62 Op. cit.
A story comes from an inland town, for instance, of a respectable family consisting, besides the parents, of three daughters and six sons, one of whom died of pneumonia. Since his death the family had been startled by exciting and remarkable events in the house—a clatter of stones on the kitchen floor, the doors and windows being closed; shoes suddenly ascending to the ceiling and then falling to the floor, etc. Search revealed nothing to explain the affair. As throwing light upon this matter, a visitor, who confessed his inability to explain the occurrences, nevertheless referred to one of the daughters as looking like a medium.
Charcot and Bourneville give frequent instances of extraordinary self-deceptions or delusions among hysterical patients. The story of an English lady of rank, who reported that she was assaulted by ruffians who attacked her in her own grounds and attempted to stab her, the weapons being turned by her corsets, is probably an example of this tendency. Investigation made by the police force threw grave doubts upon the story.
Many of the manifestations classed as hysterical by medical writers are simply downright frauds. The nature of others is doubtful. The erratic secretion of urine, for example, has frequently engaged the attention of writers on nervous diseases, and has awakened much controversy. American hysterics are certainly fastidious about this matter, as I have not yet met, in a considerable experience, with a single example of paruria erratica. Charcot63 refers sarcastically to an American physician who in 1828 gravely reported the case of a woman passing half a gallon of urinous fluid through the ear in twenty-four hours, at the same time spirting out a similar fluid by the navel. He also alludes to the case of Josephine Roulier, who about 1810 attained great notoriety in France, but was discovered by Boyer to be a fraud. This patient vomited matter containing urea, and shortly after came a flow of urine from the navel, the ears, the eyes, the nipples, and finally an evacuation of fecal matters from the mouth.
63 Op. cit.
Hemorrhages from eyes, ears, nostrils, gums, stomach, bowels, etc. have often been observed among the hysterical; these cases sometimes being fraudulent and sometimes genuine. In the Philadelphia Hospital in 1883 was a patient suffering from grave hysteria, vomiting of blood being a prominent symptom. Although close watch was kept, several days elapsed before it was discovered that she used a hair-pin to abrade the mucous membrane of her nose, swallowed the blood, which passed into the throat, and then vomited it.
Sir Thomas Watson tells of a young woman who made a hospital surgeon believe that she had stone in the bladder; and Fagge, of a patient who had been supposed to have hydatid in the liver, and who produced a piece of the stomach of a rabbit or some other small animal, which piece she declared she had vomited. A few hours later she again sent for her medical man to remove from her vagina another fragment of the same substance.
A case is reported by Lopez64 of spiders discharged from the eye of an hysterical patient. He regarded the case as one of hysterical monomania. Fragments of a dismembered spider were undoubtedly from time to time removed from the eye of the patient. Lopez believed that at first the fragments may have got into the eye accidentally, but that afterward the patient, under the influence of a morbid condition, introduced them from day to day. The total number of spiders removed in fragments was between forty and fifty. Silvy65 relates a case in which a large number of pins and needles made their exit from a patient. Other needle cases are given, and also examples of insects and larvæ discharged from the human body. In one case worms crawled out of the nose, ears, and other natural openings; in another worms were found in active motion under the conjunctiva; in a third a beetle was discharged from the bladder, and several beetles were vomited by a boy.
64 American Journal of Medical Sciences, Philadelphia, 1843, N. S., 74-81.
65 Mémoires de la Société médicale, Anné 5, p. 181.