[57] It is a familiar fact that, in women, occasionally, a violent explosion of laughter may be propagated to the bladder-center and produce urination.  “She laughed till she nearly wetted the floor,” I have heard a young woman in the country say, evidently using without thought a familiar locution.  Professor Bechterew has recorded the case of a young married lady who, from childhood, wherever she might be—­in friends’ houses, in the street, in her own drawing-room—­had always experienced an involuntary and forcible emission of urine, which could not be stopped or controlled, whenever she laughed; the bladder was quite sound and no muscular effort produced the same result. (W.  Bechterew, Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1899.) In women these relationships are most easily observed, partly because in them the explosive centers are more easily discharged, and partly, it is probable, so far as the bladder is concerned, because, although after death the resistance to the emission of urine is notably less in women, during life about the same amount of force is necessary in both sexes; so that a greater amount of energy flows to the bladder in women, and any nervous storm or disturbance is thus specially apt to affect the bladder.

[58] “Every pain,” remarks Marie de Manaceine, “produces a number of movements which are apparently useless:  we cry out, we groan, we move our limbs, we throw ourselves from one side to the other, and at bottom all these movements are logical because by interrupting and breaking our attention they render us less sensitive to the pain.  In the days before chloroform, skillful surgeons requested their patients to cry out during the operation, as we are told by Gratiolet, who could not explain so strange a fact, for in his time the antagonism of movements and attention was not recognized.” (Marie de Manaceine, Archives Italiennes de Biologie, 1894, p. 250.) This antagonism of attention by movement is but another way of expressing the vicarious relationship of motor discharges.

[59] Joanny Roux, Psychologie de l’Instinct Sexuel, 1899, pp. 22-23.  It is disputed whether hunger is located in the whole organism, and powerful arguments have been brought against the view. (W.  Cannon, “The Nature of Hunger,” Popular Science Monthly, Sept., 1912.) Thirst is usually regarded as organic (A.  Mayer, La Soif, 1901).

[60] If there is any objection to these terms it is chiefly because they have reference to vascular congestion rather than to the underlying nervous charging and discharging, which is equally fundamental, and in man more prominent than the vascular phenomena.

LOVE AND PAIN.

I.