"Hysteria" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... oppression of a wholly novel excitement. No such evidences of emotion were ever given in the parish church where the worthy clergyman read his duly prepared or perhaps thoughtfully purchased sermon. Sometimes a new form of hysteria possessed some of Wesley's congregations, and irrepressible peals of laughter broke from some of the brethren and sisters, who declared that they were forced to it by Satan. Wesley quite accepted this explanation, and ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Cashel, with a triumph that was half choked by the remnant of his hysteria. "Who is trying to make a secret now, ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... chauvinistic hysteria, Swedish politicians have naturally had an exceedingly delicate problem to solve. On one point opinion in Sweden has been unanimous. It has emphatically refused to accept a mere personal Union as a solution of ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... 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 of old, all that go near to her, all that look upon her, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... supposition of unknown causes and laws is rank heresy. Until more recent years, it was not permitted to listen to or show any disposition to investigate the narratives of phenomena which have since been "explained" and reduced to such legalized causes as hysteria or hypnotism, and even (of late) to thought-transference. But since this happy reconciliation has been effected, such stories are allowed to be believed on ordinary evidence, although the accounts of other "unclassed" supernormal marvels coming ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... 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 play. Of course ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... 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
... suddenly broke into shrill laughter. Two women came in, and one said; "Why, what on earth's the matter? Have they blown you up for your didoes to-night? What need you care. You pleased the audience." The other said, quietly: "Just get a glass of water for her; she has a touch of hysteria. I wonder who caused it?" No person had caused it. Clara Morris was merely waking from a sound sleep, unconsciously visioning that woman of the dim future who was to conquer the public in her portrayal of great ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... tore off her headphones. "Roger Snedden," she cried with a hysteria that would have dumfounded her underlings, "you've brought the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world, all right! Now ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... informed that "extreme ugliness" and "male hysteria" are admitted as "adequate disqualifications" for the French Army. If the same rule only applied to the English House of Commons, what a deal of noise and nonsense ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... of him, his mind was "impelled to concern itself with all the needs of mankind, impelled to poke its nose into every pot where the good God cooks the future." The theatre offered for a time another form of dissipation than his religious hysteria. He hated concerts, and compared himself to a conjurer or a clever trick poodle; he took up with the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later he fell under the spell of the Abbe Lamennais. Then ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... proof that, through a long-continued and deliberate education for that purpose, the German people lost its moral sense and set up diabolical standards in place of those common to all civilized races. We know that religious hysteria has at different times, like the influenza, swept over a nation, or that a society has lost its taste for generations together in art, and in poetry. We remember that the Witchcraft Delusion obsessed ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... whirling, hurling, throbbing, maddened blood. My brain is on fire, my pen is a flash of lightning. I see stars, three stars, that is to say, one of the best brands plucked from the burning. I'm going to make your flesh creep. I'll give you fits, paralytic fits, epileptic fits, and fits of hysteria, all at the same time. Have I ever been in Paris? Never. Do I know the taste of absinthe? How dare you ask me such a question? Am I a woman? Ask me another. Ugh! it's coming, the demon is upon me. I must write three murderous ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... of retiring for meditation and prayer to the lonely and desolate Mount Hira. A vivid sense of the being of one Almighty God and of his own responsibility to God, entered into his soul. A tendency to hysteria in the East a disease of men as well as of women—and to epilepsy helps to account for extraordinary states of body and mind of which he was the subject. At first he ascribed his strange ecstasies, or hallucinations, to evil spirits, especially on the occasion when an angel directed him to begin ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... you at length to leave the room; you pretended to do so, but when I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria of rage you moved suddenly towards me. A sense of horror came over me, for what exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two nights of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... frock now so badly smirched and the white gloves which had split asunder in her fall were treasures beyond compute, and Helena herself loved pretty clothes. She felt a keen sympathy in that and another respect—she had suffered from hysteria and always went prepared for an emergency. Stepping quietly to Mabel's side, she waved aside the other ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... coup de soleil [Fr.], siriasis^. fanaticism, infatuation, craze; oddity, eccentricity, twist, monomania (caprice) 608; kleptodipsomania^; hypochondriasis [Med.] &c (low spirits) 837; melancholia, depression, clinical depression, severe depression; hysteria; amentia^. screw loose, tile loose, slate loose; bee in one's bonnet, rats in the upper story. dotage &c (imbecility) 499. V. be insane &c adj.. become insane &c adj.; lose one's senses, lose one's reason, lose one's faculties, lose one's wits; go mad, run mad, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... for our own comfort and strength. We need it to deliver us from the vanity and hollowness, the fever and hysteria of the present age. We need it to make us better soldiers and workers for every good cause. Peace is coming to all the earth some day through Christ. And those who shall do most to help Him bring it are the men and women to whom He gives Peace ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
... to the Bar in 1894; of a weighty corpulence and stormy visage, Mr. Jones now settles himself in his arm-chair to hear and determine all this business about Absalom Adkins and the Boots. How admirably impressive is Mr. Jones's typically English absence of hysteria, his calm, his restfulness. Indeed, give Mr. Jones five minutes to himself and it is even betting he would be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... institutions. Doubtless the Lusk report may quite properly be classed as a mere episode in war psychology. Having armed to put down the Germans and succeeded in so doing, the ardor of conflict does not immediately abate, but new enemies are sought and easily discovered. The hysteria of repression will probably subside, but it is now a well-recognized fact that in disease, whether organic or mental, the abnormal and excessive are but instructive exaggerations and perversions of the usual course of things. They do not exist by themselves, but represent the temporary and exaggerated ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... who will tell me, who will 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 madman, a madman, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... and I entered, but she did not move. The thirty-odd passengers were huddled in a group. Solemn, white-faced men; frightened women. Some of them were sobbing. One Earth woman—a young widow—sat holding her little girl, and wailing with uncontrolled hysteria. The child knew me. As I appeared now, with my gold laced white coat over my shoulders, the little girl seemed to see in my uniform a mark of authority. She left her mother ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... 'monstrous regiment of women,' as the old writer hath it. Look at the diseases from which we are suffering—materialism and hysteria. The one has been intensified and extended, the other has newly declared itself, since women came to the front. No materialist like a woman; give her a voice in the control of things, and good-bye to all our ideals. Hard cash, military glory, glittering and clanging triumph—these be the gods ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... immediately beyond the safe confederacy of the group, skulked the wolf of fanaticism. I 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, ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... 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
... 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 ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... your poem, 'The Vision of Helen,' are neurotics. They suffer from morbid fears, delusions, hysteria, violent mental and emotional complexities. A text-book ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... of Dr Evans's assistant she again fainted, and upon that followed an attack of hysteria. When at length the medical man had seen her, Harvey received an adequate, but far from reassuring, explanation of the state of things. At nightfall Dr Evans came in person, and was with the patient for a long time. He spoke less gravely of the case, offered a lucid diagnosis, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which as often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It is more wholesome for this reason, that it can ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... instant afterward he 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—an 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 his presence ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... not submit? If you do not submit you are lost. You are condemned irretrievably to perversions, to debility, to hysteria. ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the absence of any modern model, his converts expected and received spiritual gifts. Shall we describe such manifestations as hysteria, hypnotism, or hypocrisy? Their fanaticism was contagious, especially after their flight to the mountains of Kwangsi. There Siu-tsuen boldly raised the flag of rebellion and proclaimed that he had a divine call to restore the throne to the Chinese race, ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... that Rachel, unsuspectingly, had been spared a tremendous emotional crisis. By this time she had grown nearly accustomed to the fact of the disappearance of the money. She had completely recovered from the hysteria caused by old Batchgrew's attack, and was, indeed, in the supervening calm, very ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... is a powerful antispasmodic. It is employed in hysteria, hypochondria, convulsions, and spasms, when unaccompanied by inflammation. Dose—Of the gum or powder, from three to ten grains, usually administered in the form of a pill; of the tincture, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the words when he witnessed their tremendous effect. She was on the very brink of hysteria, and the suddenness of her ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... internally, it is extremely useful in dyspepsia, flatulent colic, hysteria, and nervous diseases; and where there are no inflammatory symptoms, it is an excellent remedy in hooping ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... the one 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 ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... I 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 safe and sane comrade in petticoats. ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... will not lend themselves to it without any clear consciousness of the moral bearings of what they are doing. The cases of miraculously-effected cures of which Eginhard is ocular witness appear to belong to classes of disease in which malingering is possible or hysteria presumable. Without modern means of diagnosis, the names given to them are quite worthless. One "miracle," however, in which the patient, a woman, was cured by the mere sight of the church in which the relics of the blessed ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... death of her only daughter. He approached her, offering awkward condolences, and at once was moved to a further expression of his sympathy for her in her great loss by trying to shake her hand. At the touch of his fingers to hers the woman, already in a mood of grief bordering on hysteria, shrank back screaming out that his hand smelled of the soap with which he coated his gallows-nooses. She ran away from him, crying out as she ran, that he was accursed; that he was marked with that awful smell and could not rid himself of it. To those who had witnessed this ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... prosecutor, of course, tried to calm her. I can't help thinking that they felt ashamed of taking advantage of her hysteria and of listening to such avowals. I remember hearing them say to her, "We understand how hard it is for you; be sure we are able to feel for you," and so on, and so on. And yet they dragged the evidence out of the raving, hysterical woman. She described at last with extraordinary ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... shout of laughter; even the imperturbable Sneyd (who had continued to win steadily) wiped tears from his eyes, and Madame de Vaurigard gave way to intermittent hysteria throughout ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... Ferrers,' she said, gently, 'it is only hysteria;' and she held out a glass of cold water to him. The action provoked me. I tore myself from Raby's grasp, dashing the glass aside. I longed to break something. There was a bottle beside me, some chemical acid that Hugh Redmond had carelessly left that very morning. I snatched up the vial, for I ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... home and brilliant future to become a bum. She wanted to know why. Vespa took six long paragraphs to give six explanations, all equally valid and all advanced by equally distinguished sociologists. He himself favored the mass hysteria theory. But if you looked at his gobbledegook closely, you could reduce it to one phrase, We ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... diseases of women chapters are devoted to amenorrhea, menorrhagia, hysteria (suffocatio matricis), prolapse, ulceration, abscess, cancer, dropsy and "ventosity" ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... bottle-openers. 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, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... head-hunting crimes was committed and the actual drama got under way. I can recall reading the sensational accounts in the newspapers and my anxious fear that this fresh display of criminal perversion would excite Carse into a state nearing hysteria. I telegraphed him that same day, begging his refusal to bother with the case and requesting that he come to visit me. His reply was swift and brief; he had already commenced his investigations of the ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... increase of the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain? was what was ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... you have forgotten the case?" he resumed. "We called it hysteria, not knowing what else it was. I don't forgive the girl for slipping through our fingers; I hate to be beaten by Death, in that way. Have you made up your mind what to do, on the next occasion? Perhaps ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... splashed thickly against the window over their heads, they would look up at the window or across at the door. And when the boat would roll down and, rolling, threaten to dump them all on the floor, they would grab the table and yell "Whoa!" or "Wait a second!" with just a suggestion of hysteria in their throats; and somebody would call out, "Go on with the story, Joe!" and the ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... as the Chief and the Boss had hinted at in their conversation, a wave of hysteria which had swept over the city only a short time before regarding what had come to be called the "poisoned needle" cases. Personally I had doubted them and I had known many doctors and scientists as well as vice and ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... sober, clear, and true testimony of the former, to the fanciful and impossible assertions of the latter, there is a straight, slowly rising road on which testimony appears progressively less true, and more impossible. No man can say where the quality of foolishness begins—nervousness, excitement, hysteria, over-strain, illusion, fantasy, and pathoformic lies, are the shadings which may be distinguished, and the quantity of untruth in such testimonies may be demonstrated, from one to one hundred per cent., without needing to skip a single degree. We must not, however, ignore ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Sheila Carmack who answered, her voice on the high edge of hysteria. "Meaning? I think it might mean," she said, "that ECAIAC has also had a recent indulgence for the whodunits. But with a smattering of confusion, wouldn't you say? Or would you say a distortion of the detectival? ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... trance-speech, the willing-game, etc., are now, thanks to him, instruments of research, reagents like litmus paper or the galvanometer, for revealing what would otherwise be hidden. These are so many ways of putting the Subliminal on tap. Of course without the simultaneous work on hypnotism and hysteria independently begun by others, he could not have pushed his own work so far. But he is so far the only generalizer of the problem and the only user of all the methods; and even though his theory of the extent of the Subliminal should have to be subverted ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... overstrained self-command snapped like a bow-string and his breast shook with sudden hysteria. "Will I take it?" he cried with a gasping laugh that was rather more like a sob. "Will I take the Court of St. James? Will I take money from home? Oh, my God, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... John Schuyler, of late. A drop to desuetude may of its last half be far more silent than of its first. One gathers momentum, as one descends, whether the descent be physical, or moral. At the inception comes the gradual slipping—the vast, frantic effort to stay that slipping—the exertion, the hysteria, the fright, the remorse, the stretching out of hands to aid and of souls to help.... Then, things become different. There comes a vast silence. The hands draw back; the souls are hidden; and when Hope itself lifts its pinions and soars away, ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... 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 ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... clutching. 'Charley, don't you play me false, don't you play me false! My God, Charley, I'll kill you—I'll do something with you, if you play me false.' It was like a child in hysterics. I didn't realize it immediately, but that was just what was the matter with my brother—hysteria. 'Easy,' I said, 'where can I take you? I'm not known here.' 'Take!' he says, 'to your own house, of course.' 'Listen,' I said. 'Do you hear what I say?' He nodded. 'Well,' I went on, 'I'm the chief engineer of a steamer in yon dock. If you come down with me, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... instead singularly unstable and singularly complex. It has been found that under some unusual stimulus—such as an injury, an illness, or the strain of an intense emotion—there may result a disintegration, or, as it is technically termed, a dissociation, of personality, giving rise it may be to hysteria, it may be to hallucinations, it may even be to a complete disappearance of the original personality and its replacement by a new personality, ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... less 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
... frequent in hysteria in girls, but it is of no consequence. When hiccoughs set in during the course of any serious disease it is a very ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... whistled. Phoebe drew a long breath and prayed that the train would make a short stop and speed along for she could not endure much more. She looked at Mother Bab. The hysteria was turned from her. She knew she would have to be brave for the sake ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... temperatures, employed in baths and for drinking purposes, as well. Except in very hot weather the water is inodorous, but its sedative properties have placed it in the first rank. It has been used with great benefit in all nervous complaints, hypochondria, hysteria, intestinal complaints, indigestion, &c., its action ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... preoccupied with Catherine and my own thoughts, the door opened without my having taken a dig at the opener beforehand. The arrival was all I needed to crack wide open in a howling fit of hysteria. It was so pat. I couldn't help but let myself go: "Well! This looks like ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... from any ancestry having any apparent taint of lunacy in their blood, but they do receive from their progenitors certain impressions upon their mental and moral, as well as their physical beings, which impressions, like an iron mould, fix and shape their subsequent destinies. Hysteria in the mother may develop insanity in the child, while drunkenness in the father may impel epilepsy, or mania, in the son. Ungoverned passions in the parents may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of their children, and the bad treatment of the wife may produce ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... task: the inferences may be drawn by experts. The old theory of imposture, the Voltairean theory of a 'poor idiot,' the vague charge of 'hysteria,' are untenable. The honesty and the genius of Jeanne are no longer denied. If hysteria be named, it is plain that we must argue that, because hysteria is accompanied by visionary symptoms, all visions are proofs of hysteria. Michelet holds by hallucinations ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... stop and hear you call yourself such a name," said Garvington, ostentatiously dense to her true meaning. "It is hysteria that speaks, and not my dear sister. Very natural when you are so ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... from Mr. Kipling with his old-fashioned injunction, "Keep ye the law." There are certain laws which Mr. Wells proclaims on the housetops that he sees no necessity for keeping, and so Mr. Kipling is buried under piles of opprobrium—"the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and the inconsistency," and so on. As for Mr. Bernard Shaw, we