"Is that all you are afraid of?" "But surely it is quite enough." Doctor Janet turned for an explanation to her husband, who shook his head despairingly, as he replied in an undertone: "This is the way she has been for years, doctor, only lately she has grown much worse. She will scarcely eat anything, for fear of catching cholera. It is difficult to persuade her to stir from the house. She seems to think the air is full of cholera germs. She sees cholera in everything. Tell me, doctor, is my poor Justine mad? Must we be separated, she and I? Is it that she will have to spend the rest of her life in an asylum?" "Leave her here a few days," said Doctor Janet, "and I can tell you better then." Psychopathologists have invented some delicate tests for discriminating infallibly between true organic insanity, which in the present state of medical knowledge is quite incurable, and functional mental troubles due to dissociation. Applying these, Doctor Janet soon reached the conclusion that Justine was not really insane, and that her "phobia," or irrational fear, was due to some forgotten shock connected with the disease cholera. But, closely though he questioned her, she could recall nothing of the sort. He then decided to try the effect of hypnotizing her, for, as all psychopathologists are aware, hypnotism, when it is possible to use it, is an unrivaled agency for recovering lost memories. Put into the hypnotic state, patients easily remember incidents in their past of which they have no conscious recollection when in the normal, waking state. It was thus with Justine, who proved to be most hypnotizable. "I want you," Doctor Janet told her, after she had passed into deep hypnosis, "to try to remember whether at any time in your life you saw a person suffering from cholera, or one who had died from cholera." "Why, certainly I did," she promptly replied, shuddering violently. "When was it?" "When I was a little girl--fifteen years old." "Tell me the circumstances." "My mother was very poor. She had to take all sorts of work. Sometimes she nursed sick people, and when they died she got them ready for burial. Once two people in our neighborhood died from cholera, and I helped her with the corpses. They made a frightful sight--one of them, at all events. It was the body of a man, naked, and all blue and green. Oh, frightful, frightful! What if I should catch the cholera? I shall catch it, I know I shall! Nothing can save me!" Her voice rose in a shriek of terror, and Doctor Janet hastened to de-hypnotize her. The situation was now perfectly clear to him. Evidently the sight of the corpse, "naked, and all blue and green," had so profoundly affected the impressionable girl as to cause a severe dissociation whereby all memory of the shocking episode had been blotted out of her consciousness, only to be subconsciously remembered in most minute detail.