Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/176

164 and sympathies. Hysterical patients demand, more than anything else, that other persons shall be occupied wholly with them, interested in their petty passions, that they take part in their likes and dislikes, that they admire their intelligence or their dress. They tell improbable stories, lie boldly, and are not disconcerted in the least when they are convicted of the lie. Deprived of all moral sense, they obey only because they have no alternative. No feeling of modesty or false shame restrains them; they tell their adventures to any one that comes, provided they are pleased with him, and will talk with men as freely as if they were of their own sex. Nothing embarrasses these female Diogeneses; they have an answer for everything, ask the most indiscreet questions, and tell the truth bluntly to every one. They are not deficient in self-love, and are indignant if one does not appear to be occupied with them. They never hold the same opinion long, and will pass from one sentiment to another with marvelous rapidity. No idea, no reasoning can hold them or persuade them. Their mind wanders from spot to spot without the power to settle itself, and it is as hard to fix the attention of an hysterical person upon a precise idea as it is by reasoning to induce a bird which is hopping about to stop and fix itself on a branch.

These unfortunate creatures are wholly deficient in good sense, and commit all manner of follies when left to themselves. It is necessary to be fully aware of this fact to understand why they are confined in an asylum for the insane; for when we question them, when we converse with them, we do not discover that total perversion of intelligence which we make out so easily with regard to most insane persons. We should have to see them in their working life, that is, in the midst of the exterior world, subjected to the exciting influences of every kind with which it abounds, to comprehend to what extravagances, not to use a stronger term, they will abandon themselves when no restraint hinders them. Sometimes, though rarely, they commit crimes. Most frequently they forge strings of fables to delude justice. One will cut herself with scissors, and pretend that some one has hurt her; another will feign pregnancy in order to make some one whom she hardly knows marry her; another is a kleptomaniac, and when she is in a shop steals everything within her reach, to accuse the first person that comes along of having committed the theft.

No description can be as valuable to convey an understanding of the nature of the disorders of the intelligence which hysteria causes as the simple story of a patient who has long been known at the Salpêtrière under the name of G, and who is distinguished for the eccentricity of her disposition, as well as for the violence of the convulsions from which she suffers. G was born at Loudun on the 2d of January, 1843; was abandoned by her mother and put among the foundlings; after having passed her early years in an asylum, she was sent to the country. When fourteen years old she was courted by a young