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.  This alarmed a brother, who insisted upon a change of treatment, and after some months she was brought on a couch to this city.

At the time I first saw her, she took thirty grains of chloral every night and three hypodermic injections of one-half grain of morphia daily.  As to food, she took next to none, and I could only guess her weight at about ninety pounds.  She was in height five feet two and a half inches, and very sallow, with pale lips, and the large, indented tongue of anaemia.  I made the most careful search for signs of organic mischief, and, finding none, I began my treatment as usual with milk, and added massage and electricity without waiting.  Her digestion seemed so good that I gave lactate of iron in twenty-grain doses from the third day, and also the aloes pill thrice a day.  It is perhaps needless to state that I isolated her with a nurse she had never seen before, and that for seven weeks she saw no one else save myself and the attendants.  The full schedule of diet was reached at the end of a fortnight, but the chloral and morphia were given up at the second day.  She slept well the fourth night, and, save that she had twice a slight return of polyuria, went on without a single drawback.  In two months she was afoot and weighed one hundred and twenty-one pounds.  Her change in tint, flesh, and expression was so remarkable that the process of repair might well have been called a renewal of life.

She went home changed no less morally than physically, and resumed her place in the family circle and in social life, a healthy and well-cured woman.

I might multiply these histories almost endlessly.  In some cases I have cured without fattening; in others, though rarely, the mental habits formed through years of illness have been too deeply ingrained for change, and I have seen the patient get up fat and well only to relapse on some slight occasion.

The intense persistency with which some women study and dwell upon their symptoms is often the great difficulty.  Even a slight physical annoyance becomes for one of these unhappily-constituted natures a grave and almost ineradicable trouble, owing to the habit of self-study.

Miss P., aet. 29, weight one hundred and eleven pounds, height five feet four inches, dark-skinned, sallow, and covered with the acne of bromidism, had had one attack which was considered to have been epileptic, and which was probably hysterical, but on this matter she dwelt with incessant terror, which was fostered by the tender care of a near relative, who left her neither by night nor by day.  Vague neuralgic aches in the limbs, with constant weariness, asthenopia, anaemia, loss of appetite, and loss of flesh, followed.  Then came spinal pain and irregular menstruation, a long course of local cauterizations of the womb, spinal braces, and endless tonics and narcotics.