If only the stigmatization be considered, the supposition is untenable, when it is remembered that she was constantly watched by her friends, neighbors, and visitors. How, under such circumstances, could she possibly buy and use the blisters, caustics, or other means of producing the bleeding wounds? But, granting she had all these at her command, how could the ignorant peasant girl--even though aided by two or three accomplices--produce a result which the physician with all the resources of science cannot effect? For it involved the necessity of causing a bloody discharge from nine or ten points of the body, and of sustaining this for a half-day or even longer under the very eyes of witnesses who prevented any repeated irritation of the bleeding surfaces. But when the ecstatic trance is borne in mind, the impossibility of imposture is still more evident. How can we conceive that a young girl, brought up in the hardships of manual work, deprived of all instruction, who has read nothing, and seen nothing, could each week, during an entire day, play the part of a consummate actress; that she could simulate not only the abolition of sight and hearing, but complete insensibility to the most exquisitely painful tests; that she could control functions which are essentially beyond the power of the will, as circulation, bodily temperature, respiration; or that she could suspend those excretions which are at once the most humiliating and the most irresistible evidence of human weakness!