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When a 13-year-old Virginia girl started sneezing, her parents thought it was merely a cold. Butwhen the sneezes continued for hours, they called in a doctor. Nearly two months later the girl wasstill sneezing, thousands of times a day, and her case had attracted worldwide attention.
Hundreds of suggestions, ranging from"put a clothes pin on her nose"to "have her stand on herhead"poured in. But nothing did any good. Finally,she was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital whereDr. Leo Kanner, one of the world’s top authorities on sneezing, solved the baffling (难以理解的)problem with great speed.
He used neither drugs nor surgery, curiously enough, the clue for the treatment was found in anancient superstition about the amazing bodily reaction we call the sneeze. It was all in her mind, hesaid, a view which Aristotle, some 3,000 years earlier, would have agreed with heartily.
Dr. Kanner simply gave a modem psychological interpretation to the ancient belief that too muchsneezing was an indication that the spirit was troubled; and he began to treat the girl accordingly."Less than two days in a hospital room, a plan for better scholastic and vocational adjustment,
and reassurance about her unreasonable fear of tuberculosis quickly changed her from a sneezer to anex-sneezer," he reported.
Sneezing has always been a subject of wonder, awe and puzzlement. Dr. Kanner has collectedthousands of superstitions concerning it. The most universal one is the custom of begging for theblessing of God when a person sneezes a practice Dr. Kanner traces back to the ancient belief that asneeze was an indication that the sneezer was possessed of an evil spirit. Strangely, people over theworld still continue the custom with the traditional, "God bless you" or its equivalent.
When scientists look at the sneeze, they see a remarkable mechanism which, without any con-scious help from you, takes on a job that has to be done. When you need to sneeze you sneeze, thisbeing nature’s clever way of getting rid of an annoying object from the nose. The object may be justsome dust in the nose which nature is striving to remove.

The girl sneezed continuously because she ________