"Hysteria" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... carefully and exhaustively and dispassionately we study the disorders of the nervous system which come in the field of medicine, the more irresistibly we are drawn to the conclusion that from neurasthenia and hysteria to insanity and paralysis they are every one of them the result of some definite morbid change in some cell or strand of the nervous system. The man or woman who is nervous has poisoned nerve-cells, either from hereditary ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... I to myself, having walked to the far side of the open square, "sit on this bench, unfold the paper, and use your intelligence to overcome the hysteria which last night's experience and this odd affair of the Sheik have aroused. Be sensible. This message is a matter to be explained, just as all things are to be explained by any one who is not the victim ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... the utmost. Presently she heard the banging of a trunk-lid. He was there. And now that he was there, she, who had always taken pride in her lack of feminine nerves, found herself in the grip of a panic that verged on hysteria. Her heart fluttered and missed a beat. It had been so easy to plan! She was afraid. Perhaps the tension of waiting all these hours was the cause. With an angry gesture she strove to dismiss the feeling of trepidation by walking resolutely ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... through this dressing station some thousands of cases, and we may have had eight or ten malingerers. But this is not all sham. There is a strong mixture of hysteria and suggestion with the sham. A chap with a highly organised temperament gets buried by a shell. That is a terrific nerve shock. He sees two or three chaps blown to bits. Another nerve shock. Now he has heard about shell shock as a result of a similar experience. Immediately the suggestion ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... other contemptible things in this world there are two that I loathe and despise: hysteria in a woman; fear and cowardice in a man. The first turns me to ice. I cannot sympathize with hysteria. The second turns my stomach. Cowardice in a man is to me positively nauseous. And this fear-smitten mass of human animals on our reeling poop ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... wrote, "who are so wise in the ways of those tricky things called nerves, must know that it was only a mild hysteria that made me say those most unladylike things. I have written Norah all about it. She has replied, advising me to stick to the good-fellow role but not to dress the part. So when next you see me I shall be a perfectly ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... with three hours' schooling a day (except Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, when they had none), and how outdoor play the rest of the time was rapidly developing them physically and in the sense of responsibility and judgment. There were no recorded cases of weak eyes, nerves, or hysteria. There were no suicides among the children upon the occasion of ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... control, it was necessary that corporate control should be attacked. The muck-raking added to it aroused a spirit against all success in business, whether the methods pursued were honest or not. The result has been a hysteria that prompts hostility to capital even when it is working in honest lines and earning an honest profit. In many states it has led to excessive restrictive legislation and has terrorized capital; ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... was supposed to enter the heart more effectually. The tortures of hell alternated with the delights of heaven, in imagery calculated to drive the timid and conscientious young folks to insanity, at these meetings, to which, once awakened, the subject of conviction went three times a day, until the hysteria, the prolonged excitement so produced, came as a sign of acceptance. As each new convert rose on the "anxious seat[1]," where he or she went when the first feeling of conviction came, and afterwards made the declaration of salvation found, the shouts and cries of "Glory to God," the sobbing ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... That tetanus, hysteria, and other spasmodic affections have often been mistaken for rabies, there is no doubt, and we can easily imagine the mental effect produced upon an individual of a highly nervous temperament, by the knowledge of his being bitten by an animal ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... has still much to learn of domestic politics. Let him sit with me here any night on my housetop and he will see the sad effects of sectarian reform and newspaper hysteria. He will see the creatures of the Tenderloin at home on Broadway and Fifth Avenue where, twelve months ago, their presence was unknown. He will see the policeman on the beat neglect the broken lock of my house door that haply ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... without issue. The extreme cases of this are the pathological states of mania and depression, where such feelings assume proportions dangerous to the existence of the individual. Intoxication and hysteria present analogous, though more transient phenomena. And one may observe the autonomous development of mere feeling even in the healthy life, as when one remains jolly after all occasion for it has ceased, or angry after the cause for anger has ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the general interest which she was arousing, Audrey leaned on the rail of the screen of flowers, and gave herself up afresh to laughter. Monsieur Dauphin was decidedly puzzled. The affair might have ended in hysteria and confusion had not Miss Ingate, with Nick and Tommy, come hurrying up ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... was very much overwrought, G. G.'s mother had a mild little attack of hysteria; and Cynthia beat her on the back and shook her and kissed her until she was over it. Then G. G.'s mother told ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... my opinion, your wife's case is an incurable one. The one specific cause of her mental breakdown is the Southern situation which has borne tremendously upon her. That whole region of country is affected by a sort of sociological hysteria and we physicians are expecting more and more pathological manifestations as a result of the strain ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... of Timothy with news from Thessalonica. The apostle's reasons for writing were: (a) to calm and encourage the converts whom he had so abruptly left; (b) to urge them to perform their ordinary duties. They had fallen into a state bordering on religious hysteria. Quite determined to be true to Christ, they had been demoralized by the strain of facing constant hostility. They had begun to take excessive interest in unfulfilled prophecy and eschatological speculation. The result was ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... day. And here she was, at midnight, hobnobbing with quiescent murder and sudden death! To-morrow Burlingame would ask her to hustle up the Sunday stuff, and she would hustle. She wanted to laugh, but was a little afraid that this laughter might degenerate into incipient hysteria. