Text-book of psychiatry : a psychological study of insanity for practitioners and students / Authorized translation ed. and enl. by William C. Krauss.

Emanuel Mendel

Date:: 1908

Credit: Text-book of psychiatry : a psychological study of insanity for practitioners and students / Authorized translation ed. and enl. by William C. Krauss. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

29/332 page 11

$of the muscular feeling in the region of the interior and exterior muscles of the eye. Quite often a dilated joupil in the patient corresponds with the perception of a hallucination at a distance, while a contracted ])upil corresponds with such a one close by. Another connection of sight hallucinations with hallucinations in the feelings of i\Mi muscles (writing center) is that the patient writes (or sees writ- ten) his thoughts on the wall, in the air (photography of thought). The hallucinations of audition are either of an elementary nature (tone a by the composer Schumann, cracking, shooting, rushing of water) or of a complicated nature: Hearing single words or sentences (rascal, Don Juan of the water-works, you must marry), speeches of one or more persons, men, Avomen, children, a whole mob; sometimes different languages are heard, quite often rhymes or whole verses. The voices are olten low at first, then plainly heard as if coming nearer. Gen- erally the voice is in a whisper, but sometimes loud: Trumpet tones, they yell in my ear. In many cases the patient answers the voice which he hears, carries on a conversation with it. Sometimes the hallucinations of audition are first called forth by hallucinations of sight: The patient sees a shadow, this begins to speak. With the hallucinations of audition belongs also the audibil- ity of one's own thoughts.^ At first it is only a catch-word spoken to the patient, arising from the momentary idea, for example, with the thought of father, father, or, with the thought of death, death. The hearing of such words, generally softly spoken at first, causes great disquiet and unrest to the patient in regard to the unheard- of and horrible thing which happens him; gradually he elaborates the occurrence into his system of delusions, and then a condition is developed in which these catch-words are clothed in an allocu- tion, as: Now he thinks of his father, Kow he thinks of his death. This is an echo of the thought; they take away his ' Cramer, Die Hallucinationen im Muskelsinn bei Geisteskranl^cn. Freiburg, 1889.$