Essays on hysteria, brain-tumor, and some other cases of nervous disease.

  • Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 1842-1906.
Date:
1888
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on hysteria, brain-tumor, and some other cases of nervous disease. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    rhcea ; or in perversions of fundamental instincts—as that for food, the sexual and the maternal instinct; in its sensory hallucinations, in the predominance of ego- tistic consciousness over external perception, in its purposeless excitability, depression of effective force, suspiciousness of others, correlative with a sense of personal inadequacy, etc. This relationship of hyste- ria to insanity is perfectly well recognized by alienists, but often overlooked by the general practitioners or specialists under whose eyes hysterical symptoms usually develop. It is also recognized that hysteria may accompany organic brain disease (Seguin), or epilepsy* (Gowers), or precede insanity ; in such cases indicating the beginnings of cortical degeneration (Gowers). The relations of hysteria to the degenera- tion of stock are again indicated by its frequent family coincidence with tuberculosis.2 Profound as are the roots of hysteria, and although it be often as incurable as insanity accompanied by cortical wasting, though it be often as tenacious as life, or even occasionally fatal, it is, nevertheless, usually the lighter form of the neuroses and degenera- tions to which it is allied. It is, moreover, not infre- quently symptomatic; that is, though the tempera- ment may have pre-existed, the serious symptoms only date from some curable peripheric or moral irritation. Is there any distinction to be made between hysteria and neurasthenia ? A distinction is often made, based upon the sex and temper of the patient. If this be a female, and notably selfish, the case is pronounced 1 Apart from the so-called hystero-epilepsy, or hysteria major. Gowers on Epilepsy, p. 175. 2 Grasset: Brain, 1884. I have frequently had occasion to note this, or the occurrence of hysteria in phthisical families.