“Voodoo Death.” By this I mean the casting of a fatal spell on a person by a king or priest or voodoo doctor exerting an influence among savage and superstitious people, with the result that the person who is credulous and terrorized by the spell is said to die.

The sudden and unexpected death of a presumably healthy person in the midst of his accustomed activities is one of the most dramatic and disturbing events in clinical practice and everyday experience. The tragedy is heightened when autopsy examination shows an essentially normal myocardium with minimal disease of the coronary arteries and no evidence of thrombotic occlusion.

Since “voodoo death” can be seen as comparable to our own society's “sudden death,” for which much anecdotal material is complemented by some clinical and pathophysiological assessment, we believe that “voodoo death” does refer to an empirical phenomenon whose complex dimensions are receiving more adequate description…. These noxious effects of belief and expectation have recently been called “nocebo.”