This form of lethargy is characterized by the complete unconsciousness which persists during its course. Its duration is variable, sometimes continuing for a few minutes only; sometimes lasting through many days and weeks. Dr. W. T. Gairdner, Professor of Medicine in the University of Glasgow,[76] reports the case of a woman who remained for over one hundred and sixty days in a condition of lethargic stupor. “The patient was the mother of a family, and had lived a strictly domestic and (up to a short time before her seizure) healthy and regular life. There were no peculiar moral and religious problems to perplex the situation. There was no history of inveterate hysteria, or of long continued rapt contemplation; nor has there been the slightest evidence of any craving after notoriety, either before the attack or since its termination. The moral atmosphere, in short, surrounding the phenomena, is altogether unfavorable to exaggeration and imposture, for which, indeed, no reasonable motive can be assigned. Nevertheless, under these very commonplace conditions, concurring with some degree of melancholy or mental despondency after delivery, but during a convalescence otherwise normal, Mrs. McI----presents to our notice a condition of suspended consciousness and disordered innervation in no degree less extreme than the ‘trances’ or cataleptic attacks which have been recorded as the result of the most aggravated hysteria, or as the miracles of religious ecstasy and profound mental emotion. She becomes for the long period of over one hundred and sixty days continuously an almost mindless automaton, connected with the external world only through a few insignificant reflexes and through the organic functions. She is fed, almost without resistance, through the stomach-tube; she defecates and urinates (during much the greater part of the time) unconsciously; she is absolutely passive as regards everything that demands spontaneous movement, and betrays almost no sign of sensation, general or special, when subjected to the severest tests that can be applied short of physical injury. But while her senses were thus shut, and her volitions in suspense to an extent much beyond ordinary sleep, there was, nevertheless, a _sleep within the sleep_. The periodicity of day and night was maintained by some change in the condition of the innervation, of which snoring was the sole indication. She was not convulsed, nor paralyzed, nor delirious; the singing, laughing, weeping, adoring ecstasies of hysteria and of religious excitement were wholly wanting; nor were there during many months such intervals of normal consciousness as are observed in almost all the recorded cases of hysterical coma and of catalepsy. The statue-like pose, moreover, and the _flexibilitas cerea_ of typical catalepsy, are absent in this case. The return to consciousness was followed or accompanied by a return of all the normal functions of mind and body; there is now no