SECULAR HYSTERIA.

Hitherto mental states of individuals have been our chief study in this book. But collective phenomena of mental disturbance are likewise met with at several distinct periods of history. The influence which the insane have exerted upon different branches of human production and upon the general development of humanity has been already pointed out. We have particularly referred to the influence of individuals, such as weak-minded benefactors of the people, mad prophets, and the imbecile Roman emperors who displayed what is called moral insanity. But besides such individual phenomena there is a form of mental disease the peculiarity of which is that it attacks not isolated individuals, but epidemically entire communities, and in that way influences the development and metaphysical conceptions (Weltanschauung) of whole nations.

A correct recognition of such states will be of no slight value for the community; for along with the recognition comes, as we shall see, an indication of the way to improvement and remedy. Thus it becomes the task of modern psychiatry not only to treat individual patients, but also to observe society, and especially to keep guard against that phenomenon which ought to be termed Secular Hysteria (Zeithysterie).

It is a pretty widespread opinion that nervous diseases, and especially hysteria, have alarmingly increased during the last decades, and that they are about to increase much more. In all civilized countries, we are told, and in every stratum of the population, a weakness of the nervous system manifests itself of which our forefathers had no knowledge. Neurasthenia and hysteria spread wider and wider, like a devastating epidemic, attacking not merely the lower classes but just the “upper ten thousand.” It is educated society which is threatened with total overthrow by utter derangement of the nerves. “Whither is this to lead, and how is it to end?” lament some solicitous prophets who already see yawning before them the gulf by which the enervated human race is about to be swallowed up.

Let us weigh the reasons which occasion this apprehension. What real proof is there of this enormous increase of nervous diseases and of the continually progressive degeneration of civilized man? First of all, there are the statistics. “Numbers,” we have been told, “can not lie.” Perhaps not; but those who collect them may fasten upon them very seriously mistaken labels.

The assiduous statistician ascertains that the insane asylums contain more women than men. So far, so good. But if he tells us that more women are insane than men, he labels those numbers erroneously, for the inequality is really due to the fact that insane males die off, while insane females survive, relatively speaking. Suppose the statistics of different countries do show that the number of inmates of insane asylums is increasing out of all proportion to the growth of the general population, would it not be superficial in the extreme to conclude, without further data, that insanity was upon the increase? At present these statistics mean nothing more than that the number of patients in such institutions has considerably increased. But when we consider what great advances have been made in the diagnosis of mental diseases, and consider also that a great number of such cases, which were formerly treated unsuccessfully at home, are now treated in such institutions with good results, because there they are removed from the detrimental influences of familiar surroundings, while the proper means and methods for rational treatment are at hand, we shall find that the seemingly enormous increase of mental disturbances need not cause us uneasiness.

Other extensive statistical material for nervous diseases is afforded by the numerous dispensaries of the great cities; but no extended experience is required to teach that a large proportion of such cases would not appear if the patients had to pay fixed fees, and round ones, as they had to do in the good old times when physicians saw comparatively little of nervous diseases. Our grandmothers had their “headaches” and their “twitchings in the limbs” like the women of to-day; but they never dreamed of calling a doctor or going to the dispensary for such things, so that they were not “statistical material.”

In the dispensaries for nervous diseases there are numerous chronical patients who, becoming discouraged in one place, think they would like to try another doctor; and some of them make a round of sojourns in different hospitals. Each of them is counted as many times over in the statistics as there are places where he is treated. This perceptibly increases the numbers.

These considerations give some idea, though but a slight one, of the extreme difficulty of making even rough approximate inferences from sanitary statistics.

But certain observers tell us that exact enumeration is not required. Hysteria and degeneration of the race stare us, as they aver, daily in the face. In every department of human activity disorders of the nervous system are seen. The very style and methods of the art and literature of the day proclaim a general nervous prostration.

Max Nordau is the protagonist of this widespread opinion. In his eyes, mental degeneration has seized upon the majority of civilized men to such a degree that “the upper strata of urban population” form but a “suffering hospital.” The art, the poetry, the fiction, the philosophy of the day present the most manifold embodiments of degeneration and of secular hysteria.

Nordau admits, of course, that degeneration and hysteria have always existed. “But,” says he, “they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitude of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing upon it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strength, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously and become a danger to civilization.”⁠[104] The conception of secular hysteria which advances epidemically and attacks whole classes is therefore, according to Nordau, only applicable to the present time; and of this he says: “We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria.”⁠[105]⁠

But in declaring that in former times hysteria was but of sporadic occurrence and attained no importance for the life of society as a whole, Nordau falls into a grave error. Mental diseases, and especially hysteria, have, from the earliest times to the present, exercised a tremendous influence upon the current Weltanschauung or metaphysical conception of the universe and upon the whole mental development, and that precisely because they not only occurred sporadically, but, as we shall soon see, attacked the masses in the form of epidemics, and so became of the highest significance and importance for the life of society as a whole.