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls upon the ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and healthy in the face of nature, purify the mind alike from dulness and hysteria. There is no place where the young are more gladly conscious of their youth, or the old better ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the same form, yet the tokens of its existence are too obvious to be overlooked.—Another agency scarcely less efficient is that of neuropathies, to use the medical term,—meaning the various forms of disorder which have their origin in the brain, and comprising not only epilepsy, hysteria, chorea, and other convulsive affections, but that habit of body and mind which makes a person nervous. While they may abridge the mental efficiency of the patient comparatively little or not at all, they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... gave us another exhibition of that repression of feeling, of that disdain of hysteria, that is a national characteristic, and is what Mr. Kipling meant when he wrote: "But oh, beware my country, when my ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... and less. Was not this clearly a moment when the strong mind of a man should assert itself over foolish feminine hysteria? ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... settled by medical authority, that the proportion of mothers who can suckle their children is decidedly diminishing among the upper and middle classes, that deaths from childbirth are eight times as great among these classes as among the peasantry, and that spinal distortion, hysteria, and painful disorders are on the increase. Nine-tenths of the evil he attributes to the long hours of school study, and to the neglect of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... stood beside Sheba on the little plateau. She had quite recovered from the touch of hysteria that had attacked her courage. The wind and the rain had whipped the color into her soft cheeks, had disarranged a little the crinkly, blue-black hair, wet tendrils of which nestled against her temples. The health and buoyancy of the ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... no reason for alarm, they told him. And instead of being mysterious it was a perfectly defined case of nerves, hysteria, emotional collapse. ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... which others hear not." He, too, "could ... with the poor and trampled sit and weep."[5] There is in nearly all anarchists this supersensitiveness, this hyperaesthesia that leads to ecstasy, to hysteria, and to fanaticism. It is a neuropathy that has led certain scientists, like Lombroso and Krafft-Ebbing, to suggest that some anarchist crimes can only be looked upon as a means to indirect suicide. They are outbursts that lead to a spectacular martyr-like ending to ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... torsion of her limbs, tears a cry of desire from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... green Lulov—the palm-branch of the Feast of Tabernacles—and shook it piously toward every corner of the compass. At each shake the audience rolled about in spasms of merriment. A moment later a white gliding figure, moving to the measure of the cake-walk, keyed up the laughter to hysteria. It was the Ghost appearing to frighten Ophelia. His sepulchral bass notes mingled ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... almost like one assailed suddenly by robbers, terrified and half incredulous. When her hysteria subsided ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Beckett was equally faithful to the Table, and in spite of the paralysis of the legs from which he suffered (and for which he was for a time duly chaffed by the advice of Percival Leigh, lest there might be hysteria about the disease) he attended the Wednesday gatherings with what regularity he could up to within a fortnight before he died. Thackeray, too, for many years after he ceased writing for Punch would weekly join the Staff, and always received a cordial and affectionate welcome. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... possessing the hunter's extraordinarily keen ear, Courtlandt recognized the quality; and the weight of a thousand worlds lightened its pressure upon his heart. And the Barone laughed, too. So there they were, the three of them. But Nora's ineffectual battle for repression had driven her near to hysteria. To escape this dire calamity, she flung open a casement window and stood within it, breathing in the heavy ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... Asherton Hall, Mrs. Swinton framed a hundred speeches, and went through imaginary altercations. By the time she arrived, she was keyed up to a dangerous pitch of excitement, verging on hysteria. Nobody saw her coming and she entered the ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... revival was well advanced by 1905, but was becoming more sensational every month. Led on by an expectant public, the magazines manufactured exposures to supply the market, and hysteria often took the place of investigation. The real needs of reform were in danger of being lost in a flood of denunciation. In the spring of 1906 President Roosevelt spoke out to check the indiscriminate abuse. He drew his topic from Bunyan's ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... chair in the hall, an erratic creaking responded, and Woolfolk started forward, and stopped as he heard and then identified the noise. This, he told himself, would not do; the hysteria was creeping over him again. He shook his shoulders, wiped his palm and took a fresh grip ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the hand