Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/98

 confined in the Salpêtrière, for it has not been usual to regard hysteria as a grave disease necessitating or justifying seclusion. It is not always so grave. The disease manifests itself in every degree. Just as we may suffer a burn that is so superficial that we can hardly feel it, while there are other burns so deep and extended that they lead to death; just as there are light fevers and also fevers that are speedily mortal—so there are light hysteriæ, almost imperceptible, constituting a disposition of the organization rather than a disease, and besides them there are grave hysteriæ, so grave that they are confounded with insanity, with general paralysis, and with epilepsy. At the Salpêtrière, there are hardly any other hysterical cases than those of grave hysteria; as to light hysteria, it may be found everywhere. When the doctors speak of a nervous woman, they say an hysterical woman; and this language, though it may sound unpleasantly in a conversation or a romance, is not out of place in a psychological study, for what is commonly called nervousness in a young woman is simply hysteria.

I imagine that every one is more or less acquainted with the oddities of character exhibited by nervous women. All their feelings are carried to an extreme. The most trifling event is enough to provoke enthusiasm or despair in them. Nobody can cry so easily. It even seems to me that they control the fountain-key of tears, at least so as to make them flow, for to put a stop to them is another affair. To say that hysterical persons will cry for a small matter is saying too little, for they will cry for nothing; they will be all of a sudden possessed of an indefinable grief, an incomprehensible, vague sorrow, which it is not possible to resist. It is like a ball that rises from the chest to the throat, hinders respiration, and causes suffocation. They must retire, hide themselves in the most obscure corner, and there, where they are not seen or heard, sob for hours; then, suddenly, the fit of sorrow will cease and give place to a surprising gayety.

All that it has been customary to attribute to the nervous temperament of woman enters into the domain of hysteria. The appetite is capricious, fantastic: to-day, for example, everything displeases, and it is impossible to accept a particle of nourishment; to-morrow, all will be changed and nothing will suffice to appease the hunger. Generally, hysterical persons have a marked taste for vinegar and green fruits—a diet certainly not favorable to health. Such irregular and deficient alimentation impedes general nutrition and impoverishes the blood, and, by a kind of circular connection of disorders which is very common in pathology, the anæmia thus induced augments the hysteria which is the occasion of it; and young women suffering from it are more subject to hysteria than others.

As every one knows, the character of hysterical persons is very strange. We might say, borrowing an expression from the painters, that it is very picturesque, and presents points of view varied and always unforeseen. A young woman, for example, who yesterday had