Note 88 — Chapter V

The night-terrors of children have frequently been found to have their origin in gastric or intestinal disturbance. Graham Little brings together the opinions of various authorities on this point, though he is himself inclined to give chief importance to heart disease producing slight disturbances of breathing, since he has found that in nearly two-thirds of his cases (17 out of 30) night-terrors were associated with early heart disease (Graham Little, 'The Causation of Night-Terrors,' British Medical Journal, 19th August 1899). It should be added that night-terrors are more usually divided into two classes: (1) idiopathic (purely cerebral in origin), and (2) symptomatic (due to reflex disturbance caused by various local disorders); see e.g. Guthrie, 'On Night-Terrors,' Clinical Journal, 7th January 1899. J. A. Symonds has well described his own night-terrors as a child (Horatio Brown, J. A. Symonds, vol. i.). Lafcadio Hearn (in a paper on 'Nightmare-Touch' in Shadowings) also gives a vivid account of his own childish night-terrors.