in his reassuringly; he tried his best to pat it in the old, big-brother way. "You've had an awfully trying day—most women would be in their rooms having hysteria ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... nothing serious the matter, Mrs. Burton. It was hardly worth while to disturb you. At present the young French girl who was crossing with us to her former home is suffering from an attack of hysteria. As I have not been able to quiet her and as you are here, perhaps you will come and see what you ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... not far from the Falls. Here, in a great council lodge, the older men sat in deliberation for a full day and night. The dull drum sounded continually, the council pipe went round, and the warriors besought the spirits to give them knowledge. The savage hysteria, little by little, yet steadily, arose higher and higher, until at length it reached that point of frenzy where naught could suffice save some ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... brilliant with a somewhat glassy brightness, and there was a touch of hysteria in her manner. Mrs. Lewin thought she had been drinking. Many of her customers ended that way—took to cognac and ratafia, when choicer pleasures were exhausted and wrinkles began to show through ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... I had a right to live—to eat what would have been wasted on dying people!" Bemmon twisted to appeal to the ones who held him, his words quick and ragged with hysteria. "You can't hang me—I don't ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... thirteen, at the period of puberty, which for her never came, Jeanne would appear to have been subject on her right side to unilateral hallucinations of sight and hearing. Now Charcot[2752] considered unilateral hallucinations of sight to be common in cases of hysteria.[2753] He even thought that in hysterical subjects they are allied to a hemianaesthesia situated on the same side of the body, and which in Jeanne would be on the right side. Jeanne's trial might have proved the existence of this hemianaesthesia, an extremely ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century." He does not pretend that it is a good poem, but "here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria." It is in Joseph Warton, according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with "the individualist attitude to nature." Readers of Horace Walpole's letters, however, will remember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature. But these were ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... degrees Fahrenheit or 98 degrees Fahrenheit. You can remain in this bath for several hours without harm, for it is neither weakening nor stimulating. It has a soothing effect upon the nerves and is even valuable in preventing attacks of hysteria or other nervous difficulties. This particular bath is so effective in hospitals for the insane that it has frequently obviated the use of padded cells and straight jackets. It is just as effective for the nervous person who wishes to overcome the excitement that is preventing sleep. A half-hour ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... herself! She certainly looks innocent enough; but what does a blush prove, and what does its absence prove, on one of these innocent faces? There is nothing in all this world that can lie and cheat like the face and the tongue of a young girl. Just give her a little touch of hysteria,—I don't mean enough of it to make her friends call the doctor in, but a slight hint of it in the nervous system,—and "Machiavel the waiting-maid" might take lessons of her. But I cannot think our Scheherezade is one of that kind, and I am ashamed of myself for noting such a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... great strength of men under emotion or the disturbances of the body by ideas are listed as examples. This is not the place to discuss cures by faith. It suffices to say this: that in the first place most of such cures relate to hysteria, a disease we shall discuss later but which is characterized by symptoms that appear and disappear like magic. I have seen "cured" (and have "cured") such patients, affected with paralysis, deafness, dumbness, blindness, etc., with reasoning, electricity, bitter ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... she was really in a dangerous predicament came a mental panic which threatened to take the form of hysteria. She held tightly to the pommel of the saddle, shutting her eyes on the desolate world around her, battling against the great fear that rose within her and choked her. When she opened her eyes again the world was ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... who are interested in the same subject, by meeting and imparting suggestions, make all the ideas of each the common stock of all. Hyperboreans have a mental disease which renders them liable to suggestion. The women are afflicted by hysteria before puberty. Later they show the phenomena of "possession,"—dancing and ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... well how to affect. If you can summon tears at pleasure, a few would not be amiss; a gentle shower, not enough to make the nose and eyes red or to detract from your beauty. Men cannot resist beauty and tears. Never mar their effect with anything bordering on sobs and hysteria; such violent manifestations being neither refined nor artistic. A scene in which one person does the talking must be limited in time. No ordinary man can keep at white heat fifteen minutes; if his victim says nothing, he will soon exhaust himself. Remember ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... The extortion from Dick was more conventional—a tea set from Tiffany's. From Joseph Bloeckman came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him want to weep—indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with remembrances ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Hysteria.