clxvi Journal of Comparative Neurology. 



M. Pitres refused to give a definition, but enumerates certain 

 common characteristics, viz : 



1. Hysterical accidents are the result of purely functional 

 derangements of the nervous system. 



2. They can be abruptly provoked, modified, or suppressed by 

 psychic influences or by psychic causes which have no effect upon 

 similar accidents dependent upon organic lesions. 



3. They rarely occur isolated, in the immense majority of cases 

 certain latent stigmates coexist with the striking manifestations of the 

 disorder. 



* 4. They have no regular evolution ; the occur without pre-es- 



tablished order and follow one another under different forms and at dif- 

 ferent periods m the same subjects. 



5. They do not habitually have, upon the general health and 

 upon the mental state of the subjects overtaken by hysteria, the deep 

 retentissement which accidents, similar but dependent upon another 

 causes, would have. 



Brachet said: Hysteria is a disorder of the cerebral nervous sys- 

 tem which is manifested more or less abruptly by the crisis of general 

 convulsions and by the sensation of an ascending ball in course of 

 the Eesophagus, at the superior extremity of which it becomes fixed, 

 threatenmg suffocation. 



These definitions which consider hysteria an essentially convulsive 

 malady were more comprehensive than those which sought to explain 

 it as dependent upon uterine disorders. 



M. Charcot has shown that hysterical paralysis could be produced 

 by suggestion. "In certain circumstances," says he, "a paralysis 

 could be produced by an idea. . . . This idea, once installed, 

 fixed in the spirit and,reigning there without control, would be devel- 

 oped and would acquire sufficient force to be realized under the form 

 of paralysis. . . . He showed especially the importance of the 

 fixed idea which produced and sustained the accident, reproduction 

 of identical facts by suggestion, the treatment by isolation and the 

 moral influences which modified, not the physical state, but the patho- 

 logical mental state of the patient." 



After much controversy, this doctrine has finally prevailed. 



There is no longer an author who absolutely denies the existence 

 of hysterical accidents, produced by imitation, by suggestion, by idea. 



M. Guinon shows how, in certain cases, we can arrive at the 

 fixed idea which determines the hysterical accident. The patient 

 broods upon his accident, he thinks about it incessantly, and this 



