38 MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



scream and rave, then another followed suit, then 

 another, and pandemonium seemed at hand. It was 

 stopped by rather rough measures, gentle ones 

 making matters worse. There was a current story 

 of one of the surgeons having effectually stopped a 

 most threatening outbreak, which the nurses began 

 to join, in which an abundance of cold water was 

 only part of the remedy employed. 



Many protean forms of that strange disorder, 

 hysteria, were frequently pointed out to me. The 

 demoralisation that accompanied it was shown by 

 the gross and palpable lies told by the patients in 

 their desire at any cost to attract attention. A 

 paroxysm of it may resemble a severe epileptic fit. 

 I was informed in all seriousness by a friend, of a 

 valuable way of distinguishing them, important for 

 nurses to bear in mind, that in epilepsy the patient 

 might and often did bite himself, his tongue for 

 example, but in hysteria the patients never bit them- 

 selves but always other people. 



Delirium tremens was a strange malady. The 

 struggles were sometimes terrible, yet the pulse was 

 feeble and the reserve of strength almost nil. The 

 visions of the patients seemed indistinguishable by 

 them from realities ; in the few cases I saw, they 

 were wholly of fish or of creeping things. One of 

 the men implored me to take away the creature that 

 was crawling over his counterpane, following its 

 imagined movements with his finder and staring - as 

 at a ghost. Poor humanity ! I often feel that the 

 tableland of sanity upon which most of us dwell, 

 is small in area, with unfenced precipices on every 

 side, over any one of which we may fall. 



