operation against her will, her mother came to me and said that the
invalid had made signs to her that she would now submit herself to my
power. I lost no time in getting my assistants, and waiting upon her
before the resolution should depart; but, what was my disappointment to
find that she had, in the meantime, been seized with an attack of
coughing, so much more serious than any she yet had, that I expected
every moment to see her die of suffocation. Her mother sat beside her,
weeping and looking on her with an expression of agony; and the little
sufferer presented to me such an appearance of emaciation and weakness,
that I doubted if I could venture to touch her with a knife, even if her
relentless foe allowed her once more to escape for a little time. The
coughing and spasms again ceased; but she lay as one dead. I could
scarcely feel a pulse in her, and her pale, beautiful face was as calm
and benign as if she had been soothed by a divine aspiration, in place
of being tortured the moment before by an agony that twisted every
muscle of her countenance. She lay in this state about ten minutes, at
the end of which time she again opened her eyes, and made a faint sign
to her mother that she was prepared. I lost no time. In a moment I had
made the incision; and so well had I calculated the locality of the
stone, that I was able to seize it on the very first insertion of the
nippers. I drew it out, and held it up to her eye. The sight of it
operated like magic. She started up on her feet, and, running a few
paces, while the blood flowed plentifully down her white throat, clapped
her hands, and cried, "It's out--it's out!" She would have fallen
instantly, for the impulse that had overcome her weakness was like a
shock from a galvanic battery, that moves, and in an instant leaves all
dead as before. I seized her, just as she was falling; and, having
placed her again on the sofa, sewed up the wound. Before I left her, I
saw her breathing freely the unobstructed air. Her blue eye was
illuminated with joy; and such was the immediate effect of giving a free
passage to the breath of life, that one might have marked the rapid
change of returning health going on throughout her whole system. In a
short time she recovered, and returned home.
I saw this interesting patient three years afterwards--a fine, blooming
young woman.
THE HENWIFE.
I have often made observations on that extraordinary disease,
hypochondria; and chiefly on the cases where it presents the phasis of a
false conception of the existing condition of external circumstances
affecting the patient, accompanied by a terror of their operation on his
fortunes and prosperity. These are common. I conceive that they argue a
lesser derangement of the cerebral functions, than where there occurs a
total overturn of the conception of personal identity; and the
conviction of _self_ passes into a belief that the patient is actually
something else than himself--nay, something else than a man at all, and
even something else than an organised being. In both cases, there is,
of course, a false conviction, and so far they range under the same
head; yet, as the conception of identity is among the first, and
strongest, and steadiest of all the states or acts of the mind, it may
be presumed to require a stronger deranging impulse to effect the
overthrow of an idea that often remains unimpaired amidst the very
wrecks of the intellect, than to produce those conditions of ordinary
partial derangement of the rational or perceptive powers which daily
come under our observation. Yet--and it is a curious feature of these
pitiful states of the diseased mind, and one that argues ill for the
superiority of man over the passing humours of a fluctuating
temperament--wherever there is a false conception of identity, passing
into an idea that the patient is something different from himself, he
becomes an involuntary humorist; and, while the ordinary maniac brings
tears to the eyes of the shuddering beholders, he, in his character of
an animal or piece of inert matter, produces nothing but a tickling
sensation of exquisite ludicrousness, passing often into broad laughter,
certainly the greatest enemy of pity. Now, I approach a case of this
kind with feelings entirely different; and, while I thus confess that I
can contemplate no state of derangement but with pity, I shall leave a
grave narrative of an extraordinary instance of false conviction--true
in all its details[23]--to be read and relished according to the fancies
and humours of the public.
[Footnote 23: We understand that another case of human incubation
occurred, somewhere about the Crosscauseway or Simon Square, of
Edinburgh, in Dr Gregory's time.--ED.]
