The systematic treatment of nerve prostration and hysteria.

  • William Smoult Playfair
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The systematic treatment of nerve prostration and hysteria. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    which I prefer to quote to avoid any suspicion of exaggeration on my part. Case i. On September 10 a gentleman came to consult me on the case of his wife, in consequence of his attention having been directed to my former papers by a relative who is a well-known physician in London. He informed me that his wife was now fifty-five years of age, and that she had passed ten years of her married life in India. At the age of thirty she was much weakened by several suc- cessive miscarriages, and then drifted into con- firmed ill-health. He wrote, on making an ap- pointment, as follows :—' I will give you at once a short outline of her case. We have been married thirty-four years, of which the last twenty have been spent by her in bed or on the sofa. She is unable even to stand, and finds the pain in her back too great to admit of her sitting up. She is utterly without strength, of an intensely nervous temperament, and suffers incessantly from neu- ralgia. She has, moreover, an outward curvature of the spine. There is not the slightest symptom of paralysis. Fortunately she does not touch mot- E