Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/561

Rh on the 8th of September, 1825, with an absolute repulsion against food, and thus continued till the day of her death, after a lethargic sleep of three months, on the 19th of March, 1828. The autopsy disclosed a contraction of the sigmoid flexure of the colon. One of the most extraordinary cases on record is that of the Dutch hysteric Angelina de Vlies, forty-one years old, who continued without food from the 10th of March, 1822, to 1826. She was subject to cramps and tremors, and was very weak, and not able to rise without help. Bourneville and D'Olier tell of an idiotic child who at two years of age lived three weeks, and at seven years twenty-eight days, on nothing but water and broth. In many similar cases, the patients have eaten occasionally, but only the minimum quantity indispensable for the maintenance of life. Thus, a woman cited by Laségue only ate during a year what an ordinary person would require for two days.

One of the characteristics of cases of this kind is the extraordinary perversion of appetite. An insatiable craving prevails in some of the patients, a loathing in others. Perversions of the sexual passion have also been remarked. With these fantastic tastes is associated an exceptionally strong and enduring power of resistance.

There was for a long time at the Salpêtrière a woman named Etchverry, who had hemiplegia on one side and contracture on the other. Her hysteria should apparently have provoked a general denutrition, but it did not. She would not eat, and had to be fed artificially. Her excretions were marked by an extreme deficiency of urea. There was no deception in her case, for she was under constant watch.

I have observed in a very precise experiment the diminution in the phenomena of nutrition in hysterics. M. Hannot and myself, studying two hystero-epileptic cases at the Salpêtrière, found that the patient in a condition of lethargy received only four litres of air into her lungs in sixteen minutes, and made only eight inspirations in thirty-six minutes. This marvelous slackening of the respiratory phenomena constitutes a real hibernation in man, resulting from the absence of stimulation of the nervous system.

Observations have been made of a disease of somnolence. M. Charcot has recently published an account of a case, and MM. Semelaigne and Gélineau have published another. An irresistible torpor takes possession of the patients, who fall into a sleep in which all the phenomena of nutrition are slackened, but the sleepers wake occasionally and take food or perform physical offices.

The fakirs of India, who allow themselves to be buried alive, belong to the same category. They submit to extraordinary mortifications, eat but little, abstain from meats, and use curious arts to empty their stomachs. Having hypnotized themselves, they