Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/187

Rh nervous disease. It can not, therefore, be said to be in any sense a disease of nervous debility. Those who suffer most from it are the very opposite of neurasthenics or anæmics; they have none of the symptoms detailed in my work on nervous exhaustion; they are full-blooded and strong-nerved, capable of working hard and long at the most toilsome service, and will hold themselves up full and sturdy and enduring, side by side with the hardiest men in the nation. Like "servant-girl hysteria," and like certain forms of chorea or "jerks," as they are called, which appear or have appeared in certain religious revivals, like the "Holy Rollers" as they were called in the religious revivals of northern New Hampshire, these Jumpers are contributions to psychology more than to pathology. Far out of the range of the aided senses, far beyond the reach of the microscope, or perhaps of the spectroscope, there may be molecular changes or disturbances which manifest themselves in these jumpings and strikings and throwings as a result and correlative. But for the present, possibly for all time, we can only study this subject psychologically; we can only approach it satisfactorily from the psychological side. Only those who clearly recognize the two distinct types of hysteria, the neurasthenic or anæmic form, which may be called physical hysteria, and the mental or psychical form, which may be called psychical hysteria, can understand the nature of this peculiar malady of the Jumpers; but those who do comprehend and recognize these two types of hysteria will have little difficulty in comprehending the general nature of this jumping and its position among the neuroses. Some of the cases of hysteria major on which Charcot has experimented with his metals and magnets belong, as I am persuaded from personal observation, to psychical or mental rather than to physical diseases. I can find in the families of those who suffer from jumping no proof of any form of functional or organic nervous disease.

Jumping is, therefore, a trancoidal condition, exhibiting a part of the phenomena of trance, and bearing the same relation to trance that certain epileptoidal conditions bear to epilepsy.

Although the phenomena exhibited by the Jumpers are analogous to those of mesmeric trance, of mental hysteria of the "Jerkers" and "Holy Rollers" in revivals, they yet differ from all these and all allied forms of nervous disorder in these two respects:

1. The momentary character of the manifestations.

In but a second or so all the acts of the Jumper—striking, throwing, dropping, crying, jerking, or jumping—are over completely, and he is about in the same condition as before he was surprised. The explosion of the Jumper, like the explosion of a revolver, is sudden and instantaneous; and like a revolver, also, the Jumper is at once ready for a new explosion on proper excitation. If we look at a Jumper five