Sometimes it happens that the starting-point of hypochondriac pains, simulating neuralgia, is a blow, or other bodily injury acting on a predisposed nervous system. Another of my patients at the Westminster Hospital was a policeman, who had received a severe kick in the groin; he suffered pains which at first seemed to wear all the characters of true neuralgia in the pudic nerve, but afterward shifted to other places and exhibited all the intractability of hypochondriasis; the patient also developed the regular appearance and the characteristic hallucinations of the latter disease. On the last occasion when I saw him, he struck me as likely to become really insane, in the melancholic form; and the probability is that the casualty which he suffered was only accidentally the starting-point of a malady which was inherent in him since birth, and would have been developed, in any case, at some period of his life. CHAPTER IV. THE PAINS OF LOCOMOTOR ATAXY. Considering the vast amount that has been written about this disease during the last few years, it might be thought superfluous for me to give any description of its general features. But it unfortunately happens that there is still great divergence of opinion among authorities as to the true limitation of the group of cases that can properly be ranked under this title, and, indeed, as to the propriety of employing the title at all. The phrase ataxie locomotrice progressive, as every one knows, was applied by Duchenne de Boulogne to a class of cases which really only form a subdivision of the group known under the older title of _tabes dorsalis_ and the most advanced German pathologists maintain that the old word was better, and that Duchenne was altogether wrong in making the one symptom, ataxy of locomotion, the bases of a new phraseology;[49] more especially as his theory as to the seat of the morbid changes was undoubtedly erroneous.