The following is a case recently described by Dr. Werner.[37] A girl, thirteen years old, suffered a great fright by falling under a carriage. She escaped with a slight scratch, but suddenly lost her speech. Dr. Werner tried to cure her by various methods during thirteen months, without any result. At last he had prescribed bromide of potassium, when one day the girl threw herself into her mother’s arms and said, in a laboured voice, 'Mamma, I shall speak again.’ After one week she spoke as before.
Wiedemeister tells a story of a bride who, as she was taking leave after the wedding breakfast, suddenly lost her speech and remained dumb for several years, until, overcome with fear at the sight of a fire, she cried out 'Fire! Fire!’ and from that time continued to speak.
Pausanias, too, relates that a youth recovered his speech in the fright caused by the sight of a lion, and Herodotus, in his history, narrates that the son of Crœsus was dumb, and that, at the taking of Sardes, seeing a Persian with drawn sword about to kill his father, he cried out, overcome with fright, 'Kill not Crœsus!’ and from that moment he was able to speak.
CHAPTER XVI
HEREDITARY TRANSMISSION. EDUCATION
I
The most difficult thing in the study of man is to surprise him on the threshold of life, to meet him as he detaches himself from the tissues of the mother, in the guise of a cell seeking the mysterious contact of the fertilising element; to seize the moment in which that wondrous force containing potentially the whole story of an existence penetrates the chemical elements of the germ; to learn how, in the protoplasm of the first imperceptible nucleus, that marvellous activity awakes which only death will end.
There is a comparatively long period at the very beginning of our existence in which the nature and differential properties of the tissues lie, so to speak, dormant in a crumb of protoplasm. Microscopists discover no difference between the cells of that primary tissue. The turbidness appearing on the whitish leaflet of the germ seems regulated from the beginning of the division of labour; at a few points the materials accumulate which are requisite for the transformation of the cells, as though these last, too much occupied in their prodigious activity of separating and multiplying, must find close at hand the materials which they need to make a man, without the delay of elaborating and preparing them before they introduce them into their body. Thus it has been found, that from the beginning sugar or glycogen, one of the most important substances in the composition of the muscles, is present in abundance.