Ev. I could add many stories to yours, Ida. This sensibility, if protracted or in excess, becomes the Panophobia of Esquirol. He attended once a lady whom the slightest noise alarmed, and who was wont to scream with affright at the simple moving of herself in bed.
From the journal of Esquirol I will quote other fragments, in which we see that every object was associated with one image.
“During our promenade he (a gallant general) interrupted me several times, in the midst of a very connected conversation, saying, “Do you hear how they repeat the words ‘coward, jealous?’ &c.” This illusion was produced by the noise of the leaves and the whistling of the wind among the branches of the trees, which appeared to him well-articulated sounds; and, although I had each time combated it with success, the illusion returned whenever the wind agitated the trees anew.
“A young married man was in a state of fury whenever he saw a woman leaning on a man’s arm, being convinced that it was his own wife. I took him to the theatre at the commencement of his convalescence, but as soon as a lady entered the saloon accompanied by a gentleman, he became agitated, and called out eagerly several times, ‘That is she, that is she.’ I could hardly help laughing, and we were obliged to retire.
“A lady, twenty-three years of age, afflicted with hysterical madness, used to remain constantly at the windows of her apartment during the summer. When she saw a beautiful cloud in the sky, she screamed out ‘Garnerin, Garnerin, come and take me!’ and repeated the same invitation until the cloud disappeared. She mistook the clouds for balloons sent up by Garnerin.”
Cast. There is here as much romance, as when Ajax mistook a drove of oxen for the armed Greeks, or Don Quixote the windmills for a band of Spanish giants.
Ev. Again, Dr. Beddoes relates the case of a scholar, who locked himself up to study the Revelation. The confinement brought on dyspeptic pains and spasms, and he was persuaded that “the monster blasphemy, with ten heads, was preying on his vitals.”
The Reverend Simon Brown died with the conviction that his rational soul was annihilated by a special fiat of the Divine will; and a patient in the Friends’ “Retreat,” at York, thought he had no soul, heart, or lungs.
From “Tulpius” we learn, that the wife of Salomon Galmus sank into a state of extreme melancholy, from the deep conviction that she was a visitant from the tomb, but sent back to the world without her heart, for God had detained that in heaven.
Such illusions are sometimes excited by wounds of the brain. A soldier of the field of Austerlitz was struck with a delirious conviction that he was but an ill-made model of his former self. “You ask how Père Lambert is,” (he would say;) “he is dead, killed at Austerlitz; that you now see is a mere machine, made in his likeness.” He would then often lapse into a state of catalepsy insensible to every stimulus.