Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 12

by Unknown

THE GLASS BACK.

I have already laid before the public one well-authenticated case of a false conception of identity, arising from the disease called hypochondria. In that case, as well as in most of the others generally met with, the supposed change of identity that takes place is complete, extending to the whole body, which is imagined to pass into a new form of being, different from man, and often into a piece of matter not imbued with life or motion at all. Of this latter case, by far the best known transmutation is that into some very brittle commodity, such as glass; and this is not to be wondered at, even amidst the darkness of our ignorance of the secret workings of those extraordinary changes which seem to shame even the invention of Ovid; for the idea or fantasy, in that case, is only a peculiar type of the feeling of the nervous apprehension or terror, which is the peculiar pathognomonic symptom of the disease itself. It is not difficult to suppose that, when the heart is filled with fear of personal injury, and yet the eye surveys no cause of danger, the mind itself will supply imaginary causes—and this accordingly we find to be the case; neither does it seem to defy our à priori conceptions, that while imaginary objects of detrimental efficacy shall be conjured up from the depths of a dark fancy, a corresponding notion of peculiar brittleness in the body itself shall be generated, to give plausibility to the pre-existing apprehension of serious evil. Indeed, the two seem to be counterparts of each other; and we have only to proceed a step further, to the species of brittleness or liability to detriment, to come to that extraordinary conception, which almost every doctor of extensive practice has witnessed once or twice in his life—that the body is composed of glass, and therefore in continual danger of being cracked or broken to pieces, from the appulse of objects that are every day impinging upon us without doing us any harm. The frequency of the "glass man" is therefore not a matter of very great wonder to a philosophical mind, after the casual condition of the change is admitted. The case has so often occurred, that it now excites little curiosity; but I question much, if the case of a fancied partial transmutation of the flesh into glass may not, as well from its rarity as its grotesqueness, claim a greater share of interest from the faculty, and from the general reader; and when I state that the instance I have to record was witnessed and studied by myself, with a view to the interests of science—a fact of much importance in all reports of extraordinary conditions of human nature—I need say no more in recommendation of it to the attention of the public.

The unhappy subject of the case was a poor man, called Patrick G——, by trade a tailor—a profession, by the way, which is more productive of hypochondria than any other with which I am acquainted, arising, doubtless, from the sedentary habits of the individuals, combined with their irregular modes of living. I have always noticed a peculiar outré character in the ideas and feelings of people inclined to hypochondria; and those who have been permitted to enter the penetralia of the workshop where the board is covered with these unfortunate beings, will justify the remark, by their experience of the strange sayings, grotesque art, and recondite humour, to be found in the peculiar atmosphere of that temple of taste. I make this allusion, of course, with a scientific view, as elucidating a fine point in psychology, and not in the slightest degree influenced by a love of the mere garbage of the food of an ill-timed curiosity. The peculiarity of thought and feeling, incidental to this class, might easily have been discovered in the individual who was so unfortunate as to require my aid; and all his physical appearances would have justified the anticipation of the peculiarity, before he opened his mouth. His complexion was so decidedly what we call saturnine, that it approached to the colour of green. He was at all times excessively irritable, so much so that he was often attacked with spasmodic affections; and at these times he was so easily acted upon by slight and trifling external causes, that his wife, a very sober and decent woman, required to observe the greatest caution in conducting those affairs of her domestic establishment which interfered with either his mind or body. If he was not in this state of irritability, he was sure to be under the power of an extreme rigidity of solids, and torpor of the nervous system, accompanied by their usual concomitant of melancholy, which suggested even a bizarrerie of thought quite different from that of ordinary men. I thought the seat of his disease was the spleen, in consequence of finding an enlargement of that organ; but I afterwards came to be satisfied that his liver, too, was deranged—an opinion very well justified by what afterwards befel him.

The symptoms I have mentioned continued in the man for a period of a year and a-half; but an aggravation of them became soon thereafter apparent, in a very marked increase of his melancholy, accompanied by a shaking nervousness on being approached by any heavy article, subject to movement. When forced out by his wife for the benefit of his health, he kept the side of the wall, shook at the risk of a jostle, as if a push or drive would have killed him, and ran into closes and avenues, to be out of the reach of carriages that were steadily keeping the middle of the high-road. I have observed these symptoms (to us well known) in very aggravated diseases of the stomach, without very marked derangement of the neighbouring organs; and calmed the fears of his wife, by stating that they would probably abate, as the medicines I gave him (chiefly tonics) began to operate upon his system. I had, notwithstanding, my fears that a deeper type of hypochondria was on the eve of exhibiting itself—an opinion formed chiefly from the study of his eye, which was getting daily heavier and gloomier, more turned to the angle of the orbit, and filled with morbid terror, on the approach of any moving thing, however innocuous. To test further the truth of my deduction, I gave him a gentle push aside, and observed that he shrank as if he had been stung by an adder, retreating back from me, and eyeing me with suspicion and dread, as if I had been about to kill him. He was now, I suspected, on the eve of falling into one of two positions, depending upon the temperament of his mind. He would either (as happens with people of an imaginative turn) create fanciful objects of fear that might do him bodily injury, retaining his conception of personal identity unimpaired, or he would pass into the false conviction of being made of some tender substance, capable of being injured by the approach of external objects, but retaining otherwise his conceptions of external things entire—a result more common to minds of a sedate, phlegmatic kind.

My fears turned out too true. The next time I visited him, I was met by his wife in the passage, who said she wished to speak a few words to me before I entered. She whispered that she feared her husband had entirely lost his senses—for that, on the day previous, he had gone to bed, where he had lain ever since in the same position—on his face; and yet, so far as she could ascertain, there was nothing the matter with his back. When she asked him why he lay in that extraordinary position, he turned up a piteous eye in her face, and replied, with a sigh that came from the deepest part of his chest, that she would know that soon enough, requesting her, for the sake of Heaven's mercy and a wife's love, not to touch him, and to keep the bedclothes as light upon him as it was ever, ever in her power to do. I could not, even by the power of anticipation, derived from an ample experience of diseases of this sort, divine the peculiarity of this patient's complaint; but I was soon to have sufficient evidence to unravel the mystery.

On going forward to him, I observed that he was carefully laid on his face, with just so much of his left eye exposed as to serve for a watch over his body, and exhibit the apprehension which filled his soul, and engrossed every other feeling.

"Why in this position?" said I. "The back is the resting-place of patients. Turn, and you will experience the truth of what I say."

"Turn!—oh, that I could!" said he; "but, alas, alas! I dare not; I dare not." And he accompanied his words with a peculiar nervous glance, indicating great uneasiness and fear.

"Why?" rejoined I.

"Ah, sir," he cried, in a choking voice, "I must keep this side uppermost. Glass is brittle, very brittle. I dare not turn; the crash—ay, sir, the crash—would be tremendous. I would be in a hundred pieces in a moment. Dreadful thought!—Do not touch me, for Heaven's sake! approach me not. It is brittle, brittle—ah, very, very brittle!"