—This is usually brought on by some excessive strain upon the brain nerves, and may show itself either in the violent or in the fainting form; it may even pass from the one to the other, fainting alternating with violent movements and cries. It may often be checked by ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... to the verge of hysteria, but her sure, simple faith had built a hospital and changed the criminal record of a city. The thought that she might be right, in spite of the circular and Kobu, gave me so much comfort that the ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... He was face to face with a crisis which baffled him completely, and yet which he felt to be wholly unworthy of his powers. His brain had never been keener, his sense of power more inspiring. Yet he had never felt more impotent. It was woman's hysteria against which he had to fight. The ordinary weapons were useless. He realised quite well her condition and the dangers resulting from it. The heart of the woman was once more beating to its own natural tune. If Hunterleys ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... governed by a woman with strong "magnetism," and an equally strong love of admiration and devotion, can be kept in a chronic state of hysteria by the emotional affection of the girls for their teacher. When they cannot reach the teacher they will transfer the feeling to one another. Where this is allowed to pervade the atmosphere of a girls' school, those who escape floods of tears or other acute hysterical symptoms ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... fit, apparently produced by a sudden shock. The boy was taken to one of the bedrooms, and after some time recovered consciousness, but only to pass into a condition described by the medical man as one of violent hysteria. The doctor exhibited a strong sedative, and in the course of two hours pronounced him fit to walk home, but in passing through the hall the paroxysms of fright returned and with additional violence. The father perceived that the child was pointing at some object, and heard the old cry, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... morning. It was, in the more important of them, followed by digests of the calculations which had made this terrific result a practical certainty. These, again, were followed by speculations, some deliberately scientific, and some wild beyond the dreams of the most hopeless hysteria. ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... Church have been endeavoring to cure nervous disorders by putting the patient at peace with himself. Every patient is examined by a physician, and if the root of his disorder proves to be nervous (hysteria, alcoholism, a drug habit, insomnia, or any one of the many forms of neurasthenia) he is admitted into the Health Class for psycho-therapeutical treatment. Here he is encouraged to unburden himself of the distress or perplexity which haunts ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... afternoon in a sort of stupor. At tea-time Beatrice, who had until then kept herself in restraint, gave way to an outburst of angry hysteria. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... close. And suddenly he was laughing—a madness, half hysteria. "Why, this, all this—why look, Glora, it's funny! This little world all excited, an ant-hill, outraged! Look! ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... mutilated form, divested of their spiritual significance. The "Big Meeting," or revival meeting often gives an opportunity for a revival of the latent paganism in the Negro. The weird songs, the wild excitement of the people followed by the unchaste exposures and hysteria of women, the physical agony and wallowing on the floor, and the violent physical gymnastics among both sexes is a species of voodooism imported from the religion of heathen Africa. It is deplorable because its after effects ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... lovable Bernadette, whose sufferings had flowered so wonderfully. As a doctor had roughly expressed it, this girl of fourteen, at a critical period of her life, already ravaged, too, by asthma, was, after all, simply an exceptional victim of hysteria, afflicted with a degenerate heredity and lapsing into infancy. If there were no violent crises in her case, if there were no stiffening of the muscles during her attacks, if she retained a precise recollection of her dreams, the reason was that her case was peculiar to herself, and she ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Buck, and evinced no intention of getting out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes screamed, cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of hysteria. Thornton rapped Hal's knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife to the ground. He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to pick it up. Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes cut ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... symptoms of so-called possession to recognized mental and physical derangements such as insanity, epilepsy, and hysteria, suggests the conclusion that possession should be classed with other ailments due to ill adjustment of the relations of the mental and physical life. If this conclusion is valid, the idea of actual possession by evil spirits becomes only an ancient effort to interpret the ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... fourth or fifth time since Lizzie had known him, and he was in imminent danger of getting into jail, or into a coat of tar and feathers. As the controversy grew hotter and the peril greater, Lizzie came to a condition which might have been diagnosed as chronic impending hysteria. Her eyes were red from secret weeping, and at the slightest provocation she would burst into floods of tears and throw herself into her husband's arms. This would start off Jimmie Junior and the little ones, who always took their cue from him. And Jimmie Senior would stand perplexed and helpless. ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... that within a few days your secretary will make an appointment for you to see a Miss Valerie French. This is my niece. She does not know we are friends. When she tells you her tale, you need make no allowance for hysteria. Believe every word she says. She will not exaggerate. And please remember this. It is most desirable that she should marry the man about whom she will consult you. But it is still more desirable that she should not ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... thing that makes me think Daisy did not write the letter. I fancied myself she might have done it in a moment of hysteria and out of hatred of me, but she could not know anything of the Scarlet Cross. No one in Rickwell could ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... tobacco-pipe was placed between its lips." Dr. Pidduck asserts that in no instance is the sin of the father more strikingly visited upon his children than the sin of tobacco using. "The enervation, the hypochondriasis, the