Religious enthusiasm and proneness to the mystic and the occult formed, even in the highest antiquity, an important factor of those degenerate and hysterical individuals who entertained the delusion that they were in communication with good or with bad spirits, and who by that channel influenced the masses not a little. A great number of the priestesses who delivered oracular responses to the Greeks “with strong quakings of their body” were psychopathic subjects undergoing the hysterical convulsions well known to us to-day. Hence epilepsy, which in those days was not discriminated from hysterical cramps, came to be called the morbus sacer, or sacred disease. Plutarch, in his description of the Pythian priestess, delineates the typical image of a hysterical subject who, in ecstatic convulsion, stammered unintelligible words, into which the priests injected some sense. But hysteria, with its inclination to religious enthusiasm, was not limited to separate persons. On the contrary, we meet with it among all peoples and in all periods of history; and among all peoples we meet with it in the form of epidemics of various kinds. But never did this disease find a better or more fertile soil in which to thrive than in the Middle Ages of northern Europe, marked as they were by ignorance and superstition; and, accordingly, we find that epidemics of hysteria then assumed dimensions surpassing those of any similar outbursts in other centuries. A great many fine books have been written about the individual and epidemic crazes of those ages. The French have made particularly careful researches into the matter. Let it suffice here to adduce a few examples in order to show how great an influence hysteria, in its collective manifestation, exercised upon the social relations and entire development of civilization of those times.

Calmeil⁠[106] describes a great number of hysterical epidemics of different forms. One of the principal eruptions in Germany was demonomania, or Teufelswahn. “In the year 1549,” says Calmeil, “a delusion called Vaudoisie prevailed in Artois, that the devils carried many secretly in the night to the assemblies, where compacts were made with Satan and where carnal intercourse took place. Without knowing how, the participants of the nocturnal meetings found themselves next morning back in their dwellings. At the place of assemblage is a devil of human form whose face, however, is seen by none. He reads his commands to them, and then every one has to offer an indecent salute; and he gives them money, wine and food in great quantities. Thereupon each takes a woman—for there are women and men together there—the light is extinguished, and they carnally converse. Suddenly every one is back at the place whence he came. On account of this delusion many persons of Arras, both gentle and simple, were imprisoned and stretched on the rack.”⁠[107]⁠

A manifestation equally widespread in Germany was anthropophagy—that is, the delusion that the Devil and his worshippers lived on human flesh. Men were believed to live in the neighbourhood of Berne and of Lausanne who had given themselves to the Devil and who ate their own children. Hundreds of men were for this stretched on the rack or burned at the stake. Indeed, there were a number of insane persons who thought that they themselves were in league with the Devil, and that they slew children. A woman who was executed at Berne testified: “We lie in wait especially for unbaptized children, but also for those who are baptized, particularly when they are not protected by the sign of the cross. We kill them by our words and ceremonies as they lie in their cradles or by their parents’ sides. So people suppose they have been stifled or have just died of themselves. Then we secretly steal them out of the earth and boil them until, after separating the bones, the whole meat becomes fluid and potable. Of the more solid parts we make a magic salve for our arts and transformations. We bottle the juice, and when a neophyte drinks a few drops of it he has a share in our science.”⁠[108]⁠

The bull of Innocent VIII, which appeared in 1484, showed how deep-rooted the devil-delusion was in Germany. Everywhere people talked of how there was a great league with devils whose votaries committed deeds of shame in their assemblies; of how they were under obligation to destroy and consume newborn babes before they were baptized. In one year after the publication of the bull, forty-one women were executed in Burbia because in their nocturnal assemblies they always strangled, boiled, and ate a child. Midwives were on the Rhine feared more than ordinary witches. Since their calling brought them daily into connection with newborn babes, it must plainly be of the utmost consequence to the Devil to win them over to his service. A midwife who was burned alive at Dann, near Basel, accused herself of having killed more than forty children.⁠[109] Bodin adds that she afterward by night disinterred the bodies and ate of them, baking the meat in a stove.⁠[110] Among the persons who were burned in Strassburg, one woman was distinguished by her insensibility to the most terrible tortures. She declared that this freedom from pain was due to her being embrocated with the fat of a newborn child.⁠[111] This sort of delirium was very widely spread under Innocent III. “The inclination to worship the Devil appears in many families to be hereditary and in many localities to be endemic.” The religious delusion was, as is commonly the case, connected with states of sexual excitement and delusions belonging thereto.

Toward the middle of the sixteenth century there broke out in many places in Germany, especially in convents, epidemic convulsions which exhibited the typical image of la grande hystérie and were connected with symptoms of religious delusions and of sexual excitement. Calmeil cites the following report upon the malady in one convent: “The majority of the nuns had at that time been living for more than fifty days exclusively upon turnip juice. Their sickness would begin by the vomiting of a black liquid so sharp and acrid that it would take the skin off their tongues and lips. Their nights soon became restless. They would suddenly walk in their sleep. They would think they heard a sound of human lamentation, and on hurrying to the spot would find nobody. When they had passed their urine, they immediately afterward wet the bed or their linen. They often had the sensation of being tickled on the soles of their feet, and could not keep from laughing. They were thrown out of bed and rolled on the floor, as if they had been pulled out by the feet. Their arms and legs were contorted in every direction, and their faces were convulsively drawn up. They would leap high and then fling themselves with all their force upon the floor again. Many bore bruises on their bodies. Often, when they seemed perfectly quiet and sane, they would suddenly fall down, lose the use of speech, and remain stretched on the ground as if they had completely lost consciousness. Then they would throw themselves out of their apparent immobility convulsively into the air with such violence and strength that those about could hardly hold them down. Many found it too hard to keep themselves erect, and crawled on their hands and knees. Others clambered up to the roof beams, and let themselves hang head down.”⁠[112]⁠

