In the cases that develop early in life it will practically always be found that infantile cerebral disorders of some kind are a prominent feature of the history. The mother's delivery was difficult perhaps, and the child was for some time after birth unconscious, or infantile convulsions occurred. It may be remarked here that a history of convulsions in childhood is now considered by physicians as of serious import for the future nervous and mental life of the child. It has recently been announced, for instance, that so-called idiopathic epilepsy,--that is, epilepsy without some directly immediate cause,--very seldom develops later in life in persons who have not had in childhood convulsive seizures as the result of some extreme irritation. This does not imply that every child that has convulsions will suffer from some serious nervous or mental condition later; but every child whose mental and nervous equilibrium is not stable, because of hereditary elements of weakness, will almost certainly suffer. Injuries to the head in childhood are nearly of as great importance as the actual occurrence of convulsions. There are usually three stages of paranoia described by authorities in mental diseases. These have been called the prodromal or initial period, which is also, because of the set of symptoms usually most prominent in it, often called the hypochondriacal stage of the disease. The patient occupies himself with his feelings and his sensations. He is concerned very much about the state of his health and is prone to think himself affected by diseases that he reads about or hears described. This set of symptoms, by itself alone, is not an index of enduring mental disturbance, but may be only a manifestation of a passing mental perturbation in sympathy with some slight physical ailment. This state may indeed be nothing more than the result of too persistent introspection. {287} Most medical students suffer from a certain amount of hypochondria during their early acquisition of a knowledge of the symptoms of disease. In the true hypochondriac, however, every bodily sensation, or as it is technically called, somaesthetic sensation, is translated to mean a significant symptom of serious disease. A slight feeling of fatigue becomes to the patient's mind the "tired feeling" of a dangerous constitutional disorder. Any peculiar feeling, such as that of the hand or foot going to sleep, is set down at once as a symptom of a serious nervous disease, or if the patient has heard that in old people numbness of the extremities is a forerunner of apoplexy, he is sure to conclude that apoplexy is threatening in his own case. Subjective sensations of heat and cold set him to taking his temperature and his pulse, and even slight variations in these are magnified into important physical signs of disease.