BODILY CONDITIONS MENTAL STATES. 49 



the incision to the same degree, and the difference in sensations would 

 be simply the difference of mental constitutions, that is, it would be 

 wholly mental. So of classes. The child of the widow, Bridget 

 Murphy, who lives in a back alley and goes out to work by the day, 

 leaving her children at home with nothing to stimulate the mind, does 

 not feel the same amount of pain from the pressure of an instrument 

 which is applied for disease of the hip-joint, which he has got in falling 

 down stairs, as the child reared among the excitements of a cultivated 

 home, with pictures and toys, the circus and menagerie, dogs and horses, 

 and the society of cultivated adults to stimulate mental activity. While 

 the widow's son can hardly talk at five years old, the other, by aid of 

 French and German nurses, speaks three languages at the same age. 

 But when he falls on the ice and gets hip-disease, his sufferings corre- 

 spond to his mental rather than to his bodily condition, and his pains, 

 like his pleasures, are as much greater than those of the first-mentioned 

 child as his mind is more active and thus more susceptible. To con- 

 tinue the illustration, the instrument worn by the child intellectually 

 low down may, by the mother's ignorance and neglect, become buried 

 in the flesh, with slight murmur, compared to the distress caused by a 

 crumb of bread or a wrinkle in the linen under the points of pressure 

 in the mentally active child. Mental susceptibility corresponds closelv 

 with mental activity, so that so-called bodily sensibility must correspond 

 closely again with mental activity. And we find this to be the case. 

 What is said to be Indian fortitude, when they tear their flesh in some 

 of their rites, is simply brutishness. They do not feel in the same de- 

 gree that we should under the same circumstances. And, on the other 

 hand, the cultured and aesthetic should comprehend, more than they do, 

 that an increased capacity for painful sensations is the direct result and 

 the constant accompaniment of the refinements of civilization, and that 

 to suffer is inevitable along with the pleasurable emotions, which con- 

 stitute at once the compensation and the charm of the higher civilized 

 existence. 



An illustration or two of the mental production of hyperesthesia 

 and it is the same with anaesthesia will suffice for this part of our 

 subject. 



It should be remembered that each case represents a class of cases, 

 and is not simply an isolated and phenomenal instance of a curious 

 manifestation. Many cases of lameness of the ankle-joint are produced 

 by, or, strictly speaking, exist only in, the mind, as, for instance, the 

 following among many others : 



An unmarried lady of thirty called on me for advice with reference 

 to a foot and ankle which she had not been able to use during the three 

 and a half years preceding. There was a history of some slight injury, 

 with periods of improvement during the first six months of her lameness, 

 but with a final loss of ability to use it on account of its exceeding pain- 

 fulness at every attempt to bear her weight upon it, and she had been 



VOL. XT.- 



