Hysteria : the history of a disease / by Ilza Veith.

  • Ilza Veith
Date:
1970, ©1965
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hysteria : the history of a disease / by Ilza Veith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    103/128 (page 97)
    and in all of which I was tolerably successful, considering that at that time I had never seen it. However, the de- scription was sufficiently accurate for my purpose, for it succeeded in distracting the young lady's attention from her suffering, and during the few minutes which this con- versation occupied she was to all appearance entirely free from pain. She talked freely and cheerfully, and not the slightest reference was made by either of us to her former suffering. I then changed the subject by saying, I think your pain has flown away, when she immediately resumed her crying fit, and sobbed as before. She assured me she was in great pain, and that the sensation had been but sup- pressed. That this was a case of severe Hysteria was highly probable even had I gone no further with the evi- dence, relative to which the following thoughts occurred to my mind. What could be the nature of this pain if not hysteric ? I was told by her family that pain followed the act of deglutition, not remotely or at an interval of one or more hours, but almost as immediately as the food could reach the stomach. This could not be dyspeptic or com- mon gastrodynia, which waits on the process of digestion, and rarely occurs within a period of two hours of taking food. There is one disease only of the stomach in which pain follows the admission of food into it, and that occa- sionally only, namely, cancer. Was it probable, or scarcely more than possible, that this girl of eighteen could have been for so many months the subject of undetected cancer of the stomach ? If cancer, could the attendant pain, so severe as it appeared at the commencement of my visit, be suspended by conversation ? It was neither gastrodynia, the 7