942 Dynamic Theory. 



the subsequent paroxysm, again she would persue the train of ideas 



which had occupied her mind in the former." 



A case is related of a young lady who became somnambulistic during 

 a long illness which was complicated with severe s}*mptons of hysteria. 

 While she was in the somnambulistic state her thoughts ran a great deal 

 upon a deceased brother. While in one of these spells she got posses- 

 sion of a locket containing some of his hair. With a view of diverting 

 her morbid thoughts her attendants attempted to take this away. But 

 she resisted and kept the trinket, which she hid under her pillow, and 

 then fell into a natural sleep, during which the locket was removed. 

 When she awoke she remembered nothing of the contest or of the 

 locket, except that she retained a vague, and to her unaccountable, 

 feeling of antipathy against one of the persons who had tried to get 

 the locket away from her. But a few days afterwards she fell into the 

 somnambulistic state again and immediately began to search for the 

 locket under the pillow, and expressed surprise that it was gone, saving 

 she put it there only a few minutes before. The time that had elapsed 

 since her last fit of somnambulism, she was, in this state, totally un- 

 conscious of. In this, and all the subsequent periods of somnambu- 

 lism, she retained an active antipathy to the person first mentioned who 

 had crossed her regarding the locket, until after a considerable time her 

 thoughts became diverted from her brother and ran in some new channel. 

 It is not always possible to make such examination of the brain of 

 an insane person as will enable the doctor to connect the disease with 

 lesion of the brain, but this has been done so often as to establish the 

 principle that the character of the individual depends upon the integ- 

 rity of his brain and changes with it. This has been illustrated by 

 cases already cited in chapter 69. Some more will now be given. 



' ' The Crowbar Case. " l One of the most remarkable cases on record 

 is that of Phineas P. Gage, of Cavendish, Vermont. He was foreman 

 of a gang of workmen in a stone quarry, and at the time of the acci- 

 dent, on the 13th of September, 1848, was charging with powder a 

 hole drilled in the rock. He was sitting upon a shelf of rack above 

 the hole, the powder and fuse had been adjusted, and he was tamping 

 it down with an iron tamping bar. This bar was round and compara- 

 tively smooth, three feet, seven inches long, one and a quarter inches in 

 its largest diameter, and at one end tapering for about a foot to a point 

 one quarter of an inch thick. While looking around, he allowed the 

 iron to strike fire upon the rock, and an explosion followed which sent 

 the bar obliquely upward through his head, and high into the air so as 

 to fall several rods behind him, smeared with blood and brains. The 

 iron entered by its taper end the left cheek, and passed obliquely up- 

 1 From a Lecture by Dr. Burt G. Wilder. 



