94 HAUPT— TOBIT'S BLINDNESS AND SARA'S HYSTERIA. 



who performed these wonderful cures would have been regarded as 

 an angel. When St. Paul at Lystra (some eighteen miles south- 

 southwest of Konia, the ancient Iconium which was the easternmost 

 city of Phrygia) cured a man who had never walked, having been a 

 cripple from his mother's womb, the people said. The gods have 

 come down to us in the likeness of men, and they called Paul : Mer- 

 curius, and his companion, Barnabas, Jupiter (Acts 14, 8-12). In 

 cases of hysterical paralysis wonderful cures may be efifected even 

 by quacks and charlatans. In hysteria we generally find an in- 

 creased susceptibility to external suggestion, and the paroxysmal 

 symptoms may be dispelled by suggestion. Hysteria, or neuro- 

 mimesis, is essentially a lack of inhibitory power, and something 

 particularly nasty or dreaded may induce sufficient inhibitory power. 

 A hysterical fit may be prevented or checked if the patient is threat- 

 ened with something particularly disagreeable. 



One of my medical friends told me that, when he was resident 

 physician at a sanatorium for nervous diseases, he would often tell 

 a nurse who came to him in despair, because one of the female 

 patients had a hysterical fit. Call in another nurse, and tell her to 

 prepare an ice-cold bath; say, If the fit lasts much longer, we must 

 put her in an ice-cold bath and keep her there. This generally re- 

 sulted in the speedy disappearance of all symptoms. While a pa- 

 tient is unconscious in an epileptic fit, there is no loss of conscious- 

 ness in a hysterical seizure. Psychotherapeutic measures are more 

 valuable than drugs. Some thirty years ago there was in a well- 

 known European sanatorium a married woman who was so hysteri- 

 cal that the physician-in-chief finally whipped her. There may have 

 been some sadistic inclination on the part of the doctor, and maso- 

 chism on the part of the patient. But she was cured. The doctor 

 was sentenced to several months in jail, but there were a number of 

 petitions with a great many signatures, urging the authorities to 

 pardon the energetic -healer, or at least permit him to pay a fine 

 instead of sending him to jail. He paid the fine, and could well 

 afford to do so, because so many husbands sent their hysterical 



Dice, a former cowboy and house painter, now known as the Miracle Man 

 of York (Pa.), was treating blindness with the "tears" of a "sea-monster." 