hysteria, the insanity, the dwarfish deformities, the consumption, the suffering lives, and early deaths of the children of inveterate smokers bear ample testimony to the feebleness and unsoundness of the constitution transmitted ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... is, you scarcely know what you're doing, my poor Mr. Shawn. You're on wires, that's what's the matter with you—hysteria. I know what it is as well as anybody. You'll excuse me saying so, but you're no ordinary man. You're one of these highly-strung people and you ought to take care of yourself. Well, I'll go now, and if it's mutually agreeable we might perhaps meet ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... education, possess nothing more solid than mere accomplishments, and have no materials of thought," and no "occupation to excite interest or demand attention." "The liability of such persons to melancholy, hysteria, hypochondriasis, and other varieties of mental distress, really depends on a state of irritability of brain, induced by ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... infected. A new spirit had been in action, eating into the foundations of the national character; it worked through the masses of the great cities, unnerved by the three poisons of drink, the Salvation Army, and popular journalism. A mighty force of hysteria and sensationalism was created, seething, ready to burst its bonds ... The canker spread through the country-side; the boundaries of class and class are now so vague that quickly the whole population ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... with the good days gradually drawing ahead and becoming more frequent and more marked. I look for her to recover entirely in a year's time, but she will always retain her sensitiveness and a certain amount of hysteria, so that things that would not bother you or me will hurt her grievously. You must be prepared to expect this to happen. But I see no reason at all why she should not in the near future become a happy wife and mother." The blessings of ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... hers, that child-like softening and breaking down under him, in itself so unexpected (I didn't know she could do it), that sudden and innocent catastrophe, was the first sign to me that I was done for—wiped out. There wasn't any violence or any hysteria about it, only grief, only pity. It was an entirely simple, gentle and beautiful performance, and it took place in my rooms after Jevons had left us. But, as I say, this was long afterwards. The agony of my undoing was a ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... in which we make laws is that they are not enforced because they are not in harmony with the views of the community. The statute books of every State are encumbered with laws passed in moments of hysteria and never put into operation, or else allowed to lapse after a few months of confusion. Every newspaper in California, for example, breaks the law every day when it prints a news item without appending the name of the writer, and probably we are all of us breaking laws of which we never ...
— Morals in Trade and Commerce • Frank B. Anderson
... "Hysteria," he said to himself. "Her head turned by this love affair. He's treated her badly, whatever they may say, and it has unhinged ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... for recognition, and we realize the awful sufferings of many an ignorant or sensitive soul. It was not until the religious revival had passed its height that the people began to realize the folly and dangers of the hysteria that had accompanied it. It was not until long afterward that many of its characteristics, which had been interpreted as supernatural signs, were known and understood, and correctly diagnosticated as outward evidence of ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... sometimes becomes too acute, either from a vitiated state of the organ itself, which is not often the case; or from an increased sensibility or irritability of the whole nervous system, which is observed in hysteria, phrenitis, and ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... ass, kept on telling her I couldn't live without her, that I'd make her happy, that she didn't know what she was saying, and—But, good Lord, she kept on saying no! Nothing but no! Do—do you think she meant to say no? Could it have been hysteria? She said it so often, over and over again, that it might have been hysteria. I never thought ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... momentary return of his hysteria and said: "I say, old boy, I should like to see a chart of our fortnight's cruise ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Maccabee was attempting to form in his fortress. It came like the gradual velocity of a burning star across the sky. From the ranks nearest the exit from the burrow the murmur issued, growing into intelligible sound, mounting to the wildness of hysteria and prevailing wholly over the Gibborim in the space between heart-beats. Everywhere they cast down their spears and their weapons, everywhere they gazed at him with brilliant threatening eyes and cried in loud voices so that the things each mad mind put ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... consideration led her to gloss or to minimise the disabilities of her own. She sat sometimes in gravest wonder, pinching her lips, and watched the studiously modified interest of his glance following her into its queer by-ways—her sphere's—full of spangles and lime-light, and the first-class hysteria of third-class rival artistry. There was a fascination in bringing him out of his remoteness near to those things, a speculation worth making as to what he might do. This remained ungratified, for he never did anything. He only let it appear by the most indefinite signs possible that he ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... than are at present afforded by the ordinary Punch Show. In M. MAETERLINCK's version, Ponsch becomes the Prince of Half-seas-over-Holland; he is the victim of hereditary homicidal mania, complicated by neurotic hysteria. Inflamed by the insinuations of Mynheer Olenikke—a kind of Dutch Mephistopheles and Iago combined—he is secretly jealous of his consort the Princess Joedi's preference for the society of Djoe, the Court Jester and Society Clown. Here is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... unexpectedness, was adorned by an abominable temper, an overbearing manner, and a sense of cruel humour. He had almost finished his examinations at the nearest school where, during a brisk campaign of eight days, he had caused five dismissals, nine cases of nervous exhaustion, and an epidemic of hysteria. ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... done? I am well aware of your experiments with the y wave, gentlemen—and it was on the y wave that the messages came. You may be interested to know that the number of lives lost, the property damage, the business losses due to the panic, have not yet been fully determined; but it makes the hysteria following the Fantafilm hoax very small potatoes ...
