THE PATHOLOGY OF THE PASSIONS. 663 



dulgence in pleasures. A still stranger epidemic is that of infanti- 

 cide, which prevailed in Paris at the beginning of this century, after 

 the newspapers had published the history of the Cornier case. Ma- 

 dame Cornier, under the influence of infanticidal monomania, had mur- 

 dered her child under circumstances of such a kind as to make an im- 

 pression on a certain number of mothers, so that, though excellent 

 women and sincerely attached to their children, they were seized with 

 a desire to get rid of them. They did not yield to the temptation, 

 but the circumstance of their being attacked with such a mania ex- 

 cited much surprise among medical men. 



It will not be uninteresting, if to these curious phenomena we ap- 

 pend the facts of nervous contagion to which M. Bouchut called the 

 attention of physicians some years ago. It had long been known, es- 

 pecially since the time of the famous convulsionnaires of the St.-Medard 

 Cemetery, that some neuropathic states are multiplied by instinctive 

 imitation ; but M. Bouchut shows that facts of this kind are far more 

 common than has been supposed, and the work wherein he describes 

 them adds a new and a dramatic chapter to the strange history of 

 nervous aberrations. One of the first cases given by M. Bouchut is 

 as follows — it was observed at Paris in 1848, in a shop where 400 

 work-women were employed : One day one of these work-women turned 

 pale, lost consciousness, and fell to the floor, her limbs convulsed, and 

 her jaws set. Within the space of two hours 30 of the women were 

 seized in the same way. On the fourth day 115 were affected, the 

 symptoms in all cases being the same, viz., suffocation, prickling sen- 

 sation in the limbs, vertigo, dread of sudden death, followed by loss 

 of consciousness in the convulsions. A similar epidemic was observed 

 in 1861 among the young girls of the parish of Montmartre, who were 

 preparing for the first communion. On the morning of the first day 

 of the retraite — or preparatory season of religious seclusion — while at 

 church, three of them became unconscious, and were seized with gen- 

 eral convulsions. The following day the same symptoms appeared in 

 three other girls. Still others were attacked on the third day. On 

 the fourth, the communion-day, 32 were seized in the same way. On 

 the fifth, confirmation-day, as the archbishop approached, 15 girls 

 were seized with convulsions, uttered a shriek, and fell to the floor 

 unconscious, when the prelate was about to confirm them. Thus, in 

 the space of 75 days, 40 girls out of 150 manifested identical nervous 

 disorders. 



The various hallucinational, ecstatic, and spasmodic states, trans- 

 mitted and multiplied by example, play an important role in mediaeval 

 history, particularly among the religious orders. There is the closest 

 analogy between the accounts handed down to us by the writers of 

 those times and the observations of physicians published in our own 

 day. As concerns the question of treatment, we possess hardly any 

 save moral remedies ; and the success attending the employment of 