Such cases of typical hysteria appeared everywhere in the form of epidemics, and with special frequency in convents. Of one convent we read: “It was singular that as soon as one nun had her fit, the others, even in distant parts of the building, would immediately go off into fits as soon as they heard the noise of a person falling. The nuns had no power of will at all; they bit themselves, struck and bit their mates, knocked against one another, and endeavoured vehemently to wound strangers. Upon any attempt to control the indecency of their conduct, their tumult and exaltation would become more angry. If they were left to themselves, they would soon come to biting and wounding without seeming to feel the least pain.” Such subjects were considered to be bewitched or possessed of the Devil. They were treated by exorcisms and conjurations which often increased their sufferings.

Not women alone were attacked by the disease; men were visited in the same way. Gilles de la Tourette⁠[113] gives an account of such an epidemic, according to a description by Hecker.⁠[114] We read: “In Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1574, troops of men and women from Germany were seen labouring under a common madness and displaying in the streets and churches this singular spectacle. With clasped hands, and carried away by an inward compulsion which they could not master, they danced for hours and kept up the spectacle without being abashed by those who were about, until they would fall exhausted to the ground. Then they would complain of their great agony, and would groan as though they were going to die, until people wrapped their abdomens with linen cloths, whereupon they would come to themselves and be free for a time from their sufferings. The object of this was to dispel the wind which set in after the attack. People often resorted to the simpler method of planting blows of the fist or kicks upon their abdomens. During their dance the subjects had visions. They did not see or hear; but in their imagination they beheld spirits whose names they pronounced, or rather shrieked out.... In well-developed cases the fits began with epileptiform convulsions. The subjects fell snorting to the ground without consciousness, and foamed at the mouth. Then, all at once, they got up and began their dance with frightful wrenchings. In a few months this plague extended from Aix-la-Chapelle as far as the Netherlands.”

Like the men and women, children were likewise attacked. Calmeil adduces the following example: “Toward the end of the winter of 1566 the majority of the foundlings in the hospital of Amsterdam were seized with convulsions and delirium. Thirty children (other accounts say seventy) suffered from the malady. They tumbled suddenly to the ground, rolled from half an hour to an hour upon the floor, as if possessed, and when they then stood up they awoke as from a deep sleep. They did not know what had happened. Prayers, conjurations, and exorcisms of such power that they would certainly have driven out the Devil were of no avail. After a longer duration of the disease the children finally began to vomit. They threw up nails, needles, wool, pieces of linen, bits of skin, and other foreign bodies which they had secretly swallowed down. They climbed like cats upon the walls and roofs, spoke in unknown tongues, and had such a terrific look that it scared people. This was more than sufficient for regarding them as possessed. At the sight of many women they made peculiar gestures, and such women were regarded as witches.”⁠[115]⁠

A phenomenon often seen to-day in insane asylums is, that patients think themselves to be beasts, such as dogs, cats, monkeys, wolves, etc., and behave accordingly. In the Middle Ages this gave rise to the superstition of the Werewolf. The word is formed from wolf and the obsolete word wër, in Gothic vair, in Latin vir, man. Such persons, who during epidemics were sometimes found in great numbers, ran about the woods on all fours, lived and behaved exactly like beasts, fell upon men who might pass by, attacked even riders and vehicles, and stole children and devoured their flesh. Such things were known to the ancients too. The Scythians, according to Herodotus, knew the werewolf; the Greeks, especially the Arcadians, spoke of a λυκάνθρωπος; and the Romans of the versipellis. Toward the end of the year 1573 the peasants in the vicinity of Dôles were authorized to hunt werewolves. The parliamentary license ran thus: “In the territories of Espagny, Salvange, Courchapon and surrounding places, it is known that for some days a werewolf has been seen. It has secretly stolen and killed several children, and has also attacked riders who have escaped it with difficulty. In consideration of all these things, this court of justice, wishing to avoid greater damage, allows the inmates and inhabitants of the said places and others, contrary to the edict concerning hunting, to come together with spears, halberds, pikes, crossbows, and sticks to hunt and pursue the said werewolf in all places where they can find him, and to bind him and to kill him without punishment or revenge.... Given in the council of the said court of justice this 13th day of September, in the year of grace 1573.”⁠[116] A man captured as a werewolf confessed that he was changed into a beast, and asserted that his skin grew inside out so that the fur was not seen. They cut off his arms and legs, to make sure he spoke the truth, and he bled to death.

The disease of demonomania continued to spread. According to one report, a thousand dancers filled the streets of Metz. Young people of both sexes fled from their parents, and servants from their masters, and allowed themselves to be carried away by the epidemic, and to take part in the insane proceedings.⁠[117]⁠

In the electoral see of Trèves, within a few years, six thousand five hundred men were executed as enchanted and as bewitched.

“In 1609 the Government was informed that all Labourd, the district approximately coinciding with the present Département des Basses-Pyrénées swarmed with devil-worshippers. Seven-and-twenty parishes were attacked by the malady. The difficulty was greatest in Siboure, St. Jean de Luz, Andage, and the neighbourhood of Bayonne. The account of this epidemic is a shining contribution to the history of insanity as a social disease.”⁠[118] All these sufferers were considered as bewitched and possessed. The ministers of Henry IV held it to be imperatively requisite to bring the whole power of justice against witches; and hundreds of human beings were burned or incarcerated. The judges worked the rack actively in order to get complete confessions from the bewitched and from those who were sold to the Devil. Often the victims fell into ecstatic convulsion, and boasted, when they were tortured nigh unto death, that they felt inexpressible joy at finding themselves brought near to the Devil, who doubtless stood in their minds for the great adversary of the court. Many made vain efforts to utter a word when they were virtually throttled. A report says: “The Devil sought to vex them so that, even if they wished to confess, they should be unable to bring out a word. We saw with our own eyes that, as soon as they had spoken one word of confession, the Devil sprang at their throat, and that a hindrance mounted from their chest to their chin, just as when a plug is put before the opening of a cask in order to hinder the flow of the liquor.” This describes a common symptom of hysteria which we call globus hystericus.

The influence which hysterical subjects exercised upon the whole metaphysics, or view of the universe (Weltanschauung) of those times, was tremendous. While superstition and fanaticism may truly be called the best fertilizers to yield a crop of hysteria—and they have vastly contributed to its extension and large growth—at the same time, hysteria, in its turn, with its astonishing symptoms, far beyond the classificatory powers of those ages, has had the effect of enormously feeding and propagating superstition. In short, the two phenomena, hysteria and superstition, played into one another’s hands; each was alternately cause and effect; and between them they called forth that dismal period in which the human mind was loaded with fetters, and postponed for centuries its free possession of its heritage. The author who is capable of saying that before this our time “hysteria only showed itself sporadically, and had no importance in the life of the whole community,” is not acquainted with the history of insanity and the biography of the human race. In order to pass judgment upon the present times from a psychological point of view, the very first requisite is an acquaintance with times gone by, and a tracing out of the path which has brought our culture to its present height.

Before passing on to the study of the present, let us first ask why and how it was that diseases of the mind took on an epidemic character. Most of those authors who have made hysteria the subject of deep investigations agree in this: that suggestibility (using this word approximately in its psychological sense) is a particular mark of the state of soul of the hysterical.⁠[119] Every man is to a certain degree susceptible of suggestion. Everyday life shows this. Merely seeing somebody else laugh, gape, hawk, or cough, makes other people do so; and so it is with other semi-voluntary acts. Hence it is that people are accustomed to say that laughing and gaping are “contagious.” In hysteria, suggestibility is present in greater or less measure, according to the intensity of the disease. The subjects usually possess little or no force of will, but are receptive of outward influences. This characteristic becomes particularly apparent during emotions, such as anxiety, fear, terror, etc. An infinity of examples shows that grave states of hysteria are brought on by passionate emotion. Frequently it is a concatenation of such emotions that results at last in hysteria; whence the extreme importance of education, and of the collective impressions of childhood for persons of the sort considered, becomes apparent. As long as children drew in mystical tendencies with their mother’s milk, and were kept in fear and terror by the belief in the apparition of the Devil and in witchcraft, it is self-evident that the doors for the development of hysteria were opened, and suggestibility and emotivity appeared in full blossom.

Unintermittent religious observances, imaginary converse with supernatural beings, such as saints and angels, led first to hallucinations and ultimately to morbid phenomena of hysteria. To look upon an ecstatical state, or upon a case of hysterical cramps, was sufficient to excite similar states in a circle of companions much disposed to the same thing by anxiety and surprise. Physicians who devote themselves specially to diseases of the nervous system and who enjoy a large practice know only too well that, when their anterooms are thronged, as often as one woman goes into a hysterical fit several others among those who happen to be there are pretty sure to follow the example. How much more strongly must the suggestion act if the individual who originates it is supposed not to be diseased, but, on the contrary, to have driven some astute bargain with Satan or to be deep in the lore of the Chaldeans, so that the attack is regarded as an evidence of superiority!

Severe diseases of the mind proper, such as mania and paranoia, have undoubtedly also played their parts, and no unimportant ones, in the production of epidemics. All the phenomena of those diseases which are now speedily confined to asylums, continued in former ages before the public eye, and fell like sparks upon the magazine of superstition and mysticism in the people. Those who raved were supposed to be witches; and weak-minded persons who imagined themselves to be animals, etc., were taken for werewolves at least. As for those who were attacked by religious delusions of greatness, they were rated as holy souls endowed with the grace of God’s Spirit. The influence of these subjects upon the mass of the hysterical, with their high-grade suggestibility, must, of course, have been a quite fatal one. Conditions which in the one were produced by insane ideas and imperative motions were called forth in the mass of the others by the force of suggestion, and were terribly spread.

The influence of these phenomena—that is to say, of insanity, but more particularly of endemic eruptions of hysteria, upon the whole culture—is shown in the literature of that time. Ideas of sorcery, of the apparition of the Devil, and of witchcraft prevailed not only among the rude populace, the mass of the people, but also among scholars of renown and consideration—men who had accomplished great things in their generation. Bulky tomes were devoted to the discussion of matters of witchcraft and possession. Pierre Delancre, a councillor of the Parliament of Bordeaux, wrote three large volumes on the subject; and his conclusion is, that to spare the life of a single person who is even suspected of sorcery⁠[120] is a crime.

