572 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



geons and neurologists are sent. These report the facts which usually 

 are conspicuous enough. The patient gets still worse. All chances of 

 settlement on any reasonable basis are now gone and the case finds its 

 way to court. Once in the court-room, the patient is at the acme of all 

 the symptoms. Paralysis, insensibility to pain, convulsions, loss of 

 special senses, all make profound impressions on judge and jury. The 

 medical opinions are too often flatly contradictory ; and the jurors, thus 

 deprived of the advantage of special knowledge, judge for themselves 

 from what they see. 



The verdicts are always large. None too large, perhaps, as actual 

 amounts, in view of the suffering and delays the plaintiffs have gone 

 through. But excessive when compared with the amounts paid for 

 other injuries, more modest in their symptoms, but with far less hopeful 

 outcome. A young girl with hysteria can generally secure a higher 

 compensation in the courts than a working man with some lifelong 

 disability. The amounts thus unjustly graded may indicate that juries 

 can not grasp the dramatic power of idea ; or else that they believe that 

 symptoms conjured up from subconscious depths are even more per- 

 sistent than those of tangible causation. 



In strong contrast to the verdicts is the fact that hysteria from in- 

 jury, in America at least, is cured in nearly every case. Such is my 

 personal conviction,^ based upon information obtained about the plain- 

 tiffs after the suit is closed. Into a detailed examination it is rarely 

 possible to go. For after the trial these individuals, with surprising 

 frequency, fold their tents and silently steal away. Those that remain 

 within a reasonable radius rebel at the idea of reexamination. They 

 seem to resent their recovery. A young man who was injured in one 

 of the terrible wrecks occurring near New York a few years ago, lay 

 in bed for two years with hysterical paralysis, awaiting the trial of his 

 case. There were two trials. At each of them he heard, from his 

 stretcher, his experts say his injuries were permanent. In spite of 

 that he was up and walking freely and was commuting to his work, as 

 he used to do, within eighteen months of the last trial. But a request, 

 prompted by the writer, for permission to reexamine him, brought a 

 response to the effect that " no information would be vouchsafed which 

 could in any way be used to prevent others who had suffered as he had 

 from being less generously compensated." 



From such information as is obtainable, it would seem that full 

 functional recovery is the rule. The women who were cripples often 

 marry, the men return to work. But their assumptions or resumptions 

 of activity are often slow. The patients may be well again in a few 

 months. But the miraculous and instantaneous recoveries, such as we 



^ In " Diseases of the Nervous System Resulting from Accident and Injury," 

 Appleton, 1906, the writer presented the after histories of a number of cases of 

 litigated hysteria. Since then he has added many to the series. 



