Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/690

6 were real, and that she ate, drank, slept, etc., like other mortals. Closely watched and deprived of food as the poor little fasting Welsh girl, Sarah Jacob, was, she would as certainly die. Even Dr. Tanner could not indefinitely resist so great a drain on vital force. Outraged nature would put further maltreatment beyond power of infliction.

Dr. D. H. Tuke, in his "Influence of the Mind upon the Body," adduces numerous instances of the fact that intense sympathetic attention to the physical injuries or pains of another produces similar phenomena and experiences in the sympathizer. Medical men show the connection between skin-diseases and nervous derangement. Urticaria, or hives, in children is the effect of emotional disturbance. In the disease known as purpura hæmorrhagica, Dr. Hammond states that "the blood is deficient in red corpuscles, while there is an increase in the white globules. . . . The affection is further characterized by a tendency of the blood to transude through the coats of the vessels." Boerhaave relates the case of a young girl who had ampullæ, or dilatations resembling little jugs, on various parts of her body, from which the blood flowed copiously, and which then, like those of Palma d'Oria, closed up without leaving any trace. Similar examples, more or less striking, are well known to dermatologists. From these deposits of blood in weakened, hysterical subjects, hæmorrhages follow closely on the occurrence of strong emotion. Thus Francis of Assisi, Louise Lateau, and others, thoroughly excited by passionate devotion and desire to exhibit the stigmata—where such exhibition has been the dominant idea, and the momentary expectation of its outbreak has been entertained—have unconsciously so directed the currents of nervous energy that the very phenomena desiderated have become visible. There may not have been anything but a remote correspondence between these phenomena and the wounds of the Redeemer, but extravagant fancy would at once ignore the discrepancy. Superstition always believes what it wants to believe, and the common experience of humanity is that each individual can usually behold what he desires to see. Deceivableness is one of the qualities of the human race. Dr. Hammond quotes as the counterpart of the so-called miraculous instances of the stigmata from Dr. Magnus Huss, of Stockholm, Sweden, as cited by M. Bourneville, the case of Maria K, a servant-girl, aged twenty-three, from whose skin the blood oozed in various places after emotional disturbance. "When the exuding surface was examined with a lens, no trace of excoriation of the skin was discovered. . . . The most careful inspection failed to show any sign of a cicatrix." She naturally became the object of great curiosity, and, finding that she could cause the phenomena to take place at will, frequently produced the hæmorrhage desired