The highly educated and refined lady had lost her husband by an
accident in Switzerland, which had been misrepresented by some of
the newspapers as suicide. Two years later she wrote to me: "I feel
as if I had received indelible photographs on my brain which have
since greatly affected my health and from which I may never
recover. This winter the symptoms I have been able to control
returned and I have been ill. I unfortunately saw the newspaper
headlines with my husband's supposed suicide. Though I exclaimed
then, 'how outrageous,' I felt as if I had been struck and since
then I can seldom read a paper without dread and apprehension, and
the hearing of anyone's suicide fills me with terror. When I
hurried to Europe, on the ocean a week from the day of my husband's
death, I had a curious and overwhelming shock. On opening a drawer
and seeing a pair of scissors, they looked to me like a dagger and
suddenly the whole cabin seemed filled with implements of death.
The doctors said that I would find it hard to get over such
impressions but I told them I would, as I had courage and will. But
I have been realizing in these two years that I may be suffering
from something that may be beyond the control of will. I often
become so nervously sensitive that scissors are unbearable for me
to see, or a steel knife or anything that might express death. Our
family physicians are still against hypnotism, and if I should go
to a neurologist of my own selection, it might be to one who
believed still only in nerve foods, baths, or a sanitarium."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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