In a large old land of houses in ---- Street, commonly known by the name
of the Ark, and occupied by a number of small families in the lower
grade of society, an old woman, Margaret B----, had lived for many
years, chiefly upon the bounty of a noble family in the country, whom
she had served in the capacity of poulterer--_vulgariter_, henwife. She
had been for some time ailing; and I was requested by those who took an
interest in her, to pay her occasionally a visit, in the course of my
professional rounds in the neighbourhood of her dwelling. I could
discover, for a time, no marked complaint about her. Living lonely, she
had fallen into a lowness of spirits, which, as one of her neighbours
informed me, was most effectually removed or ameliorated for a time, by
a recurrence to the remembered employments of her former years. She was,
in particular, curiously addicted to thinking and speaking of her former
extensive establishment of fowls at ---- House; and made reference to
speckled favourites by special name, as if she had treated them by
distinctions of superiority, beauty, and utility, after the manner of
fond mothers, who indulge a habit of fantastic favouritism among their
children. I myself noticed this garrulous peculiarity; but, accustomed
to all manner of eccentricities, as well healthy as morbid, I attributed
her freaks to a foolish fancy, that sought for food among the cherished
recesses of a fond memory of the past. By degrees, however, she
underwent a considerable change; falling into moods of silent
melancholy, which lasted for days, and rising from them to luxuriate,
with a fervour that engrossed her whole soul, on the favourite theme,
which seemed to present every day new attractions for her moody mind.
As I passed one day along the passage that led to her humble dwelling,
her nearest neighbour, a favourite gossip, met me, and whispered,
secretly and mysteriously, into my ear, that old Margaret, as she called
her, had been, during the whole day, occupied with the regulation of an
imagined establishment of her old favourites, the hens. She had been
calling them to her by name; using all the technicalities of the
domestic fowler's vocabulary; driving some of the more forward away, and
endearingly encouraging the backward favourites to participate in the
meal of scattered barley she threw upon the floor. The woman added, that
she feared she was mad, and yet she laughed at the symptoms of her
imputed insanity. I went forward, and, on opening the door, saw good
evidence of the truth of my informant's story in the grain that lay
about in every direction; but the occupation was gone, the industrious
fowler had sunk into a fit of melancholy, and sat, with a drooping head
and heavy eye, looking into the fire. She was dogged and silent; and,
though I touched gently the irritable chord, I got no response: the
illusion was gone, and had left nothing in her mind but the darkness of
a morbid melancholy which I possessed no secret to remove.
This state of gloom lasted, I understood--for I could not get her
visited in the meantime--for three days, during which she scarcely spoke
to her neighbours, whose curiosity, roused by her previous conduct,
supplied the place of the kindness which ought to have stimulated
charitable attentions. At the end of that time, she awoke from her
dream, and spoke with her accustomed sense on any subject that was
started in her presence; but during the night she was heard again busy
in her old occupation of feeding her feathered family; and several of
the neighbours had even been at the pains to leave their beds, and
listen to her one-sided dialogue and strange proceedings, as a matter of
intense curiosity. I got a second report of these acts from the same
neighbours, and very properly set the patient down for one of those
unfortunate beings, too common in our land, who are afflicted with
temporary derangement, which sometimes shows itself in the form of a
fancied presence of some familiar object, and a passing into a condition
or position occupied in some prior part of the life of the afflicted
individual. These objects are too common to excite in us any particular
curiosity; and, having made a report to those interested in her that I
feared she was subject to temporary fits of insanity, I left to them the
choice of the ordinary expedients in such cases.
Some weeks afterwards, the neighbour whom I had formerly seen, called
and told me that the patient had not been attended to as her situation
required, and that she had passed into a new condition, so extraordinary
and incredible, that she could not trust her tongue to tell it to a
rational being, and therefore urged me to come and witness for the truth
of what no mortal would otherwise believe, by the evidence of my eyes. I
asked her to explain what she meant; but she replied by a laugh, and
went away, stating, that, unless I visited her soon, I might lose one of
the most strange sights I had ever witnessed in the course of all my
extended and long practice. I had seen so much of the wild vagaries of
distempered minds, so many metamorphoses of fancied identities, and such
extraordinary instances of imaginary metempsychoses, and other freaks in
lunatics, that I felt no more curiosity on the subject of the woman's
excited report than I do in ordinary cases; but, in about an hour
afterwards, I found leisure to call and make a proper judgment of what
might, after all, be a matter exaggerated by the clouds of ignorance.
As I proceeded up the stair, and along the passage, I observed several
heads peeping out at me, and heard titters and whispers in all
directions, as if the neighbours were all a-tiptoe with curiosity to
enjoy the doctor's surprise at what he was to behold. The woman who had
called me came running out from the middle of three or four old gossips
like herself, and, holding away her head to conceal a suppressed laugh,
perhaps mixed with a little affected shame, led the way before me to the
patient's room. I was grave all the while, as becomes my profession; and
I was besides displeased, as I ever am, when I see the misfortunes of my
fellow-creatures made the subject of ill-timed mirth, merely because the
most dreadful of all the visitations of man puts on grotesque
appearances and ludicrous impersonations of fantastic characters.
When I entered, I observed no one in the room. The patient's seat by the
fire was empty. A strange noise met my ear--"Cluck, cluck, cluck!" which
the woman requested me to pause and listen to. It seemed to me a human
imitation of the sounds of the feathered mother of a young brood in our
barn-yards. I was astonished, and felt my curiosity rise as high as my
conductress might desire. She proceeded to a dark corner of the room,
where I saw a large tub half-filled with straw, with the poor victim
sitting in it, in such a position that her head and shoulders only could
be observed. I now ascertained that the strange sounds came from the
occupant of the old seat of Diogenes; yet still my understanding was at
fault. I stood and gazed at the spectacle before me, while my
conductress seemed to enjoy my perplexity, and I heard the repressed
laughter of those in the passage who had come near enough to listen to
our proceedings.
"That is a strange seat, Margaret," said I. "What means this?"
I was answered by a repetition of the same extraordinary sounds--"Cluck,
cluck, cluck!"
I looked gravely at the neighbour for a serious explanation. I could see
no humour in the melancholy indications of drivelling madness, and added
a stern expression to the gravity with which I intended to subdue a
cruel and ill-timed levity. The woman felt awed and abashed, but it was
only for a moment; she stooped down, and, putting her hands among the
straw upon which the invalid sat, pulled out a couple of eggs. A louder
repetition of the sounds, "cluck, cluck," followed, as if the incubator
felt an instinctive parental anger at the temerity of the spoiler of her
inchoate progeny. To satisfy her humour, the woman replaced the eggs,
and the cluck ceased.[24]
[Footnote 24: The reader may be here reminded of the well-known case of
the confessor to the French King. He was long under the delusion of
being a cock; he tried to fly, perched upon cross rafters, picked minced
meat out of a wooden trencher, and crowed regularly every morning.--ED.]
"There are two dozen of these beneath her," said the woman. "Lord ----'s
gamekeeper brought them in to her four days ago, to serve for food to
her. I saw her go out for the straw, and she borrowed the tub from me.
She built her nest on the night afterwards, and she commenced sitting
there immediately when it was completed, so that she has already sat
three days and nights. We heard the 'cluck' through the partition; and,
upon coming in, found her as you now see her."
"Has she got any food?" said I, with a still graver aspect, as I saw my
informant watching for a smile to repay her for her extraordinary
information, and keep her in countenance.
"Nothing but some peas of barley," replied the woman, with something of
seriousness assumed with great difficulty. "See here."
And she pointed to a small cup placed by the side of the tub, in which
some of the grain mentioned was contained, and alongside of it a small
vessel of water.
The truth was now fully apparent. A false conviction of as extraordinary
a nature as I had yet witnessed had taken entire possession of the
invalid's mind. It was not difficult, on ordinary and vulgar data, to
account for the peculiar turn of the malady in the case of this woman,
because all her life had been spent among fowls; yet I must bear my
professional testimony to the fact, that, among the many instances of
false conceptions of identity I had previously witnessed, and have since
seen, I never knew a case where the peculiarity of the conviction had
any relation whatever to the prior habits of mind or body of the
invalid. The deranging power, whatever it is, has often no respect to
pre-existing habits or associations; but, on the contrary, seems to
delight in a capricious triumph over all the ordinary acts of the mind,
and delights to introduce an imagined form and character as widely
opposed as the antipodes to the prior conceptions of the unfortunate
individual. The case before me was, therefore, in this respect
interesting; for, as to the grotesque conditions of the fancied change,
though calculated to produce an extraordinary effect on vulgar minds, I
looked upon them, philosophically, as only another instance of the
endless variety of melancholy changes to which our frail natures are
exposed.
I proceeded to ask my informant if any means had been taken to draw the
invalid from her position, and got for answer, that several of the
neighbours had come in and endeavoured to prevail upon her to renounce
her charge; but that, having failed in their efforts, they had on
several occasions removed her by force, and in opposition to strenuous
struggles, and extraordinary sounds of mixed anger and pitiful sorrow.
No sooner, however, were their backs turned, than she _flew_ to her
seat, and manifested the greatest satisfaction by peculiar noises, at
being again reinstated in her charge of her inchoate brood, which she
was terrified would, by growing cold, be deprived of the principle of
vitality she was busy in communicating to them. I tested, by my own
efforts, her instinctive force of affection, by taking her by the arms
and endeavouring to remove her; but she sent up such a pitiful cry,
mixed with her imitative cluck and cackle, that I let her go, as much
through a sudden impulse of fear as from an inability to lift her by the
power of my arms. I then put down my hand to remove some of the eggs,
but was in an instant attacked as fiercely as if the invalid had in
reality been the creature she fancied herself to be; and the manner of
the attack was so true to the habits of the feathered mother, that, even
in the midst of my philosophy and concern for the unhappy being, I
trembled for my professional gravity. She had fancied that the
protuberance on her face was a beak, and used that organ with such
effect, that, on missing my hand, she darted the fancied organ of
defence on the corner of the tub, and produced a stream of blood, which
I required to quench by the vulgar but effectual mode of placing down
her back the key of the door. During all the struggle, the "cluck,
cluck" was kept up, accompanied with a shaking of her clothes, as if she
had been raising the feathers to evidence farther for her instinctive
anger.
I now left this unhappy individual to the charge of the woman, with a
recommendation (I could do nothing more) to endeavour to get her weaned
from her situation and habit. Two or three of my brother practitioners
having heard the circumstances, visited her during that afternoon, and
witnessed, as they informed me, the same symptoms that had been seen by
me. Two days afterwards, I visited her again, having, in the meantime,
written to Lord ----'s steward an account of the state of the family's
poor _protege_, with some advices as to how she ought to be disposed of.
