with them. Even after the child was born he continued to be disagreeable.
The patient was rather low spirited and quieter after her marriage. She worried over her illegitimate pregnancy and the scolding from her father. But nothing was thought of all this, and it did not interfere with her activity. The birth was normal. She had no flow, no unfavorable symptoms, and sat up on the twelfth day. She is said to have appeared natural mentally.
A week before admission the family returned from the christening, having left the patient apparently well. They now found her sitting in her chair, limp, with closed eyes, giving no answer to questions. Only after about twenty minutes could she be aroused. After her father had given her milk with whiskey in it, she claimed he had poisoned her. In the evening she was bright and lively, singing and dancing with the others, but in the night she woke up her husband, seemed frightened, said somebody was in the room and that he should get a priest as she was going to die. The husband went to sleep again. The next forenoon the patient claimed she had been frightened all night and thought her father was going to kill her husband.
On the second day, while sitting at breakfast, she groped about for the bread plate for some time and then said she had been blind for a short time. During the day she had frequent spells in which she would close her eyes, become perfectly quiet and difficult to rouse. Sometimes at the beginning of these spells she would say "I am going." She was then taken to her aunt and walked there, a distance of a few blocks. She was there for two days before going to the Observation Pavilion. In this time she is said to have been quiet for the most part, often apparently sleeping or staring. Once she said she was "rather dirty, filthy." Once she tried to get out of the window, said it was a door and that she wanted to get out and take a walk. Above all, she had, in these two days, repeated peculiar seizures which the aunt and the husband described as follows: When sitting on a chair she would close her eyes, clench her fists, pound the side of the chair, get stiff, slide on the floor, then thrash her arms and legs about and move the head to and fro. She frothed at the mouth. After the attack, which lasted a few minutes, she breathed heavily for a while. Once she wiped off the froth
with a handkerchief and gave the latter to the aunt, saying "Burn that, it is poison." Before the attack she sometimes said that it got dark over her eyes and that her face felt funny, again that she had a pain in the stomach which worked towards her right shoulder. There was no cry in the beginning of the attack, but once she wet herself.
After recovery the patient herself told the development of her psychosis thus:
There was trouble between the father and the husband, and she was afraid of her father. On the day of the christening she took sick: a queer feeling came over her and she wondered whether she was going to die, "Then I seemed to lose myself, and when I came to I found my family standing around me." Her father gave her whiskey and she thought it was poison. "That night I had spells of dancing and singing, it must have been something I took, perhaps the liquor." The same night she was frightened, thought her father might do some harm, and had a vision of a person in white standing at her bed. After that she had repeated spells in which she knew nothing until "I came to again." "It was a queer trembling."
At the Observation Pavilion she was described as in a state of "intense mental depression," taking no interest in things going on about her. She spoke, however; said she wanted to die, that she had imagined her father had given her poison, that every one was against her, and that people were talking about her.
1. On admission the patient had a slightly elevated temperature, which soon subsided, full breasts but without inflammation. Sordes were not mentioned.
For a few days she was essentially somewhat restless, getting out of bed, disarranging her clothes, wandering about—all in a rather deliberate, aimless way, sometimes vaguely resistive, again with free movements. She looked, dazed, sometimes stared straight ahead and looked "dreamy." Occasionally there was a tendency to close her eyes. With the restlessness she looked at times "a little apprehensive," or shrank away when approached. She spoke slowly, with initial difficulty, but answered quite a number of questions. The mental content of this period was displayed in the following utterances: She would ask for a priest, or say "Have I done something?" or "Do people want