A maniacal patient wore on her head a tent of newspaper to keep the devil from coming through the ceiling and attacking her. She frequently heard her husband running about the upper floor with the devil on his back. As a further precaution she stained her gray hair red with pickled beet juice, and would occasionally hurl loose furniture at the walls and ceilings of her rooms and assault all who approached her. A man who presented a case of dementia pulled the hairs from his beard and planted them in rows in the garden, watering them daily, and showing much astonishment that they did not grow. He spent hours each day in spelling words backward and forward, and also by repeating their letters in the order in which they appear in the alphabet. When he wanted funds he signed yellow fallen leaves with a needle, and they turned into money. A case of general paresis (commonly though improperly called "softening of the brain") passed into the second stage as a delusion was uppermost to the effect that there was opium everywhere; opium in his hat, opium in his newspaper, opium in his bath sponge, opium in his food. He thereupon refused to eat, and was fed with a tube for two years, at the end of which time he resumed natural methods of nutrition and ate voraciously. Another general paretic promised to his physician such gifts as an ivory vest with diamond buttons, boasted of his great strength while scarcely able to walk alone, and declared he was a celebrated vocalist, while his lips and tongue were so tremulous he could scarcely articulate. _Fixed Delusions of Paranoia_ Paranoia is an infrequent variety of insanity in which the patient is dominated by certain fixed delusions, while for a long time his intellect is but slightly impaired. The delusions are usually persecutory, and the patient alleges a conspiracy. He is generally deluded with the belief that he is a prominent person in history, or an Old Testament worthy, and there is usually a religious tinge to his delusions. A patient of the writer believed himself to be the reincarnation of Christ, appearing as "the Christ of the Jews and the Christ of the Christians" in one. Over the head of his landlord, who requested overdue rent, the patient fired a revolver, "to show that the reign of peace had begun in the world." He wrote a new bible for his followers, and arranged for a triumphal procession headed by his brother and himself on horseback, wearing white stars. _How the Physician Should Be Aided_