An Impeccable Warrior (Millard example)

[Jim Eshelman]

Carol, June 13, 1920, 10:00 AM EDT, New York, NY

Cancer can be a psychosomatic disease, there is not much doubt about that. It has been linked with an inability to express emotion, and a turning inwards of hostility against oneself... It has been postulated that the mind can heal as well as kill. The interest of this case lies in the fact that it may be one of them.

Carol and Lake were not happily married. It was remarkable that she had finally got married at the age of 31, for she seemed to be afraid of forming close attachments to anyone. Her father died when she was four, and her childhood was financially deprived, as her mother had to work to support the two children...

Her children were her whole world, but now they are all grown and have left home. She has no friends, and no hobbies. She has had to live with the knowledge that she had a very malignant type of cancer, which, although it was removed, can recur at any time.

...Melanoma is one of the types of cancer which is increasing in incidence... In melanoma, the skin melanocytes, which carry pigment, become wild and start growing in an irregular and unrestrained manner. Cells break away and ae carried to the brain or the lungs, and the patient usually dies quite quickly Sometimes, however, the T cells of the thymus are activated strongly and destroy all the melanin in the body, including the cells of the malignant melanoma. When this happens, spontaneous cure results... Her cancer was not properly treated, for it was not operated on for some months after discovery, and she had no chemotherapy. A metastasis in the lymph glands was removed a year after the original operation, but it has not recurred.

[Jim Eshelman]

Regrettably, Dr. Millard did not give an abundance of information in the disease itself. She spent most of the chapter discussing the poor marriage, the psychological implications and possible causations, and related details. These are interesting on their own, though I'm mostly interested in the cut and dried medical details at the moment.

My analysis: Carol has no background hard aspects except a mundane Mercury-Pluto conjunction. We'll come back to that.

I'm sure the psychological analysis is sound, that Carol had much difficulty settling down and had powerful freedom-restriction tensions: One of her most important aspects is a 0°21' Saturn-Uranus opposition, which is also her only hard mundane aspect - and it's a 0°00' aspect mundanely! She's a Taurus-Aries with Moon exactly culminating and Jupiter near Ascendant, overall a more positive chart than negative.

Sun is middleground in partile trine to Mars and platic conjunction with Venus: Vitality is average and outright strength/energy are good.

Moon in Aries and Mars in Virgo don't tell us much because we don't know where on her skin the melanoma occurred. We can't match it to body regions.

Her close hard aspects are: Moon-Neptune square (0°51' closely angular), Saturn-Uranus opposition (0°00' middleground), and Mercury-Pluto conjunction (1°14' background).

From Moon-Neptune, we expect fluid disturbances, blood impurities, swelling, and especially toxic subconscious patterns that risk anxiety, depression, confusion, and other neurosis. This is closely foreground so all the Moon-Neptune psychological patterns (including acute sensitivity, easily feeling overwhelmed by other people) will be predominant.

From Saturn-Uranus, we expect inhibition of biological rhythms. impairment of the body’s electrical system, tension, spastic colon or other elimination struggles, and skeletal injury (she did break a leg in an accident that brought her back with her husband).

From Mercury-Pluto, we expect nervous strain (burn-out, mental trauma), atypical cognition or nervous response, and health concerns that arise from profound psychological impact. This is in Gemini, increasing the chance of a neurological effect.

I don't know a clear pattern for cancer. Again, we find Pluto involved in the aspect most likely to be a health issue, but this could be a coincidence. I see why Millard focused on the psychological elements (besides her own conviction that cancer is a psychosomatic disease), because they are the most obvious factors in Carol's chart. Without knowing where on her body the melanoma appeared, I don't have anything strong to take hold of in this chart.

It IS a luckier than average chart. Besides addressing the psychological factors as the root of the disease, that's all I've got to offer.