TEE HISTORY OF TWINS, ETC. 351 



and wlio expressed himself in these words : ' I have my ophthalmia ; 

 yon must be having yours.' However singular this story may appear, 

 the fact is none the less exact ; it has not been told to me by others, 

 but I have seen it myself; and I have seen other analogous cases in 

 ray practice. These twins were also asthmatic, and asthmatic to a 

 frightful degree. Though born in Marseilles, they were never able 

 to stay in that town, where their business affairs required them to go, 

 without having an attack. Still more strange, it was sufficient for 

 them to get away only as far as Toulon in order to be cured of the 

 attack caught at Marseilles. They traveled continually, and in all 

 countries, on business affairs, and they remarked that certain localities 

 were extremely liurtful to them, and that in others they were free 

 from all asthmatic symptoms," 



I do not like to pass over here a most dramatic tale in the " Psycho- 

 logic Morbide" of Dr. J, Moreau (de Tours), Medecin de I'llospice de 

 Bicetre, Paris, 1859, p, 172. lie speaks "of two twin brothers who 

 had been confined, on account of monomania, at Bicetre. . . . Physi- 

 cally the tAvo young men are so nearly alike that the one is easily 

 mistaken for the other. Morally, their resemblance is no less com- 

 i:)lete, and is most remarkable in its details. Thus, their dominant 

 ideas are absolutely the same. They both consider themselves subject 

 to imaginary persecutions ; the same enemies have sworn their de- 

 struction, and employ the same means to effect it. Both have hallu- 

 cinations of hearing. They are both of them melancholy and morose ; 

 they never address a word to anybody, and will hardly answer the 

 questions that others address to them. They always keep apart, and 

 never communicate with one another. An extremely curious fact 

 which has been frequently noted by the superintendents of their sec- 

 tion of the hospital, and by myself, is this : From time to time, at 

 very irregular intervals of two, three, and many months, without ap- 

 preciable cause, and by the purely spontaneous effect of their illness, 

 a very marked change takes place in the condition of the two broth- 

 ers. Both of them, at the same time, and often on the same day, 

 rouse themselves from their habitual stupor and prostration ; they 

 make the same complaints, and they come of their own accord to the 

 physician, with an urgent request to be liberated, I have seen this 

 strange thing occur, even when they were some miles apart, the one 

 beinof at Bicetre and the other living at Saint-Anne," 



Dr. Moreau ranked as a very considerable medical authority, but I 

 cannot wholly accept this strange story without fuller information. 

 Dr. Moreau writes it in too off-hand a way to carry the conviction that 

 he had investigated the circumstances with the skeptic spirit and scru- 

 pulous exactness which so strange a phenomenon would have required. 

 If full and precise notes of the case exist, they certainly ought to be 

 published at length. I sent a copy of this passage to the principal 

 authorities among the physicians to the insane in England, asking if 



