BODILY ILLNESS AS A MENTAL STIMULANT. 247 



meeting with the distinguished lady. " You are constantly 

 going from place to place," she said. " Yes," he answered, 

 " I am like the huma," and finished the sentence as before. 

 What horror when it flashed over him that he had made this 

 fine speech, word for word, twice over ! Yet it was not 

 true, as the lady might perhaps have fairly inferred, that he 

 had embellished his conversation with the huma daily during 

 that whole interval of years. On the contrary, he had never 

 once thought of the odious fowl until the recurrence of pre- 

 cisely the same circumstances brought up precisely the same 

 idea.' He was not in the slightest degree afraid of brain- 

 disease. On the contrary, he considered the circumstance 

 indicative of good order in the mental mechanism. ' He 

 ought to have been proud,' says Holmes, speaking for him, 

 and meaning no doubt that he was proud, ' of the accuracy 

 of his mental adjustments. Given certain factors, and a sound 

 brain should always evolve the same fixed product with the 

 certai?ity of B abb age's calculating machine' 



Somewhat akin to the unconscious recurrence of mental 

 processes after considerable intervals of time is the tendency 

 to imitate the actions of others as though sharing in their 

 thoughts, and according to many because mind acts upon 

 mind. This tendency, though not always associated with 

 disease, is usually a sign of bodily illness. Dr. Carpenter 

 mentions the following singular case, but rather as illustra- 

 ting generally the influence of suggestions derived from 

 external sources in determining the current of thought, than 

 as showing how prone the thoughts are to run in undesirable 

 currents when the body is out of health : ' During an epi- 

 demic of fever, in which an active delirium had been a 

 common symptom, it was observed that many of the patients 

 of one particular physician were possessed by a strong 

 tendency to throw themselves out of the window, whilst no 

 such tendency presented itself in unusual frequency in the 

 practice of others. The author's informant, Dr. C., himself 

 a distinguished professor in the university, explained the 

 tendency of what had occurred within his own knowledge ) 



