In the autumn of 1886 I settled down in Vienna as a physician, and married the girl who had been waiting for me in a distant city for more than four years. I may here go back a little and explain how it was the fault of my _fiancée_ that I was not already famous at that early age. A side interest, though it was a deep one, had led me in 1884 to obtain from Merck some of what was then the little-known alkaloid cocaine and to study its physiological action. While I was in the middle of this work, an opportunity arose for making a journey to visit my _fiancée_, from whom I had been parted for two years. I hastily wound up my investigation of cocaine and contented myself in my book on the subject with prophesying that further uses for it would soon be found. I suggested, however, to my friend, L. Königstein, the ophthalmologist, that he should investigate the question of how far the anæsthetizing properties of cocaine were applicable in diseases of the eye. When I returned from my holiday I found that not he, but another of my friends, Carl Koller (now in New York), to whom I had also spoken about cocaine, had made the decisive experiments upon animals’ eyes and had demonstrated them at the Ophthalmological Congress at Heidelberg. Koller is therefore rightly regarded as the discoverer of local anæsthesia by cocaine, which has become so important in minor surgery; but I bore my _fiancée_ no grudge for my neglected opportunity. I will now return to the year of 1886, the time of my settling down in Vienna as a specialist in nervous diseases. The duty devolved upon me of giving a report before the “Gesellschaft der Aerzte” [Society of Medicine] upon what I had seen and learnt with Charcot. But I met with a bad reception. Persons of authority, such as the chairman (Bamberger, the physician), declared that what I said was incredible. Meynert urged me to find some cases in Vienna similar to those which I had described and to present them before the Society. I tried to do so; but the senior physicians in whose departments I found any such cases, refused to allow me to observe them or to work at them. One of them, an old surgeon, actually broke out with the exclamation: “But, my dear sir, how can you talk such nonsense? _Hysteron_ (sic) means the uterus. So how can a man be hysterical?” I objected in vain that what I wanted was, not to have my diagnosis approved, but to have the case put at my disposal. At length, outside the hospital, I came upon a case of classical hysterical hemi-anæsthesia in a man, and demonstrated it before the “Gesellschaft der Aerzte.” This time I was applauded, but no further interest was taken in me. The impression that the great authorities had rejected my innovations remained unshaken; and, with my hysteria in men and my production of hysterical paralyses by suggestion, I found myself forced into the Opposition. As I was soon afterwards excluded from the laboratory of cerebral anatomy and for a whole term had nowhere to