With the gradual awakening of science and the beginning—or, more accurately speaking, the restoration—of the doctrine of mental diseases, the fatal consequences of superstition became milder, and the extension of hysterical epidemics was narrowed. To recognise that possession does not imply dealings with the enemy, but is simply a disease, was to break off the poisoned tip from the arrow of suggestion, and thenceforward the morbid impulse to imitation of the insane symptoms lost much of its strength and asserted itself less frequently.

No doubt hysterical epidemics based upon religion continue even to this day. The last century was by no means poor in such phenomena. They are to be met with still. The religious epidemics which broke out in Sweden in the years 1841 and 1842, and which have been described by the Swedish psychiatrist Sonden, are good examples.⁠[121] To this very day, among certain religious denominations—the Methodist Church of the United States, for instance—phenomena can still be observed bearing a close resemblance to the mediæval epidemics. I myself had an opportunity of attending a Methodist camp-meeting, and was there enabled to assure myself of the overwhelming force suggestion may exert upon a crowd of thousands of people. Men and women, children and superannuated persons, behaved for all the world like mad. They howled and shrieked until they were too exhausted to bring forth a sound. Here and there one would leap up. He was “inspired,” and would communicate to the crowd his divine inspirations, drawn in reality from hallucination or auto-suggestion. I saw one young man climb a tree, imagining that he saw Christ in it.

The principal causes of the spread of epidemics of insanity and of the so-called secular hysteria are, then, suggestibility, emotionalism, the impulse to mimicry, and the tendency to mysticism. These important symptoms form the well-ripened dung heap for the growth of whatever mushroom crop of occult and supernatural ideas you will, whether from the spawn of superstition and fanaticism or from that of a lore that drolly mimics a true and living science. During the Renaissance of literature and art, which was followed by that of science, the religious fanaticism of the Middle Ages gradually lost its energy. The corresponding phenomena of our century may be called runners from that dismal period. But secular hysteria has by this time gradually assumed a different character. Belief in the devil and witches has faded quite away. Nowadays phenomena that seem unaccountable are produced in great variety by the hysteria which still subsists, and lead to crazy doctrines and errors, but they are new ones. Spiritualism, which flourished most in the middle part of the century, had such an origin. All those surprising phenomena that in earlier times had been referred to the agency of the devil and of witches were now treated as evidences of spiritual presence, telepathy, etc. Hysteria and religious superstition had formerly communicated each vitality to the other; now hysteria and pseudo-science intensified and propagated one another. The literature to which spiritualism has given rise is perfectly enormous, and forms a pendant to the old books on witchcraft. Scientific men of standing write in our times thick books to discuss the evidences of the most incredible theories about spirits, about veracious dreams, about prophecies, about telepathy, about clairvoyance, about premonitions, etc.

Such teachings could not fail to exert a decided influence upon the suggestible and mystically inclined mob of hysterics. The belief in ghosts continually spread, spiritualistic societies were formed everywhere. The social psychological situation was strongly analogous to that of the Middle Ages in regard to witchcraft. The differences were chiefly extrinsic, although it must be confessed that they were not unimportant, for nobody was any longer burned at the stake or stretched on the rack.

The success of a spiritualistic sitting required that there should be among the company one strongly stamped morbid case, such as a person subject to cataleptic seizures or to hallucinations, or something of the sort. This person, who would have been considered a witch in the Middle Ages, was now termed a “medium,” a middle term or tertium quid, through which the spirits of the dead could be brought into communication with the living. The mysterious darkness in which the sittings were held, the communion hymn that was softly intoned by the company, the excitement and strain with which the manifestations were expected, the medium’s voice of awed assurance—these things, together with physiological conditions to which we need not refer, beclouded the brain and heightened the already high suggestibility of the hysterical circle. In this way appearances of ghosts of their lost ones were suggested to great numbers of persons. To the visions were joined auditory delusions. They heard the ghosts speak, and conversed with them; and with actual conversation all remnants of doubt of their living reality were swept away.

The psychological conditions were thus essentially the same as in the religious epidemics of the Middle Ages. There appearances of infernal spirits and of witches were suggested; here the ghosts of dead relatives were seen and heard. Hysteria, with its high suggestibility, accompanied by external circumstances adapted to excite it, acted as common cause in the two cases.

Transmission of delusions and hallucinations, or, so to say, “psychical contagion,” is, in the experience of the practising psychiatrist, by no means a phenomenon of the extremest infrequency. In that form of mental derangement which goes by the name of folie à deux two persons share the same hallucinations and deluded ideas. One of them is usually chronically insane, the other a degenerate, weak-minded, or hysterical person to whom deluded ideas and deceptions of sense are suggested by the former. I have myself had opportunities of observing a number of such cases. Among others, there was a man, chronically insane, who had erected a completely systematic structure of delusions. He was the deputy of God on earth. It was his duty to promulgate God’s will and to better humanity. In consequence of his high mission, he had to endure many enmities and snares. He was persecuted (so he fancied) in every possible way. Attempts were even made (he thought) to put him out of the way. Moreover, his ideas of grandeur and persecution were nourished by corresponding deceptions of sense. Now, this patient had a wife. This wife regarded her husband as the delegate of God, believed every word he said, and was completely inoculated with his delusion. He suggested to her his hallucinations; so that she confirmed every assertion he made. She was a weak-minded person, who, under other outward circumstances, would most likely have exhibited no peculiarities out of the ordinary.

In company, and still more in large assemblies, the suggestibility of almost everybody is heightened.

Thus, then, morbid symptoms are propagated in any sort of crowded meeting, and since at spiritualistic reunions the above-mentioned outward conditions are particularly favourable to suggestion, it is not necessary that people should be downright weak-minded. It is only requisite that there should be among them a goodly sprinkling of suggestible persons of somewhat hysterical disposition; and when these are once attacked, the strength of suggestion that is brought to bear upon the remainder of the company will be multiplied.

It has been fully proved, and is generally admitted by spiritualists themselves, that from the beginning a great deal of trickery—partly mischievous, partly mercenary or otherwise deliberate—was mingled with the delusions. Besides, hysterical subjects are apt to be untruthful. At the same time mere jugglery would not have gone far if it had had nothing but cold understanding to work upon. Very often fraud was not present, and still oftener was superfluous. The real cause of the spiritualistic movement, broadly considered, was mental and nervous derangement.

Spiritualism has now, in the main, died out nearly as much as religious superstition and fanaticism have done. It is at present almost entirely in the hands of swindlers and their weak-minded victims.

With our present knowledge of hysteria, its causes and symptoms, men of science and all who are enlightened by its teachings are under a positive obligation, which can not be shaken off, and must not be shirked, to combat everything which tends to further superstition or to nourish the inclination of the people toward mysticism. Our duty it equally is to set our faces against those pernicious practices which are calculated to favour and augment that fatal symptom of hysteria, a heightened suggestibility. The very first of these practices is that of hypnotism. The hypnotic state is brought about by suggestion alone. It greatly increases the suggestibility of the subject. A number of the most eminent authors have become convinced that hypnotism is always a morbid state closely allied to hysteria. Charcot has asserted this most decidedly. His most eminent scholar, Gilles de la Tourette,⁠[122] says: “We believe that with Cathelineau we have shown by irrefragable proofs that hysteria and hypnotism are two morbid affections which are closely allied, and, in particular, that hypnosis is only possible in persons who have a tendency toward hysteria, although this disease may not have as yet otherwise manifested itself. It is easily to be conceived, then, what an influence hypnotic experiments must have upon the calling forth of hysterical phenomena.” Jolly,⁠[123] too, comes to the conclusion that “habitual hypnotics do not differ essentially from hysterical subjects.”

Although not all authors accept this conception of hypnotism, to which, for my part, I give in my full adhesion, yet all do agree that hypnotism in the hands of the laity, used as an amusement and a curiosity, may have the most unwholesome consequences. I know one case in my own experience in which such irresponsible fooling, kept up in spite of emphatic warnings, was followed by severe hysterical attacks. It is absolutely revolting that public exhibitions of professional hypnotizers are allowed to exercise their baleful influence unchecked. The subjects whom the hypnotizer selects from the audience are persons of high suggestibility, inclined to hysteria. The persons present are convinced of the real power of the hypnotizer, because the subjects are people with whom they are acquainted, who perhaps are members of their own family, so that all collusion and trickery are excluded. But fathers and mothers ought to reflect that it is a morbid state which is being induced in their daughters, that they are inoculated with a dangerous poison whose consequences may be destructive. The young ladies who are put into a cataleptic condition at the exhibition, who are made to eat raw potatoes for apples, and the like, are led to show off a mental weakness, and to be brought into a state of absolute idiocy to excite the hilarity of the audience. These are the persons who in spiritualistic séances think they see ghosts of the departed, and who some centuries ago would have been joining in a wild dance in the street, or who would have committed actions leading to their execution, as persons possessed of the devil. Such exhibitions ought to be prohibited, as they are in France, for their pernicious influence is beyond question. As for the employment of hypnotism as a therapeutic agent, that is a question into which I do not here enter.

The above study of the causes and mode of origination of the so-called secular hysteria shows very clearly that this morbid phenomenon can be brought about under the most diverse outward conditions, and that, in fact, we meet with it in history in the most widely separate fields. The psychological conditions are, however, everywhere the same—suggestibility, excessive emotionalism, the impulse to mimicry, and the inclination to mysticism.

It is highly important to recognise public hysterias in good season, in order to work against the pernicious influence of morbid suggestions. It is therefore indubitably a service to the public to sound in time the warning voice, and thus protect humanity against great harm. Such a duty Nordau thinks that he fulfils when he tells us that we stand “in the midst of a severe mental epidemic, a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria.”

Whether diseases of the nerves, and particularly degeneration and hysteria, considered as sporadic cases, are at present more frequently to be observed than in earlier times can not be determined with certainty. Pertinent statistics are wanting; and, indeed, all but a small percentage of cases of hysteria and degeneration remain without medical treatment, and consequently escape all statistics. Some general remarks of Nordau—as, for example, that people nowadays grow gray and bald earlier than they used to do, and that we lose our power of optical accommodation earlier than our forefathers did—seem to be assertions without one particle of proof. Now, without proof they can have no weight, unless we are to allow our own opinions to be formed by suggestion.