— The Fourth Invasion • Henry Josephs
... behavior of primitive people. In psychology interest developed in the study of the child and in the comparative study of human and animal behavior. The psychiatrist, in dealing with certain types of abnormal behavior like hysteria and multiple personality, was forced to study human behavior objectively. All this has prepared the way for a science of human nature and of society based upon objective and ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... vividly to Clarence's recollection her own childish exaggerations of the Indian massacre. I am far from saying that she was entirely insincere or merely acting at these moments; at times she was taken with a mild hysteria, brought on by the exciting intrusion of this real event in her monotonous life, by the attentions of her friends, the importance of her suffering as an only child, and the advancement of her position as the heiress of the Robles Rancho. If her tears were ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... animal strength and essayed the final blasphemous Vesuvian onslaught that brought about the nervous breakdown, the ultimate collapse. She had wept, then, the blubbering, loose-lipped, abandoned weeping of hysteria. She had stumbled forward and caught at his arm and clung to it, as though it were her last earthly pillar of support. Her huge plaited ropes of hair had fallen down, thick brown ropes longer than his own arms, and he, breathing hard, had sat back ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... many remarkable manifestations by which hysteria exhibits itself, for the astonishment of the credulous and uneducated portion of the public, and—alas, that it should have to be said,—for the delectation of an occasional weak-minded and ignorant physician, the assumption of the ability ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... think of all the crazy cases of mass-hysteria—that baseball-game riot in Baltimore; the time everybody started tearing off each others' clothes in Milwaukee; the sex-orgy in New Orleans. And the sharp uptrend in individual psycho-neurotic and psychotic behavior. All in connection with music, too, and ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... this outbreak of hysteria, and frowning with concern, put out his kind protesting hands to take hers. But she ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... Mr. Gladstone's and a pair of pince-nez hanging from his neck on a broad black ribbon, had been walking up and down with his hands behind his back; he paused uncertainly for a moment and then began laboriously collecting the scattered chocolates. That was the only moment when hysteria brushed Cecily with its wings. She wanted to laugh or cry—she wasn't ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... and breeding-places of the various neuroses. There general paresis treads closely upon the heels of sexual neurasthenia, while the victims of hysteria and kindred ills are almost countless in their number. What wonder, then, that the offspring of such parents should be weak and neurasthenic, and fall easy victims to the thousand and one erotic fancies which beset them! What wonder that ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... police and perpetuated by the press. No living soul ever heard Czolgosz make that statement, nor is there a single written word to prove that the boy ever breathed the accusation. Nothing but ignorance and insane hysteria, which have never yet been able to solve the simplest problem ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... considered, demanded of him that he should at once deliver himself from a false position. La Binet would make a scene, of course; but he knew the proper specific to apply to hysteria of that nature. Money, after all, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... have sense enough to know that it was most of it grief over her grandfather, and nerves and hysteria, and the fact that she was only eighteen years old and lonely, and that being a bride had a certain amount to do with it. She had told me that I was a beast, and made me feel like one; and I took the whole thing hard and believed her. I made a fine, five-act tragedy out of a jealous ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... upon the temper of the house-holder, whether she would take that apparition quietly, deceived by Lanyard's mumming into believing she had only a poor thievish fool to deal with, or with a storm of bourgeois hysteria. In the latter event, Lanyard's hand was ready planted, palm down, on the top of the desk: should the woman attempt to give the alarm, a single bound would carry the adventurer across it in full flight for ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... bridle, and even at that, one of the bridle reins was slashed and the stirrup leathers were gnawed. He looked from the white bone to the saddle, and ripped out a half dozen vigorous Anglo-Saxon oaths. It was not nice, but the explosion argued a far healthier frame of mind than either his morbid hysteria of the previous afternoon or his frenzy ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... mountains leading south, were blocked successfully by the rebelling forces, and, when the deep gloom settled finally over the city, the fate of the Westerners seemed sealed and their future hopeless. All round the foreigners' houses the people, infected with that strange, unaccountable, national hysteria, so terrible in the Chinese temperament, rose up to burn and kill. Mayhap it means little to the man who reads. Massacres have always been common enough in China, he will say; and there are thousands of people in Europe to-day who know no more ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... she had endured were imprinted upon her mind in minutest detail, and she related them in the exact order of their occurrence. The recalling of the terrible