CLASS TIL 1.2. 19. OF VOLITION. 327 



is said sometimes to be given to a soldier, who is to be severely 

 flogged, that he may, by biting it, better bear his punishment. 



19. Citta. A desire to swallow indigestible substances. I 

 once saw a young lady, about ten years of age, who filled her 

 stomach with the earth out of a flower-pot, and vomited it up 

 with small stones, bits of wood, and wings of insects amongst it. 

 She had the bombycinous complexion, and looked like a chloro- 

 tic patient, though so young; this generally proceeds from an acid 

 in the stomach. 



M. M. A vomit. Magnesia alba. Armenian bole. Rhu- 

 barb. Bark. Steel. A blister. See Class I. 2. 4. 5. 



20. Cacositia. Aversion to food. This may arise, without 

 disease of the stomach, from connecting nauseous ideas to our 



usual food, as by calling a ham a hog's a . This madness is 



much inculcated by the stoic philosophy. See Antoninus' Me- 

 ditations. See two cases of patients who refused to take nou- 

 rishment, Class III. 1.2. 1. 



Aversions to peculiar kinds of food are thus formed early in 

 life, by association of some maniacal hallucination with them; I 

 remember a child, who, on tasting the gristle of sturgeon, asked 

 what gristle was? And being told it was like the division of a 

 man's nose, received an ideal hallucination; and for twenty years 

 afterwards could not be persuaded to taste sturgeon. 



The great fear or aversion, which some people experience at 

 the sight of spiders, toads, crickets, and the like, have generally 

 had a similar origin. 



M. M. Associate agreeable ideas with those which disgust; 

 as call a spider ingenious, a frog clean and innocent; and repress 

 all expressions of disgust by the countenance, as such expressions 

 contribute to preserve, or even to increase the energy of the 

 ideas associated with them; as mentioned above in Species 17. 

 Ira. 



21. Syphilis imaginaria. The fear that they are infected with 

 the venereal disease, when they have only deserved it, is a very 

 common insanity amongst modest young men; and is not to be 

 cured without applying artfully to the mind; a little mercury 

 must be given, and hopes of a cure added weekly and gradually 

 by interview or correspondence for six or eight weeks. Many 

 of these patients have been repeatedly salivated without curing 

 the mind! 



22. Psora imaginaria. I have twice seen an imaginary itch, 

 and twice an imaginary diabetes, where there was not the least 

 vestige of either of those diseases, and once an imaginary deaf- 

 ness, where the patient heard perfectly well. In all these cases 

 the hallucinated idea is so powerfully excited, that it is not to be 



