Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/560

544 women, or children, have usually been observed in hysterical persons—for it is now known that hysteria exists in men and children as well as in women. Taking up almost any of the numerous stories related by the old authors, we find manifest traces of hysteria in them. Here, for example, is "the memorable and prodigious history of a girl who for many years neither ate nor slept nor voided, and yet lived by God's admirable grace and virtue" (Frankfort, 1587). She was Catherine Binder, of Heidelberg, who at twenty-seven years of age all at once lost the taste for warm food (a hysterical fancy), and ate nothing warm for five years, when she was treated by a quack, and also lost the taste for cold food. She neither ate nor drank for seven years. While we may entertain some question respecting the accuracy of this affirmation, there is no doubt that the girl was nervously affected. She had been deprived of hearing and speech for three years; she had spasms when she tried to eat, so that she could not swallow; and, during two weeks that she was watched, she neither ate nor drank. Another girl (1586), religiously affected in her hysteria, was taken with an aversion to everything eatable, and a difficulty in swallowing, and lived for four years on nothing but water and, at long intervals, a little bread dipped in water. Apollonia Schrierer, of Berne (1604), lay physically insensible but wide awake day and night. She was kept apart from her mother and constantly watched by the officers for two weeks, during which she took no food. In the same book with this story is that of a girl of Spires, watched for twelve days, who was assumed to have lived for three years upon nothing but a few drops of water or wine, which she took in her lips. She was twelve years old, and slept most of the time. A girl of Cologne, who lived four years without food, fainted whenever they tried to put anything into her mouth. Passing over several other cases related by these old authors, which vary but little in their general features, we come to a number of cases recorded in medical publications of the eighteenth century, in all or nearly all of which the long fast is accompanied by some kind of disorder of the body or mind. In many of these instances, as in some of those described above, the fast was not absolute, but was occasionally relieved by the introduction of a few drops of milk or broth. Such a fast can be continued indefinitely—as in the case of a woman described by Vandermonde in 1760, who lived thus for twenty-six years.

The present century furnishes numerous fairly well authenticated instances of extraordinarily long fasts, which were nearly always associated with some form of hysteria. We can not mention them all here, and omit those which are most frequently cited in the medical books. Anna Garbero is described by Ricci as having, after a sleep without eating of forty days, been taken,