ordeal, however, so wrought upon her emotions that she wept, to the limit of mild hysteria, which brought our conversation to a close, and soon ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... altogether to outweigh and control that of the country. Further, it should be remembered that the experimenters of 1871 believed the Assembly to have betrayed the cause of France by ceding her eastern districts, and to be on the point of handing over the Republic to the Monarchists. A fit of hysteria, or hypochondria, brought on by the exhausting siege and by exasperation at the triumphal entry of the Germans, added the touch of fury which enabled the Radicals of Paris to challenge the national authorities and thereafter to persist in their defiance ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... of the past two days, supervening on so long a period of profound depression, had thrown her into a state of agitation bordering on hysteria. She was constantly changing her attitude, rising and seating herself, and walking excitedly about. She would talk rapidly one moment, and then relapse into a sudden chilled silence in which she seemed to hear nothing. Once or twice she ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... the interest of the public but in the interest of the honest railroad man and the honest shipper alike, for it is they who are chiefly jeoparded by the practices of their dishonest competitors. This legislation should be enacted in a spirit as remote as possible from hysteria and rancor. If we of the American body politic are true to the traditions we have inherited we shall always scorn any effort to make us hate any man because he is rich, just as much as we should scorn any effort to make us look down upon or treat contemptuously any man because he is poor. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... disease of the nerves to which girls about the age of puberty are very subject, particularly in the higher circles of society, where their emotions are over-educated and their organization delicate. It is called hysteria, and more commonly hysterics. Frequently it deceives both doctor and friends, and is supposed to be some dangerous complaint. Often it puts on the symptoms of epilepsy, or heart disease, or consumption. We have witnessed the most frightful convulsions ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... night when Constance, marshalling all her forces, suddenly insisted that he must go out no more until he was cured. In the fight Constance was scarcely recognizable. She deliberately gave way to hysteria; she was no longer soft and gentle; she flung bitterness at him like vitriol; she shrieked like a common shrew. It seems almost incredible that Constance should have gone so far; but she did. She accused him, amid sobs, of putting his cousin ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... phlegm lies an hysteria that rivals that of the Latin races. Paul's flame died to ashes and he burst out sobbing, throwing his hands up and out with ungainly gestures. Looking down upon his awkward grief, Bachelder half regretted the just anger that caused him to slip the news like ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... replied, "our nose is as well made as our foot and our waist; but we may, perhaps, have a slight touch of hysteria." ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... "Hysteria," declared Sir Walter. "I don't blame them. It is natural. Everybody is free to go, if they desire to do so. But tell them what you have heard to-night, Masters. Tell them that no good Christian need ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... clutched at an imaginary something in the air, as if for support, then, finding none, she would let her wrists fall supine, while she gazed about with quivering lips and wild, restless eyes. Plainly, there was something she feared. She was almost over the verge of hysteria. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... of course, be ferreted out. But there is no occasion for panic. We need a sane consciousness of the disease, a knowledge of its ways and of the means of prevention and cure for the world at large. We do not need hysteria, whether personal or general, and there is nothing in the facts of the situation to warrant the development of such a mental attitude either on the part of the syphilitic or of those by whom he ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... Mr. De Gex said breathlessly. "She—she has been subject to fits of hysteria. The doctor has warned her of her heart. You heard her cries. I—I believe ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... can solve this riddle!" he kept muttering. Then he would glare at Ruth impatiently and execrate the squeamishness of women. Ruth sat on the divan with her face between her hands, trying to force herself to realize the full extent of her predicament and beat back the feeling of hysteria that almost had her in its grip. The priest lay quiet. He was in a torture of discomfort on the upturned table, but he preferred not to give the Risaldar the satisfaction of knowing it. He eased his position quietly from time to time ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... Hyperesthesia (exaggeration of sensation) { as found in neurasthenia, or in mania. { Anesthesia (absence of sensation) { as in the numbness of hysteria; in sensory { paralysis. Disorders / Retardation of < as in dementia and melancholia. Sensation "Clouding" or dulness { as in simple depression. { Perversion { as in dementia and melancholia. Sweet may taste sour; fresh food may ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... for this!" he groaned, and the tragedy in his voice contrasted so quaintly with his comic appearance, bareheaded, hair ruffled, and costume sketchy, that I felt rising symptoms of hysteria, which had to be controlled. "I must get you and the mater and Milly into safety somehow. To-night is the limit. Mater's more dead than alive, and ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... it is extremely useful in dyspepsia, flatulent colic, hysteria, and nervous diseases; and where there are no inflammatory symptoms, it is an excellent remedy ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... knew how difficult it is to keep one's balance upon the steep, lonely paths of originality, how easily the pathfinder, overwhelmed by the giddy sense of unbounded freedom, falls down into gulfs of fanaticism, hysteria, bigotry ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... explained