The chief arguments for Nordau’s opinions are therefore drawn not from the observation of individuals, but from the social phenomena of the period, our mental civilization, in which he believes that he detects the grave malady of universal degeneration and hysteria. Criticisms, some judicious and some not so, of fashions, dress, furniture, and the mode of life of modern society, bring him to the conclusion that while “to the Philistine the current terms—caprice, eccentricity, affectation of novelty, imitation—afford a sufficient explanation” of the phenomena, yet to the physician, “especially to the specialist for diseases of the nerves and the mind,” two definite states of disease are to be diagnosed: to wit, degeneration and hysteria. I must confess that I myself must, for that “specialist in diseases of the nerves and of the mind,” Dr. Nordau, fall into the class of Philistines, inasmuch as I am unable to perceive that a “thin moustache” or “wild moustache,” that very short hair or very long hair, afford sufficient grounds for a diagnosis of degeneration or of hysteria, or that the coiffure and dress of a modern lady, however eccentric and outré, constitute a morbid symptom, indicating a black death of degeneration. Nay, I must with shame confess that, far from finding fault with the fashions, it had appeared to me that the present dress of ladies bore, in many respects, the marks of sounder sense than the costumes of other epochs. I recall, for example, the hoop skirts of 1850, or those of the reign of Queen Anne, before “the age of degeneration and hysteria” had set in; the side puffs of 1850 extending laterally six inches right and left from the head, or the vast structures which were carried on the heads at an earlier period. Another point may be recollected: In former days—say in 1850, as a time perfectly remembered by many—the iron rule of fashion was such that every kind of beauty was forced to decorate itself according to one strict model, while ladies now follow their own individual tastes and consult their own convenience much more. Again, that barbaric custom of wounding the female person in order to stick shiny trinkets into the apertures so effected is becoming rapidly extinct.

As for the habitations of modern society, or, in Nordau’s phrase, the “stage properties and lumber-rooms, rag-shops and museums,” where a “friar’s cowl” or the “red mantle of Fra Diavolo” wraps the master of the house “like a Jackpudding”—these things, if such things there be, are shocking enough, I readily grant, to the feelings of an æsthetician. But, after all, I am unable to detect in them anything worse than coarse taste and coarse ostentation, qualities which surely have never ceased to mark the majority of the human race. These things are heirlooms from our monkey ancestors, not marks of recent degeneration. When Dr. Nordau declares that the “specialist physician for diseases of the nerves and of the mind” recognises degeneracy and hysteria “at first glance” in the passions and tastes of the “fashionable world,” I do not believe that he speaks for any great proportion of the profession.

Whether or not there is such a thing as “correct” taste or “incorrect” taste is a question that has been endlessly disputed in spite of the sensible proverb, “De gustibus non est disputandum.” If, however, a certain kind of taste is to be regarded as a symptom of insanity, it will plainly be necessary to agree first upon some standard of correct taste. Now, who shall be the arbiter in that matter? Shall it be the specialist for nervous diseases? If so, what a revolution will be imperative in our medical schools! Instead of students devoting their time to anatomy and pathology, they must be busy forming their tastes, attending lectures on ladies’ dress, and, in short, must give themselves over to things of that kind. Is it not to be feared lest after that sort of culture dealings with the insane should offend their supersensitive organizations? Yet however exclusive their devotion to aesthetics, differences of artistic opinion would still subsist among the “specialists in nervous diseases.” Among them might still be found those who, instead of seeing a “plague of degeneration” in modern dress, would think it a happy release from the ideas of those good old times when, in the absence of secular hysteria, men wore embroidered coats and had their hands half covered with lace, and when a long-queued bagwig covered their heads.

In short, Nordau does not give a single plausible reason for treating modern customs and fashions as symptoms of advanced degeneracy and hysteria. Ever since women became women they have taken pleasure in the adornment of their persons. That feminine passion has existed at all times. Nordau does not tell us why, in modern women, it is to be taken as a sign of an epidemic disease peculiar to our age. The simple truth is, that he does not like the present fashions; and that is enough to make him accuse the rest of the civilized population of the globe of being degenerate and hysterical.

One of the most important symptoms of universal degeneration is, according to Nordau, incapacity for adaptation, powerlessness to accommodate one’s self to the existing order of things. Here, as elsewhere, he goes too far, setting down anarchists and revolutionists as degenerates, without further examination. He speaks of a “silly need of being refractory” on the part of the degenerate, a “union against taking off one’s hat to people.” In this regard Nordau must consider his own doctrine as the most striking of all the signs of the times, in supporting its own contention, for he himself not only protests against pointed beards, partings of the hair, and cuts of the clothes, but declares the whole population, with the possible exception of those who share his tastes, to be diseased in mind.

That is what driving the business of psychiatry in Nordau’s wholesale style comes to. Whoever judges of a state of mind merely by comparison with his own sentiments and feelings, and treats every opinion which departs from his own as morbid, simply makes a layman’s diagnosis; and such, in plain truth, is the psychiatric dilettantism of Nordau’s whole book. No doubt Nordau finds in his “mentally decayed contemporaries” all the symptoms of degeneration which Morel, Magnan, and others have described. But his way of employing the conceptions of psychiatry marks his complete dilettantism. Every collector who, with a collector’s passion, buys old bric-a-brac suffers, according to Nordau, from oniomania, or the mania for purchasing. Whoever occupies himself more with any matter than Dr. Nordau deems fitting has imperative ideas. Whoever writes what Dr. Nordau does not approve is a graphomaniac. Whoever composes a drama of love suffers from erotomania. Whoever opens the discussion of a problem concerning which Dr. Nordau has formed his opinion suffers from the mania for disputation or the mania for doubt. In this way it is easy in any given man to detect any given symptom of insanity.

