When a 13-year-old Virginia girl started sneezing, her parents thought it was merely a cold. But when the sneezes continued for hours, they called in a doctor. Nearly two months later the gift was still sneezing, thousands of times a day, and her case had attracted' world-wide attention. Hundreds of suggestions, ranging from 'put a clothes pin on her nose 'to 'have her stand on her head' poured in. But nothing did any good. Finally, she was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital where Dr. Leo Kanner, one of the world' s top authorities on sneezing, solved the baffling problem with great speed. He used neither drugs nor surgery for, curiously enough, the clue for the treatment was found in an ancient superstition about the amazing bodily reaction we call the sneeze. It was all in her mind, he said, a view which Aristotle, some 3 000 years earlier, would have agreed with heartily. Dr. Kanner simply gave a modern psychological interpretation to the ancient belief that too much sneezing 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 an ex-sneezer, 'he reported. Sneezing has always been a subject of wonder, awe and puzzlement. Dr. Kanner has collected thousands of superstitions concerning it. The most universal one is the custom of begging for the blessing of God when a person sneezes -- a practice Dr. Kanner traces back to the ancient belief that a sneeze was an indication that the sneezer was possessed of an evil spirit. Strangely, people the world over 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 conscious help from you, takes on a job that has to be done. When you need to sneeze you sneeze, this being nature' s clever way of getting rid of an annoying object from the nose. The object may be just some dust in the nose which nature is striving to remove. The girl sneezed continuously because she ______.