some peculiarities of her work. She tried to talk to him about French experiments in hypnotism, and how it was said sometimes to bring to light unsuspected sides of a personality. But he laughed at hypnotism as a mixture of fraud and hysteria. So with many searchings of ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... Many of us were walking up and down in agitation. Nevertheless, there was no hysteria and no ignominious expression of fear as there had been on the ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... hysteria rising in her voice again. "I told you it sounded fairly near the closet, as if—as if somebody bumped into something. That's what it was like! That's exactly what it was like. And I was so frightened of being found in the closet ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... slept; equally plain that she had wept copiously. She sighed, she groaned, she drew in her breath, she shook her head, as she waited on table. In short, she seemed in so precarious a state, like a petard three times charged with hysteria, that I did not dare to address her; and stole out of the house on tiptoe, and actually ran downstairs, in the fear that she might call me back. It was plain that this degree of tension could ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tell me?—Is it he who died mad? he who was carried off by phthisis? he who was killed by paralysis? she whose constitutional feebleness caused her to die in early youth?—Whose is the poison of which I am to die? What is it, hysteria, alcoholism, tuberculosis, scrofula? And what is it going to make of me, an ataxic or a madman? A madman. Who was it said a madman? They all say it—a ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... shuffled over the stills, dwelling on each with excited admiration. Her excitement was pronounced. It seemed to be a sort of nervous excitement. It had caused her face to flush deeply, and her manner, especially over the Western pictures, at moments oddly approached hysteria. Merton was deeply gratified. He had expected the art studies to produce no such impression as this. The Countess in the casting office had certainly manifested nothing like hysteria at beholding them. It must be that the ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... is official Germany, is rather friendly toward the United States. Japan, the "yellow peril" is a great war dirigible that is inflated with war scares and hysteria. This aims to keep the United States preoccupied on their Western coastline, so they will not have any desire to meddle with certain plans that may eventuate in Europe within the next few years. The Japanese question is fostered ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... controls again. They were hopelessly jammed by the great magnetic attraction of the Sun. They had been jammed for hours now. He forced his way back to his bunk, and securely lashed himself to it again. Sleep was his only hope now, his only real escape from the growing, screaming hysteria within him. ...
— Rescue Squad • Thomas J. O'Hara
... save his brother now! His small wits, and alas! his smaller methods, were equal to the despairing task. As soon as he saw her waiting under the tree he fell to capering and dancing with an extravagance in which hysteria had no small part. "Sold! sold! sold again, and got ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... upon all the senses. It has at all times been supposed to have a healing power, and in the Middle Ages it was believed to cure epilepsy, madness, convulsions, hysteria, and all forms of nervous affections; while in our own time it is usefully employed in cerebral diseases, since it has both a stimulating and soothing effect. Women, since they are generally more nervous and sensitive than men, are more especially affected by music. Animals as well as man are ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... very cursory examination that he made; and the upshot of his opinion, triumphantly accepted by Mrs. Merrifield, was that there was nothing seriously amiss with the child, that she only needed care, regularity and bracing, and that the stifling, gasping spasms were simply the effect of hysteria. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... do nothing to check the epidemic of foul language, gross suggestion, and raving obscenity of word and thought that broke out. The writers abandoned all self-restraint under the impression that they were upholding virtue instead of outraging it. They infected each other with their hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently mad. They finally forced the police to arrest Mr Daly and his company, and led the magistrate to express his loathing of the duty thus forced upon him of reading an unmentionable and abominable ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... OF "POSSESSION." Survival of the belief in diabolic activity as the cause of such epidemics Epidemics of hysteria in classical times In the Middle Ages The dancing mania Inability of science during the fifteenth century to cope with such diseases Cases of possession brought within the scope of medical research during the sixteenth century Dying-out of this form of mental disease in northern Europe ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... causes of diseases and untimely deaths. He can do so in a variety of ways and not the least by providing against sexual excesses and abuses. These are a copious fountain of ill to humanity. A host of diseases, such as tuberculosis, diabetes, cardial and nervous affections, epilepsy, hysteria, general debility, weaknesses of sight, languor and general worthlessness, hypochondria, weakness and total loss of reason, and, in married life, impotence and sterility are some of the effects of venereal excesses. Any excitement of the sexual passion before the body has received its ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes—and evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... were an effervescence. There was something near hysteria in the bright flashes of her wit. However gay, joyous, cynical, Jacqueline may have seemed to herself, to Berthe, terrified though the girl was, Jacqueline's ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... believed by the public and by many physicians that only persons afflicted with hysteria and nervous troubles could be put to sleep in this way, but it was a mistake; artificial somnambulism may be produced on many subjects ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet |
