BODILY CONDITIONS MENTAL STATES. 45 



<rot through with the case. But it was all the more instructive on ac- 

 count of my ignorance, as will be seen in its relation ; so I give the case 

 more in detail than is necessary in most of these illustrations. 



I found her with the right shoulder drawn forcibly upward, firmly 

 fixed in that position, and very sensitive to handling. Supposing that 

 it might be a sprain, and not wishing to treat such cases, 1 recom- 

 mended her to apply to the late Dr. E. R. Peaslee, which she did. 

 One year from the first visit she reappeared in a very sad plight indeed. 

 I found the shoulder drawn up still higher than before, and so firmly 

 fixed that the elbow could not be removed from the side of the body 

 more than three or four inches. She looked haggard and worn out, 

 and she reported her sufferings as having been and being very intense. 

 The history intervening between the two visits was, that Dr. Peaslee 

 had given her some liniments, and, after a while, seeing that she did 

 not regain the use of her arm, he sent her to a professional " rubber," 

 who had used a great deal of disagreeable, violent, and painful manipu- 

 lation. Finding herself becoming steadily worse, at the end of a year 

 she had returned to me. I immediately sought Dr. Peaslee, and to- 

 gether we made a new examination. We found the large pectoral 

 muscle shortened and enlarged to twice its natural size, and the arm 

 so firmly bound down that it was with difficulty that she got her cloth- 

 ing on. After several consultations, we resolved to etherize her and 

 endeavor to stretch the shortened muscles. The plan was, to make an 

 apparatus which should hold the muscles we were to stretch, under 

 ether, in an extended position, for a certain length of time, and thus 

 relax them. The operation was accordingly performed, and all the 

 force consistent with safety to the bone was used, but without ap- 

 preciable effect in relaxing the great pectoral muscle. The operation 

 was therefore abandoned as a failure. We then considered the pro- 

 priety of dividing the tendon of the great pectoral ; but, as that was 

 a novel suggestion, a consultation was called, Dr. A. C. Post, of this 

 city, and the late Dr. Alden March, of Albany, being the surgeons se- 

 lected. 



The lady had come under the influence of ether with difficulty, and 

 was very much prostrated by it ; so that it was over one month after 

 the attempted stretching of the muscle before the consultation was held 

 at the lady's house in Brooklyn. The lady was still in bed, but, after 

 explaining the case, she was got up, when, to our utter astonishment, 

 we found the muscles completely relaxed and the arm perfectly free to 

 move in every direction. Exactly three years after these events, this 

 lady's brother called on me one evening, saying that he had just made 

 an appointment with Dr. Peaslee who was on the eve of starting for 

 Europe to meet me at his sister's house the next evening for the pur- 

 pose of operating on her other arm, which had in the mean time, he 

 said, become affected precisely as the right arm had previously been. 

 It had been affected for a year, but his sister had kept the fact to her- 



