“Wait a bit, and I’ll try to show you. The throat would seem to be a common seat of the affection. I knew a lady--nice woman she was, too--who went about for years speaking in a painful whisper, whilst everybody said, ‘Poor Mrs. Marjoribanks!’ But one evening she managed to set her bed-curtains alight, when she rushed to the door, screaming, ‘Ann! Ann! the house is on fire! Come at once!’ The dear woman believed ever after, that ‘something burst’ in her throat, and described the sensation minutely; her friends believed, and her doctor did not contradict. By the way, no remedy has proved more often effectual than a house on fire, only you will see the difficulties. I knew of a case, however, where the ‘house-afire’ prescription was applied with great effect. ’Twas in a London hospital for ladies; a most baffling case; patient had been for months unable to move a limb--was lifted in and out of bed like a log, fed as you would pour into a bottle. A clever young house-surgeon laid a plot with the nurses. In the middle of the night her room was filled with fumes, lurid light, &c. She tried to cry out, but the smoke was suffocating; she jumped out of bed and made for the door--more choking smoke--threw up the sash--fireman, rope, ladder--she scrambled down, and was safe. The whole was a hoax, but it cured her, and the nature of the cure was mercifully kept secret. Another example: A friend of mine determined to put a young woman under ‘massage’ in her own home; he got a trained operator, forbade any of her family to see her, and waited for results. The girl did not mend; ‘very odd! some reason for this,’ he muttered; and it came out that every night the mother had crept in to wish her child good-night; the tender visits were put a stop to, and the girl recovered.” “Your examples are interesting enough, but I fail to see how they bear; in each case, you have a person of weak or disordered intellect simulating a disease with no rational object in view. Now the beggars who know how to manufacture sores on their persons have the advantage--they do it for gain.” “I have told my tale badly; these were not persons of weak or disordered intellect; some of them very much otherwise; neither did they consciously simulate disease; not one believed it possible to make the effort he or she was surprised into. The whole question belongs to the mysterious borderland of physical and psychological science--not pathological, observe; the subject of disease and its treatment is hardly for the lay mind.” “I am trying to understand.” “It is worth your while; if every man took the pains to understand the little that is yet to be known on this interesting subject he might secure his own household, at any rate, from much misery and waste of vital powers; and not only his household, but perhaps himself--for, as I have tried to show, this that is called ‘hysteria’ is not necessarily an affair of sex.”