5O CASE HISTORIES 



His change of attitude towards his father at puberty, his 

 failure to adjust to his home relations so that he left wife and 

 children and served two enlistments at sea, and the voices in- 

 sulting him were quite in line with the other schizophrenic cases. 

 He probably did not develop a psychosis merely because other 

 people didn't like his work. 



LEFFERTS 



History: He was a thin, delicate fellow twenty-nine years 

 old. His father was born in Germany and his mother in Ireland. 

 Most of his family had died of pneumonia. His mother remar- 

 ried after his father's death, and the stepfather abused him 

 when drunk. She died when the boy was sixteen. He went to 

 school until he was fourteen, at which time he was in the fifth 

 grade. He didn't have much ambition in school and sometimes 

 failed to pass. His first job was in a florist's shop, and he 

 changed jobs a good deal until he was twenty-one, when he 

 became a department store delivery boy. After three years he 

 got typhoid fever and lost the position. He also had had pneu- 

 monia and pleurisy. For a year and a half he worked in a 

 boiler factory, and then for a half year as a church sexton until 

 he enlisted in the army at the outbreak of the war with Germany. 

 Of his army service of two years, a year and a half were 

 spent in Panama. He had malaria there, and felt sickly and 

 without ambition. He was brought back to the United States 

 and discharged in April, 1919. For two months he worked in a 

 shipyard, then one night in June he felt as if in a trance, as 

 if electricity filled his body. He saw strange visions and heard 

 loud noises. His head and stomach swelled up, and something 

 in his left side swelled up and burst like a balloon, it was a 

 ball of heathen idolaters and other wicked people. There was a 

 swelling in his right side too, but it was good and didn't burst, 

 and his mother's voice from it said, "This is my son," and that 

 pleased him. His eyes felt as if changed, big, hard, and with 

 eyelids wide open. Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter were inside him 

 and talked. The first two were female and didn't insult him, 

 but Jupiter, a male, called him a son-of-a-bitch. The first two 



