Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/622

604 burial. Pfendler, however, states, that he has known two cases in which a disastrous result was barely averted:

A Viennese lady, who had suffered for a long time from cataleptic or lethargic attacks, was finally buried in one of her trances. The sexton, who fortunately happened to be a thief in this instance, had reopened the grave, and was busy removing her clothes during the ensuing night, when a resurrection of the dead took place. Stricken with terror, he was running away, when the woman called him back, requesting to be taken to her doctor. The second instance referred to by Pfendler is that of a young lady, aged fifteen, who, after a convulsive attack, had St. Vitus's dance and other nervous symptoms. Finally she became subject to fits of sleep lasting several days. Her health suffered greatly, and the exhaustion became such that, after a consultation of the first physicians, every hope of her recovery was given up. The next day she suddenly started as if to embrace the attendant who was watching her, and fell back as if dead. All the usual tests failed to detect any sign of life. Finally, funeral preparations were made; she was dressed in white, the bell was tolling. Still uneasy about the absence of any sign of decomposition, Pfendler was making a last examination when he detected a faint respiratory movement. After an hour and a half's friction and stimulation, movement returned; and the patient looking about and smiling said, "I am too young to die." She then fell into a sleep of ten hours' duration, and woke up in full convalescence. The patient in this case had never lost consciousness, and remembered afterward what had been said and done in the room during the medical consultation and funeral preparations.

Catalepsy, though intimately allied to hysterical neurosis, often occurs in patients who offer no other symptoms of nervous derangement. Emotions are often the exciting cause of an attack in a cataleptic subject. Many curious instances are related by authors:

A little girl, mentioned by Tissot, shocked at her sister having helped herself to a coveted morsel, remained stiff and motionless for an hour, a spoon in her hand, and her arm outstretched toward the dish. A soldier, quarreling with a companion, in a fit of passion seized a bottle to throw at him; cataleptic rigidity fixed him in this attitude, motionless, unconscious, his eyes full of anger and defiance. In another case, a magistrate on the bench, insulted in the middle of his summing up, remained as if petrified in an attitude of indignation and threat at his insulter. Again, we read of priests being cataleptized at the altar in the attitude of elevating the sacrament.

It is certain that many of the saintly women in the Roman Catholic hagiology were victims of this disease: St. Catherine of Siena, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Theresa; not to speak of Joan of Arc, Madame Guyon, Marie Alacoque, and many others. Cataleptic seizures were also a common feature among the victims of the great hystero-epileptic manifestations so common in the middle ages, which we find described as "possessions" in the curious and abundant literature of the subject.

Among the sickening descriptions of the awful episodes known as "the possession of the Ursulines of Loudun," we find a graphic description of cataleptic phenomena: