Lectures on giddiness and on hysteria in the male.

  • Stewart, Thomas Grainger, Sir.
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on giddiness and on hysteria in the male. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    that they cannot with comfort sit in a gallery of a church or theatre. It is well worthy of notice that a psychical or mental element mingles with the merely sensory to a greater or less extent. I have known a person not liable to cliff giddiness begin to suffer from it when a group of young people who accompanied him on a hill expedition came, as it seemed to him, dangerously near the edge of a precipice. On the other hand, the liability to the symptom varies with the state of the general health, and in particular with even functional disturbance of the stomach and the liver. AgorapJiohia A very curious condition, manifestly allied to this, is known as Agoraphobia. Benedikt described it in 1870; Westphal in 1872. Its essential feature is, that while the subjects of it can walk quite well in a narrow lane, or even in an ordinary street, they become uneasy, and experience either giddiness or a peculiar feeling allied to it, when they attempt to traverse a wide market place or square, such as narrow lanes often open into in continental towns. Let me describe by way of illustration one of Westphal's cases. The patient was a commercial traveller, aged thirty-two, of middle height, slender, healthy looking and mobile, and complained that he suffered greatly when he tried to walk across open squares ; when he attempted to do so, a peculiar uneasiness, situated mostly in the head, but attended by violent action of the heart, was induced. On attempting to cross a square he felt as if it were miles wide, and often he trembled all over; the more he approached to the houses at the side the less was his uneasiness; a stick was no
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