A CASE OF URTICARIA FACTITIA OBSERVED IN THE COE 
COLLEGE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY. 
BY W. S. NEWELL. 
Record of an unusual affection which appeared in experimental work 
in tactual space. 
In submitting the following record upon a case of Urticaria,, the writer 
has intentionally observed two restrictions, (1) to leave the technical 
discussion of the disease in question to medical treatises, (2) to avoid 
unwarrantable generalization from a single case under observation. 
While conforming with these limitations, it has seemed that a record of 
the case, giving such concrete details of the appearance, the progress and 
the peculiarities of the disease as it was studied in our laboratory, might 
leave deductions and generalizations to await the discovery of new cases. 
We shall pursue the following general plan in presenting the subject : 
(1) Circumstances attending the first appearance of the phenomenon 
in the laboratory. 
(2) Description of details leading to given diagnosis. 
(3) Urticaria Factitia. 
(4) Characterization of Miss M. 
(5) Introspections' furnished by Miss M. 
(6) Conclusion. 
(1) As a part of the course in General Pschology, our students per- 
form a series of 1 element ary experiments, and the laboratory records 
show that several hundred students have, within the past few years, per- 
formed substantially the same experiments. A few weeks ago, while 
supervising the, work of an experiment on the tactual localization of a 
point, -some results were obtained which stand unique among our labora- 
tory reports. For the experiment in question, the students are arranged 
in teams of two each, one student acting as experimenter and the other 
as subject. The subject ’s ability to locate a point by touch, is determined 
by the accuracy with which he can put his pencil upon a spot on his 
^Seashore, Elementary Experiments in Psychology. Ch. VI, Exp. I. 
