|Not none of the least difficult problems, in the practice of medicine, is the distinguishing between cases of real disease, and those that are feigned. It is a great stumbling block in the path of young practitioners, and even the old members of the fraternity find a few chips of it in their way occasionally. To such a degree may the art of dissimulation be carried, that nothing but the eye of suspicion and blind presentiment will lead us to detect the imposition. I have known a case of simulated disease, after deceiving some of the first physicians in the South, and withstanding almost every species of treatment, to be cured by an energetic, liberal administration of the negro-whip. But this is a remedy that fearful humanity will not allow us to use, and consequently I never resort to it, but use equally as effective, but uninjurious means. Shortly after I commenced practice, I was sent for in a great hurry to see a case of fits in the person of a negro wench, belonging to a plantation a few miles from where I was located. The fit was over when I reached the place, and I found the patient resting very composedly and showing no evidence of present or past disease; but the testimony of her master went to show that she had had one of the worst fits he had ever seen, and he ought to know something about fits, as he had lived several years in Arkansas, where the doctors invariably throw every case into fits as preliminary to a cure. I made a prescription suitable to his description, and returned home, only to be sent for in greater haste the next day, and so on every day for a week, the fits seeming to increase in intensity under my treatment. I remarked, as a peculiarity of her case, that on Sundays, and when rain prevented her being put out to work, she escaped the attack; but hardly could the hoe-handle salute her palm in the cotton-field, before she would be screeching, yelping, and struggling like a friend of mine, who, camping out, made his pillow of a fallen, but still tenanted hornets' nest. I became desperate; the owner was becoming tired of sending for me, and my reputation was suffering, for the patient was getting worse. I examined her again thoroughly, but nothing could I find in her digestive, arterial, nervous, muscular, or osseous systems, to indicate disease. I shaved all the wool off her head to feel for depressed skull-bones, and commencing the Materia Medica at Acetic Acid, administered through to Zingiber, concluding the course by knocking her senseless with a galvanic battery; but she stood fits, treatment, and everything else without change, and not till a strong impression rested on my mind that she was feigning, did a different course of treatment suggest itself to me. The plantation lay on both sides of a deep bayou, the link of connexion a high wooden bridge. I happened in one day at the house, when I perceived four negroes approaching the bridge from the opposite field, bearing some object in a blanket.