The Placebo Effect

I wrote my last blog post on the issue of authenticity and “historicity” and this post deals with the same topic because I feel that it is extremely important throughout the entirety of The Man in the High Castle. As I was reading the novel and thinking about historicity and authenticity, a scene from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince popped into my head. The morning before the first Quidditch match of the year Ron was extremely nervous. Harry, who had won a bottle of Felix Felicis (liquid luck), saw how nervous Ron was and decided that he needed to do something about it. He pretended to slip some of the Felix Felicis into Ron’s drink and Hermione saw and thought that Harry had poured in some of the real thing. Hermione proceeded to tell Ron not to drink it, but of course, Ron did anyway. Ron, believing that he had liquid luck on his side, performed extremely well during the match and Gryffindor won. Harry did not tell Ron and Hermione until later on that he had not actually given Ron any of his Felix Felicis; Ron had played extremely well all on his own.

It was due to the placebo effect that Ron had been able to build up his confidence enough to play as well as he did. Ron believed that there was “authentic” Felix Felicis in his drink and therefore he benefited from its effects although it wasn’t really there. The placebo effect is an interesting way to look at authenticity. If we believe something is real, then to us, it is. This effect has been shown to have validity outside the realm fiction as well, especially in the field of medicine. Many times, to conduct research on the effects of a drug, a control group will be given a placebo pill and told that they are taking the real thing. Often this group will benefit from some of the positive effects of the drug although they aren’t actually taking it. Just because the control group believes that the medication is authentic, they actually get authentic effects from the placebo medication. This shows the extreme power of the human mind to control how we feel both physically and mentally.

It seems that the placebo effect can be applied to anything that we believe is authentic, but that actually isn’t. Just as in that case when people believe that a medication is real when it actually isn’t and therefore still experience the effects of the actual medication, we can believe that an object is historically authentic and then to us, it is. Everything always comes back to this idea of perspective. Everyone has a different idea of what is authentic and different things will be authentic to different people.