In another case, a girl of sixteen, the daughter of an Italian general, complained to her father that a certain lieutenant, her neighbour at table, had used indecent language to her. Shortly afterwards, a shower of anonymous letters troubled the peace of the household—declarations of love addressed to the girl's mother and threats to the daughter. It was discovered that the girl herself was the writer of all these letters.
Anonymous letter-writing is so common among hysterical persons, that it may be considered a pathognomonical characteristic. The handwriting is of a peculiar character, or rather it shows a peculiar tendency to vary from excessive size to extreme smallness, a characteristic we have noticed in epileptics.
Delirium. Hysterical, like epileptic, subjects often suffer from melancholia or monomaniacal delirium. Indeed, according to Morel, this symptom is more frequent when the other morbid phenomena are absent.
Psychic hysteria, like epilepsy, may exist unaccompanied by the characteristic hysterical attack, and then, as is the case with epilepsy, it is most dangerous to society.
In conclusion, although up to the present, medical men have been disposed to consider hysteria as a disease distinct from epilepsy, careful study of this malady inclined my father to class it as a variation of epilepsy, prevalent among women, who in this disease, as in many others, manifest an attenuated form.
CHAPTER IV
CRIMINALOIDS
We have seen how, owing to disease, alcoholism and epilepsy, physically and psychically degenerate individuals make their appearance in a community of normal persons. But a large proportion of the crimes committed cannot be attributed to lunatics, epileptics, or the morally insane, nor do all criminals show that aggregate of atavistic and morbid characters,—the cruelty and bestial insensibility of the savage, the impulsiveness of the epileptic, the licentiousness, delusions, and impetuosity of the madman,—which we find united in the born criminal.