Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/73

Rh feverish and feeble; and at last he either sinks into chronic despondency and irritability, or rushes hastily to the performance of some act which indicates disordered mind.

The effects of fear are all but indenticalidentical [sic] with those of rage, and like rage grow in force with repetition. The phenomena are so easily developed in the majority of persons, they may actually be acquired by imitation, and may be intensified and perhaps induced by listening to the mere narratives of events which act as causes of fear. I am daily more and more convinced that not half the evils resulting from what may be called the promptings of fear in the young and the feeble are duly appreciated, and that fear is the worst weapon of physical torture the thoughtless coward wields. The organs upon which fear exerts its injurious influence are, again, the organic nervous chain, the heart, and the brain.

Permanent intermittency of the heart is one of the leading phenomena incident to sudden and extreme terror. One example, sufficiently characteristic, will illustrate this fact:

A gentleman of middle age was returning home from a long voyage in the most perfect health and spirits, when the vessel in which he was sailing was struck from a collision, and, hopelessly injured, began to sink. With the sensation of the sinking of the ship and the obvious imminence of death—five minutes was the longest expected period of remaining life—this gentleman felt his heart, previously acting vehemently, stop in its beat. He remembered then a confused period of noise and cries and rush, and a return to comparative quiet, during which he discovered himself being conveyed, almost unconsciously, out of the sinking vessel on to the deck of another vessel that had rendered assistance. When he had gained sufficient calmness he found that periods of intermittent action of his heart could be counted. They occurred four and five times in the minute for several days, and interfered with his going to sleep for many nights. On reaching land the intermittency decreased, and when the patient came to me, soon afterward, there were not more than two intermittent strokes in the minute, all the intervening strokes being entirely natural and the action of the heart and the sounds of it being simply perfect. In this gentleman the intermittent pulse became a fixed condition, but so modified in character that it was endurable. At his last visit to me he was not conscious of the symptom except he took it objectively from himself, by feeling his own pulse or listening to his own heart.

The effect of fear on the brain may be to the extent of that which is produced by extremity of rage, so that even sudden death, from syncope, may ensue. I have known two such instances as these, but the more common effect is an intense irritability, followed by doubt, suspicion, and distrust, leading toward or to insanity. From a sudden terror deeply felt the young mind rarely recovers, never, I believe, if hereditary tendency to insanity be a part of its nature. A man,