Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/372

358 by overwhelming mental emotions, and marks the acme of such perturbing passions as terror, anguish, despair, etc.

In these eases and some others it appears to be the result of a purely nervous impression; while in still others, as in malarial fevers, of which it has been known to form a complication, the immediate cause is of a somewhat different nature. While in some cases it has been associated with scurvy, purpura, and other blood-diseases, this has not generally been the case. It has been simulated chiefly by enthusiastic and dishonest pietists.

Examples of the affection may be found extending throughout the /Whole range of medical literature, as well modern as ancient, and from a study of these we shall best be able to bring into view its numerous and varying phases.

The eminent French historian De Thou mentions the case of an Italian officer who commanded at Monte-Maro, a fortress of Piedmont, during the war in 1552 between Henry II of France and the Emperor Charles V. This officer, having been treacherously seized by order of the hostile general, and threatened with public execution unless he surrendered the place, was so agitated at the prospect of an ignominious death that he sweated blood from every part of his body.

The same writer relates a similar occurrence in the person of a young Florentine at Rome, unjustly put to death by the order of Pope Sixtus V, in the beginning of his reign, and concludes the narration as follows: "When the youth was led forth to execution, he excited the commiseration of many, and through excess of grief was observed to shed bloody tears, and to discharge blood instead of sweat from his whole body—a circumstance which many regard as a certain proof that Nature condemned the severity of a sentence so cruelly hastened, and invoked vengeance against the magistrate himself, as therein guilty of murder."

Among several examples, given in the German "Ephemerides," of bloody tears and bloody sweat occasioned by extreme fear, more especially the fear of death, may be mentioned that of "a young boy who, having taken part in a crime for which two of his elder brothers were hanged, was exposed to public view under the gallows on which they were executed, and was thereupon observed to sweat blood from his whole body."

It is mentioned by Theophrastus, and by Aristotle, who says, "Some have a bloody sweat," and again, "Some through an ill habit of body have sweat a bloody excrement."

And Diodorus Siculus says of the Indian serpents that, if any one be bitten by them, he is tormented with excessive pains, and seized with a bloody sweat. Galen observes, "Contingere interdum poros ex multo aut fervido spiritu adco dilatari, ut etiam exeat sanguis per eos fiatque sudor sanguineus" (Sometimes the pores become so much dilated by rapid or fervid breathing that the blood oozes out