It goes without saying that the same fear of disease tamed her husband over whom she ruled with an iron hand. The least opposition to her whims, or to her fears of possible disease made her so sick with all kinds of pains that the family and the husband were driven into submission. The woman was obese as a hippopotamus, well nourished, with a florid complexion, and with an appetite that would shame a Gargantua. The rarest, the best, and the most appetizing dainties had to be on her table. She made of her meals a form of worship, requisite to propitiate the goddess of maladies. She did not hesitate to take the best morsels from the plates of her daughter and son in order to satisfy her appetite which was supposed to be “delicate and small.” The patient was conscious of every square inch in her body; she was afraid that some form of malady may lurk there. She was a typical case of pathophobia. Fear of disease and quest of health were ever in her mind. She could not talk, or think of anything else, but herself and her symptoms. She made of her step-daughter a poor, colorless being, a day and night nurse, tyrannized over by pitiful, neurotic whimpering. When the patient happened to wake during the night for ever so short a period of time, she did not hesitate to wake her step-daughter, tired as the latter was by constant attendance on this psychopathic shrew. The daughter had to wake up everybody who could in any way bring comfort to that “poor, old, suffering invalid.” After much groaning, moaning, and bewailing her bitter lot the invalid took some medicine to appease the fear of disease, partook of some nourishing food to keep up her strength and health, and went to sleep for the rest of the night. Years ago, the patient was under the care of Weir Mitchell who sent her to me as a last resort. Dr. Weir Mitchell characterized the patient as an “American humbug.” As a matter of fact, the patient herself was convinced that she was on the verge of death, and was in terrible agony of her fears of disease, fears which made her quest for health a matter of life and death. The patient was obsessed by _parasitic egotism_, the _quintessence of psychopathic affections_. Many times during the day she paced the room reciting elevating passages from the Bible, from “great poets,”--Emerson being her favorite writer. I have heard neurotics with their “Mortal Mind,” “Sin and Error,” “Disease and Nothing,” recite edifying phrases such as: “The decaying flower, the blighted bud, the gnarled oak, the ferocious beast, like the discords of disease, sin, and death are unnatural” ... “Fear is inflammation, error” ... “_Adam, a-dam, a-dam, dam, dam_”....