ABNORMAL STATES

The assertion that modern jealousy is a noble passion is of course to be taken with reservations.  Where it leads to murder or revenge it is a reversion to the barbarous type, and apart from that it is, like all affections of the mind, liable to abnormal and morbid states.  Harry Campbell writes in the Lancet (1898) that

“the inordinate development of this emotion always betokens a neurotic diathesis, and not infrequently indicates the oncoming of insanity.  It is responsible for much useless suffering and not a little actual disease.”

Dr. O’Neill gives a curious example of the latter, in the same periodical.  He was summoned to a young woman who informed him that she wished to be cured of jealousy:  “I am jealous of my husband, and if you do not give me something I shall go out of my mind.”  The husband protested his innocence and declared there was no cause whatever for her accusations: 

“The wife persisted in reiterating them and so the wrangle went on till suddenly she fell from her chair on the floor in a fit, the spasmodic movements of which were so strange and varied that it would be almost impossible to describe them.  At one moment the patient was extended at full length with her body arched forward in a state of opisthotonos.  The next minute she was in a sitting position with the legs drawn up, making, while her hands clutched her throat, a guttural noise.  Then she would throw herself on her back and thrust her arms and legs about to the no small danger of those around her.  Then becoming comparatively quiet and supine she would quiver all over while her eyelids trembled with great rapidity.  This state perhaps would be followed by general convulsive movements in which she would put herself into the most grotesque postures and make the most unlovely grimaces.  At last the fit ended, and exhausted and in tears she was put to bed.  The patient was a lithe, muscular woman and to restrain her movements during the attack with the assistance at hand was a matter of impossibility, so all that could be done was to prevent her injuring herself and to sprinkle her freely with cold water.  The after-treatment was more geographical than medical.  The husband ceased doing business in a certain town where the object of his wife’s suspicions lived.”

I have been told by a perfectly healthy married woman that when jealous of her husband she felt a sensation as of some liquid welling up in her throat and suffocating her.  Pride came into play in part; she did not want others to think that her husband preferred an ignorant girl to her—­a woman of great physical and mental charm.