“The singular nature of the case we are about to narrate and comment upon will, we feel confident, arrest the attention of those who have learned the great fact that Nature often throws the strongest light upon her laws by the apparent exceptions and anomalies which from time to time are observed.  We have done with the lusus naturae of earlier generations.  We pay little attention to the stories of ‘miracles,’ except so far as we receive them ready-made at the hands of the churches which still hold to them.  Not the less do we meet with strange and surprising facts, which a century or two ago would have been handled by the clergy and the courts, but today are calmly recorded and judged by the best light our knowledge of the laws of life can throw upon them.  It must be owned that there are stories which we can hardly dispute, so clear and full is the evidence in their support, which do, notwithstanding, tax our faith and sometimes leave us sceptical in spite of all the testimony which supports them.

“In this category many will be disposed to place the case we commend to the candid attention of the Academy.  If one were told that a young man, a gentleman by birth and training, well formed, in apparently perfect health, of agreeable physiognomy and manners, could not endure the presence of the most attractive young woman, but was seized with deadly terror and sudden collapse of all the powers of life, if he came into her immediate presence; if it were added that this same young man did not shrink from the presence of an old withered crone; that he had a certain timid liking for little maidens who had not yet outgrown the company of their dolls, the listener would be apt to smile, if he did not laugh, at the absurdity of the fable.  Surely, he would say, this must be the fiction of some fanciful brain, the whim of some romancer, the trick of some playwright.  It would make a capital farce, this idea, carried out.  A young man slighting the lovely heroine of the little comedy and making love to her grandmother!  This would, of course, be overstating the truth of the story, but to such a misinterpretation the plain facts lend themselves too easily.  We will relate the leading circumstances of the case, as they were told us with perfect simplicity and frankness by the subject of an affection which, if classified, would come under the general head of Antipathy, but to which, if we give it a name, we shall have to apply the term Gynophobia, or Fear of Woman.”

Here follows the account furnished to the writer of the paper, which is in all essentials identical with that already laid before the reader.

“Such is the case offered to our consideration.  Assuming its truthfulness in all its particulars, it remains to see in the first place whether or not it is as entirely exceptional and anomalous as it seems at first sight, or whether it is only the last term of a series of cases which in their less formidable aspect are well known to us in literature, in the records of science, and even in our common experience.