She went to bed December 10, and rose for the first time February 4,
having gained twenty-nine pounds. She went to bed pale, and got up
actually ruddy. In a month she returned to her work again, and has
remained ever since in health which enables her, as she writes me, "to
enjoy work, and to do with myself what I like."
Miss L., aet. 26, came to me with the following history. At the age of 20
she had a fall, and began in a week or two to have an irritable spine.
Then, after a few months, a physician advised rest, to which she took
only too kindly, and in a year from the time of her accident she was
rarely out of bed. Surrounded by highly sympathetic relatives, to whom
chronic illness was somewhat novel, she speedily developed, with their
tender aid, hyperaesthetic states of the eye and ear, so that her nurses
crept about in a darkened room, the piano was silenced, and the children
kept quiet. By slow degrees a whole household passed under the selfish
despotism of an hysterical girl. Intense constipation, anorexia, and
alternate states of dysuria, anuria, and polyuria followed, and before
long her sister began to fail in health, owing to the incessant
exactions to which she too willingly yielded.
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