The reader of Nordau is inclined to regard him as a humourist rather than as a strictly scientific man. But comical and, in part, diverting as his psychiatric performances are, even to the professional man, yet, after all, the matter has its serious side, especially since his book is addressed to the laity, among whom such dilettantism may have quite fatal consequences. We shall therefore be unable to leave it unnoticed, however little pleasure there may be in the discussion of such unprofessional opinions.

“The severe mental epidemic,” “the black death of degeneration and hysteria,” finds its principal embodiment, according to Nordau’s statement, in the art, poetry, and philosophy of the present time. It may here be objected that artists and poets form only a minute percentage of the community, and that it is impossible from them, and nothing more, to conclude anything in regard to the whole population, and to base on this such a smashing diagnosis. To that Nordau replies that the degeneration of our time shows itself in art and literature, and that the great secular hysteria is marked in the influence which a degenerate art can exercise upon the public. Modern art would correspond to the witch superstition of the Middle Ages which exercised its baleful influence upon the masses. It is admitted that the secular hysteria of the Middle Ages forms but a feeble pendant to our modern disease, for Nordau expressly assures us that in former times hysteria had no importance for the general life of society, while it now crushes down the whole human race. As for that art and literature which are, in Nordau’s estimation, the embodiment of degeneracy, I shall consider them in the next chapter. We here concern ourselves only with their effect upon the masses—that is, with secular hysteria. Nordau takes as a sample a number of eminent poets and littérateurs, and, having reached the conviction that every one of them is a degenerate, he hangs some sort of -ism upon each and thinks that in this way he has produced a new form of disease, in comparison wherewith the demonomany and lycanthropy of the Dark Ages were innocent phenomena. For instance, Nordau specifies an Ibsenism, a Tolstoiism, and various other such -isms.

It would, at any rate, be exceedingly interesting if Dr. Nordau could furnish us with accurate analyses of these -ism diseases, and tell us in what they consist. But of this there is not one word. He just mentions the authors, labels each with his cheaply manufactured -ism, and thus the plague of the great secular hysteria receives its names. To judge by what Nordau tells us, Ibsenism and Tolstoiism are symptoms of a disease which has attacked the population and which manifests itself in states of high emotion. Surely, then, since there is supposed to be a terrible and pestlike malady whose symptoms are Ibsenism, etc., these phenomena must greatly surpass all previous hysterias of the masses. But in point of fact there is not the slightest trace of anything of the sort. Like every new phenomenon, the writers named have excited public interest in a certain measure; but there never has been observed any morbid state or affection of the masses due to the influence of any of those writers. If by Ibsenism, Tolstoiism, etc., Nordau means morbid conceptions of the world, of art, of social relations, etc., it only amounts to this: that those authors’ ways of thinking do not accord with his own. In the place of objective proof of disease Dr. Nordau leaves a blank.

Anybody acquainted with modern society must agree that the influence of those poets and writers to whose names Nordau attaches the termination -ism is a pretty slight one. How many people have ever heard of Ibsen and Tolstoi? For most persons art is but a pastime. They only go to the theatre for recreation and distraction. Well-to-do people, especially in the great cities, may have seen a play by Ibsen. The worthy matron pronounces that Nora did wrong in running away from her husband and children. But they trouble their heads very little with any purpose the writer may have had. That is all the Ibsenism that is prevalent.

As for Tolstoi’s philosophical view’s, they are neither so well known nor so influential that one can speak even of a school of Tolstoiism. The unhappy and insane Nietzsche does not represent the way of thinking of the public, and never attained such importance that we could conclude from his success that his doctrines represented the general state of mind.

For an echo of the alleged degenerate art we shall therefore seek in vain in the mass of mankind; and as for the thence inferred “putrefaction” of our contemporaries and the “black death of degeneracy and hysteria,” they are mere phantoms of the pessimistic fancy of Dr. Nordau and his learned colleagues.

Had Nordau in his sharp critique of existing conditions in the fields of society, literature, and art made no pretension to any other standpoint than that of the æsthetician and art critic, his work, in spite of its many eccentricities and falsities, would undeniably not have been without service, for he lays the scourge that is their due upon many a folly and absurdity of our time. But when he wraps himself in the solemn garb of science and, assuming the position of a psychiatrist, hurls the ban of degeneracy and hysteria upon everything that does not meet his approval, he can only be called a psychiatric dilettante.

It may be granted that a sort of secular hysteria really does exist. No doubt many erroneous doctrines of art and science are propagated by the suggestibility and emotionalism of the hysterical masses, and many evils are partly due to these phenomena. At the same time, it is certain that, thanks to the progress of science, the influence of mental disorders upon the general culture is decidedly less at present than in former periods of history, and that to-day hysterias of the masses, such as broke out in the Middle Ages, are relatively infrequent. This, however, does not imply that the number of isolated cases of derangement is less than it formerly was.