Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/100

 lies as that they indulge themselves in forging useless ones. They seem to have a love for lying, or rather for imposture. Nothing pleases them better than to lead those who question them into error; to relate stories that are absolutely false, which have not a shadow of probability; to give an account of all that they have not done and all that they have done, with an incredible luxury of details. These wanton lies are told boldly, bluntly, with a coolness that disconcerts. The physician who examines hysterical patients has always to bear in mind that they intend to deceive him, to hide the truth, and feign things that do not exist, as well as to disguise things that do exist.

Let us see now how hysteria differs from insanity. In insanity the intelligence is deeply affected, while hysteria is rather a form of disposition than a disease of the intellect. Hence the psychological interest of the hysterical condition. The apprehension is brilliant, the memory sure, the imagination lively. The defective side of the mind is revealed only by the impotency of the will to restrain passion. The will seems, in fact, to be the most delicate mechanism in the mental organization; and, when a poisonous substance enters the system to trouble the intellectual faculties, it always begins by suppressing the influence of the will over the passions.

Hysteria in its light form is of frequent occurrence. The causes that determine it ought then to be very common. One of the principal ones is heredity. If the father or mother has a nervous temperament, the daughter will probably be predisposed to hysteria. The sense of the word "heredity" as used here should be rightly understood. It is not necessary that the same form of affection shall appear in the parents and the children. A nervous derangement in the parents may be reproduced in the children under different aspects. For example, an epileptic father may have an idiotic son, an insane son, and an hysterical daughter. The law of hereditary liability is equally true when, instead of a nervous malady as grave as epilepsy or insanity, we have to do simply with a nervous temperament. Just as the color of the hair, the shape of the nose, and the voice are similar in parents and children, so the temperament is transmitted from one generation to another. The results of the medical observations of several centuries agree with the common opinion. In the times of witchcraft, the daughter of a witch—that is to say, of a person afflicted with hysteria—was inevitably regarded as a witch, and there was no need of seeking other motives for an accusation.

Other accessory causes supplement the preponderant influence of heredity. A girl, brought up with a certain degree of culture, who sees around her persons that were her companions in other days in a better situation than she has been able to reach, will become hysterical because fortune has not given her the enjoyments she craves. Dreams that have been dispelled, illusions that have vanished, hopes that have proved to be chimerical, afford motives almost sufficient to