26, came to me with the following history.

At the age of 20 she had a fall, and began in a week or two to have an irritable spine.
Then, after a few months, a physician advised rest, to which she took only too kindly, and in a year from the time of her accident she was rarely out of bed.

Surrounded by highly sympathetic relatives, to whom chronic illness was somewhat novel, she speedily developed, with their tender aid, hyperaesthetic states of the eye and ear, so that her nurses crept about in a darkened room, the piano was silenced, and the children kept quiet.

By slow degrees a whole household passed under the selfish despotism of an hysterical girl.

Intense constipation, anorexia, and alternate states of dysuria, anuria, and polyuria followed, and before long her sister began to fail in health, owing to the incessant exactions to which she too willingly yielded.