HYSTERIA HYSTERICS. 347 



sometimes comes on every day at the same hour, like brow-ague. Occasionally the 

 pain is experienced in the breast, and a fear may be entertained that a cancer is 

 breeding. Pain in the joints is a common manifestation of hysteria, and may be 

 mistaken for some serious disease. It has been stated on good authority that among 

 the higher classes of society at least four-fifths of the female patients who are 

 commonly supposed to labour under diseases of the joints labour under hysteria and 

 nothing else. This may be an exaggeration, but at all events it serves to show the 

 frequency with which pain occurs as a symptom of hysteria. " Such pain, wherever 

 it may be situated, usually requires strong adjectives for its description, and the 

 account given of it is sometimes tediously minute. I have heard one hysterical lady 

 enumerate and detail nine different kinds of pain in her chest ! Of these, some 

 were bearable, some 'intolerable/ others ' agonising,' four or five of them usually 

 appeared together, and were present at the moment of description, and yet the face 

 was calm, and simply conveyed the expression of interest in the description.** 



One of the commonest seats of hysterical pain is in the abdomen, just below the 

 ribs, and it occurs with greater frequency on the left side than the right. Sometimes 

 the pain is lower down, either in the groin or a little above it, and then, too, the 

 left side is more frequently affected. The pain is an acute nay, a very acute pain, 

 and the patient cannot tolerate the slightest pressure on the part, and can barely 

 suffer the weight of the bed-clothes. It is not only the deeper parts, but even the 

 skin and muscles, that exhibit this tenderness. Many a patient has been leeched 

 and blistered under the impression that she had peritonitis, when in reality the 

 symptoms were purely hysterical in nature. 



In some cases of hysteria there is complete loss of sensibility over the whole of 

 one half of the body. On that side you may prick them, run needles into them, as 

 much as you like without their feeling it, and what is more, no bleeding follows the 

 injury. This fact was first discovered in the case of a patient in one of the Paris 

 hospitals. On leeches being applied, their bites yielded very little blood on one side, 

 whilst on the other it followed as usual. This loss of sensation is a symptom which 

 requires to be sought for, and, in fact, many patients are quite surprised when its 

 existence is revealed to them. A curious circumstance is that the lost sensibility 

 may, in many cases, almost immediately be restored by the application to the skin' 

 of plates of metal, such, for instance, as gold coins. This fact was known and pub- 

 lished years and years ago, but it has recently been rediscovered and received by the 

 medical world with considerable eclat. 



Many of the ordinary processes of life with which the majority of us go on 

 unfelt or unheeded are keenly appreciated by the hysterical patient. She feels the 

 movements of the heart, the pulsation of the vessels caused by the circulation of the 

 blood, and even the passage of the food from the stomach into the bowels. Many 

 of these people complain of a feeling like a lump in the throat ; sometimes it seems 

 as though it would choke them, and an effort may even be made to get rid of it by 

 swallowing a little water or a morsel of bread. "We need hardly say that the sensa- 

 tion is perfectly imaginaiy, and that there is no lump or anything of the kind there. 

 Hysteria is a complaint that may at times simulate almost every disease under the 

 sun. Sometimes even vomiting of blood may be hysterical in origin. In proof of 



