64 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



who is now the inmate of an asylum, owing to fixed delusions that 

 all his best friends are conspiring to injure and kill him, explained to 

 me, before his delusion was established, from what it started. When 

 he was a boy he had a nervous dread of water, and his father, for 

 that very reason, and with the best of intentions, determined that he 

 should be taught to swim. He was taken by his tutor, in whom he 

 had every confidence, to the side of a river, and when he was un- 

 dressed he suddenly found himself cast by his instructor, without any 

 warning, into the stream. No actual danger of drowning was implied, 

 for the tutor himself was at once in the water to hold him up or to bring 

 him to land ; but the immediate effect, beginning with the faintness 

 of fear, was followed by vomiting, by a long train of other nervous 

 symptoms, by constant dread that some one was in some way about 

 to repeat the infliction, by frequent dreaming of the event by night, 

 by thinking upon it in the day. At last all the phenomena culminated 

 in that breach between the instinctive and the reasoning powers which 

 we, for want of a better term, call dangerous and insane delusion. 



The effect of grief varies somewhat according to the suddenness 

 or slowness with which it is expressed. Sudden grief tells chiefly 

 upon the heart, leading to irregular action, and to various changes in 

 the extreme parts of the circulation incidental to such irregularity. 

 Under sudden impulse of grief I have known singular local manifes- 

 tations of disease, as for instance the development of a goitre ; an 

 haemoptysis or loss of blood from the lungs ; a local paralysis of the 

 lip and tongue ; a failure of sight. 



When the grief is less sudden and more prolonged, want of power 

 and intermittency of the circulation are again the most common phe- 

 nomena. They are most easily developed in women, but I have seen 

 them occur even in men of strong habit but sensitive feeling. Thus a 

 gentleman whom I know well, and who suffers in the wfty I describe, 

 tells me that he first became conscious of the intermittency in the 

 action of his heart, upon the anxiety he felt from the loss of one of 

 his brothers, to whom he was deeply attached and for whose superior 

 talents he had, as indeed many others had, a profound admiration. 

 The attacks at first were so severe that they created in his mind some 

 alarm; but in course of time he became accustomed to them, and the 

 sense of fear passed away. The intermittency in this instance alter- 

 nated with periods in which there was very slight interruption of 

 natural action. During the more natural periods there was, however, 

 an occasional absence of stroke once in two or three hundred beats, 

 but the fact was not evident to the subject himself. When the ex- 

 treme attacks were present the intermittency of pulse occurred six or 

 even seven times in the minute, and the fact, which was subjectively 

 felt, was very painful. The stomach at the same time was uneasy, 

 there were flatulency and a sensation of sinking and exhaustion. In 

 the worst attacks there was also some difficulty in respiration, and a 