I found her still in the same position, and if possible more determined
to defend her brittle charge. I expressed to the attendant some surprise
that a human being should have been allowed to remain so long in a
predicament which seemed to throw some discredit upon our vindicated
superiority over the lower animals; but she answered me by stating that
the patient had become so fierce and vindictive, when an attempt was
made to remove her from the tub, or to take the eggs from under her,
that every one was afraid to go near her. A prejudice had, moreover,
taken possession of the neighbours, that she was under the power of some
evil spirit; and those who ventured to look at her, as she sat clucking
over her charge, gratified their intense curiosity by putting their
heads in at the door. As I approached her, I saw plainly that a fiercer
spirit had taken possession of her, probably from the attempts that had
been made to displace her, and overcome her extraordinary instinct. Her
eyes glanced as if fired by the impulse of strong anger, and her "cluck"
sounded with a wilder and more unearthly sound than when I saw her
before; but she spoke not a word, and, indeed, since ever she had
betaken herself to the nest, she had been heard to utter no other sounds
than those that are peculiar to the bird she personated. These symptoms
imparted to her a most impressive and terrific aspect, altogether
incompatible with any feeling of the ludicrous. I have seen mad people
in every mood; and, although I have observed them assume attitudes and
looks more suggestive, of course, of the terror of personal injury, I am
quite free to confess, that I never saw any one whose appearance was so
productive of those indefinable feelings of pity, fear, and awe, so
often roused within the walls of an asylum. Nature was not only
changed--it was overturned; human feelings represented the instincts of
the brutes that perish; and the organs, motions, and attitudes of our
species, were made to subserve, with an intense anxiety that was painful
to behold, the impulses of creatures in the lowest grade of creation. I
confess that my feelings were, on this occasion, harrowed; and, if I
were to search for any feature in the spectacle before me, more than
another, that tended to produce in me this effect, I would say that it
was the hideous intensity of the instinctive anxiety that beamed in her
dull sullen eye, as I proceeded forward to the place where she covered
and defended her charge, aided by the horrid interminable cluck that
ground my ears with its unnatural sound.
I was obliged to leave her again, still in the same predicament; for the
woman declared that she, for her part, would not again meddle with her,
unless assisted by her neighbours; and they, possessed of the terror of
the evil spirit, would not approach her. I got her, however, to promise
to give her some meat; but this, she said, was of no easy
accomplishment, for the invalid was possessed of the idea that nothing
ought to be eaten by one in her "particular situation," but what a hen
might pick up in its bill and swallow. She had discarded broth and
butcher-meat; and the few crumbs she had picked up off a platter that
had been placed before her would not suffice to keep in her life.
That same evening, an extraordinary scene took place in the house of
this demented creature. I had not been informed that she had any near
relations; but it happened that, when she was still in the same
extraordinary position, an only son, a fine open-hearted fellow, a
sailor, who had been absent from her for seven years, arrived, buoyant
with hope, and fired with desire to see his mother happy and well. Good
heavens! what a sight was presented to him! I witnessed not the
harrowing meeting; but the old neighbour was present, and attempted an
inadequate description of it to me. She did not know her son; and when
he approached her, to greet her with a son's love, she exhibited the
same symptoms of fury, and clucked the dreadful sounds of her defensive
anger in his agonised ear. What he saw, and what he heard, opened up to
him the hideous mystery. He rushed out of the house, and had not again
returned.
Next day, the butler of the family who took charge of her called on me.
I accompanied him to the house, when one or two of the neighbours were
prevailed upon to lend their assistance in getting her removed by force.
The scene that followed was an extraordinary one. She resisted them to
the last; as the struggle increased, her eye became more fiery, and her
unearthly screams more loud and discordant--passing through all the
notes of an incensed hen-mother, and attaining, at times, to the harsh
scream which one may have heard from that feathered biped, when
separated from her brood, and pursued by a band of urchins. The task of
mere removal was not a difficult one, and was soon accomplished. Some
curious observer examined the eggs, and found that not one of them was
broken, so carefully had she performed her supposed duty of incubation.
If she had sat the requisite time, there is not a doubt they would have
been duly and legitimately hatched.
Such are the details of this extraordinary case. It is needless to say
that it may transcend human belief. That is nothing, because belief is
too much regulated by experience. I waited on the poor woman afterwards.
The idea haunted her for about two months, and then gave place to some
other wild conceptions, that in their turn gave way to others of a more
rational character. Her son returned, and saw, with pleasure, the change
that had taken place upon his parent. Latterly she became perfectly
rational; but, if any one alluded in the remotest degree to her position
in the tub, she shuddered with horror, and evaded the subject, as if it
had terrors too dreadful to be borne.
THE ARTIST.