Diseases of women : a clinical guide to their diagnosis and treatment / by George Ernest Herman.

  • Herman, G. Ernest (George Ernest), 1849-1914.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Diseases of women : a clinical guide to their diagnosis and treatment / by George Ernest Herman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

    54/910 (page 34)
    sexual desire frequently underlies hysteria or nervous mimicries. The desire lor activity—the exercise of their faculties—natural to the young of either sex (and often denied opportunity in the female), and the craving for sympathy, play a much larger part than sexual desire; and if the latter he present, the girl docs not know exactly what she wants. If sexual desire were the principal cause of hysteria, marriage should always cure it; hut it does not. A marriage in which the patient is unoccupied and unhappy will make her worse than she was before. Another popular notion is that hysterical means shamming. This is true of the nervous mimicries, not true of the hysterical paroxysms. A corollary may he drawn that harshness is called for ; this is true of neither. (2) Hysterical fits.—The hysterical attack or fit is popu- larly called hysterics. For long medical men thought it the chief symptom of hysteria. But Dr. Fagge remarks that in most cases of hysteria (he includes under this term nervous mimicries) no attacks occur at any part of their course ; and he quotes Briquet, who says that in three out of four cases of hysteria there are no fits. The hysterical fit differs from the nervous mimicries of disease in being involuntary. It is a symptom of nervous weakness or nervous exhaustion. Women have weaker nervous systems than men, and therefore they arc more liable to hysterical fits. The strongest and sanest woman may, in favourable circumstances, come to suffer from hysterical attacks; and Dr. Wilks states that a welhknown member of Parliament, a man of sturdy frame, became hysterical beside the grave of his friend Cobden. I have described the fit in the previous chapter. The liability to fits of this kind is a different thing from the moral perversion which leads to the simulation of disease, and it is unfortunate that the same word should be applied to both. Women with disease peculiar to their sex are especially liable to these fits, because so many of them suffer from neurasthenia. In the treatment of patients subject to hysterical seizures the indication is to improve the nervous tone. Treatment of disease of the sexual apparatus is indirectly beneficial only so far as it docs this.