620 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



within the experience of most of us. There are few instances, 

 perhaps, where the valves of the heart have been actually 

 ruptured by intense emotion, but numberless instances might 

 be adduced where, within a short time after some great sorrow 

 or disgrace, the body has yielded to the effect of the wounded 

 feelings, and death has resulted. People, too, die from home- 

 sickness — that intense desire and longing for their native 

 country and friends that the Swiss call the " mal-du-pays," 

 and in this the mental illness soon reacts fatally on the phy- 

 sical forces. 



" We know also that gloom or despair may induce jaun- 

 dice ; that good news will make the heart beat vigorously, 

 that cheerfulness will calm and regulate its beat ; that fear 

 and anxiety may paralyse digestion. Some cases of exoph- 

 thalmic goitre present a curiously symptomatic analogy to 

 the phenomena of fear. There is intestmal laxity, sense of 

 abdominal chill and emptiness, palpitation of the heart and 

 about the abdominal aorta, carotid throbbing and tension 

 about the throat, with protrusion of the eyeballs. A case is 

 cited by Guislain, from Ridard, of a woman who, after seeing 

 her daughter violently beaten, was seized with great terror, 

 and suddenly became affected with gangrenous erysipelas of 

 the breast. Mr. Carter narrates that a lady who was watch- 

 ing her little child at play saw a heavy window-sash fall upon 

 its hand, cutting off' three of its fingers, and she was so much 

 overcome by fright and distress as to be unable to help. 

 After dressing the wounds the surgeon turned to the mother, 

 whom he found seated moaning and complaining of pain in 

 the hand. Three fingers corresponding to those injured in 

 the child were discovered to be swollen and inflamed. Puru- 

 lent sloughing set in. Fothergill says that the most pro- 

 nounced case of anaemia he ever met with was in a girl of 

 splendid physique and magnificent family history. She was 

 the type of health when her father fell down by her side at 

 market and died there and then. She then became incurably 

 anaemic. Emotion had ruined her blood. Both acute and 

 chronic diabetes frequently own shock or prolonged anxiety 

 as their cause. The same is true of chronic kidney disease, 

 and the same causes form part of the factors concerned in 

 cancer and epilepsy. The hair may turn grey in the course 

 of a night of grief. The milk of a mother in animals and 

 man may be instantly suspended by emotion. Dr. Car- 

 penter records cases in which the milk of nursing mothers, 

 though not suspended, became instantly fatal to their off- 

 spring. In the hypnotic state the influence of mind on body 

 is perhaps still more striking. Bivet and Fere record cases of 

 much interest. Postage-stamps were applied to the shoulder 

 of a hypnotized subject, and the suggestion was made that a 