all know his own view of the relation in which he stands ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... idea that Peachy would ever get over it. My God, you fellows have no idea what I've been through with her in regard to this question of flying. Why, one night three months ago, she had an awful attack of hysteria because I told her I'd have to cut Angela's wings as soon ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... there is more or less pleasure, except in that of hysteria, when by a sudden shock the course of Nature is reversed, and excessive grief will produce the signs of joy, as extravagant delight will sometimes exhibit those of sorrow. We should also exclude the laughter caused by inhalation of gas, and that ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... right side of the tongue, and for two years taste was totally abolished. It was normal at the time of examination. The author offered no explanation of this case, but the patient gave a decidedly neurotic history, and the symptoms seem to point with some degree of probability to hysteria. Pope reports a peculiar case in which there were daily attacks of neuralgia preceded by sweating confined to a bald spot on the head. Rockwell reports a case of unilateral hyperidrosis in a feeble old man which he thought due to organic affection ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... all so ridiculous—my having thought that the Harbison man was a gentleman, and finding him a cad, and worse. It was excruciatingly funny. I quite got a headache from laughing; indeed I laughed until I found I was crying, and then I knew I was going to have an attack of strangulated emotion, called hysteria. So I got up and turned on all the lights, and bathed my face with cologne, and ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... foremost writers to-day? The Hauptmanns and the Sudermanns, gropers in obscurity, violent sentimentalists, 'bigots to laxness,' Dr. Johnson would have called them. Their world is a moral and artistic chaos agitated by spasms of hysteria. Their work is a mass of decay touched with gleams of phosphorescence. The Romans would have called it immunditia. What is your new American word for that kind of thing, Richard? I heard you ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... and asked if I were the doctor from the old Grange. I said I was, and she begged me to come in and see her daughter-in-law. She was very ill, and the local doctor is gone. I found a young, very pretty girl, with a tiny baby, in as bad a state of hysteria as I ever saw. But that is not the story. That I heard by degrees. It seems the father-in-law, a veteran of 1870, now old, and nearly helpless, is of good family, but married, in his middle age, a woman of the country. They had one son who was sent away to school, and became a civil engineer. ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... along it. There was only room for one on the sand, and the other two, for they walked abreast, waded ankle-deep in the water. From the little city below them they could hear the hum of a myriad of tiny voices—thin, shrill and faint. Suddenly the Big Business Man laughed. There was no hysteria in his voice now—just ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... that Conjuring and Ventriloquism are old trades. They must disbelieve all Philosophical Transactions containing the records of painful and careful inquiry into now familiar disorders of the senses of seeing and hearing, and into the wonders of somnambulism, epilepsy, hysteria, miasmatic influence, vegetable poisons derived by whole communities from corrupted air, diseased imitation, and moral infection. They must disbelieve all such awkward leading cases as the case of the Woodstock Commissioners and their man, and the case ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... chaffed the tramp, shifting from fright to high spirit with the hysteria of weak natures. "I'm sure glad to see one of the good old sort. I didn't know what I was dropping in on when I fell down that hill. But it's all right, hey? I'm on the road. My name is Boston Fat, and my ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... treatment of this problem exists. Modern psychiatry, so far as it takes a sort of general notice of it, contents itself, as Krafft-Ebing does, with calling night wandering "a nervous disease," "apparently a symptomatic manifestation of other neuroses, epilepsy, hysteria, status nervosus."[2] The older literature is more explicit. It produces not only a full casuistic but seeks to give some explanation aside from a reference to neurology.[3] So, for example, the safety in climbing upon dangerous places finds ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... Sweeney Among the Nightingales The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady Preludes Rhapsody on a Windy Night Morning at the Window The Boston Evening Transcript Aunt Helen Cousin Nancy Mr. Apollinax Hysteria Conversation Galante La ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... from the case would be from assuming that lofty tone of calm, unmoved impartiality of which Marshall was such a master—and never more than on this occasion—and from setting himself sternly against popular hysteria. The words with which his opinion closes ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... an ill-directed 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 ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... vertigo, paralysis of limbs, vomiting, sciatica, or incontinence or suppression of urine, spitting of blood; others, again, simulate hysteria, epilepsy, or insanity. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... underwent intermittent nervous attacks that returned nightly, and threw his senses into confusion while showing him the hideous green face of his victim. These attacks resembled the accesses of some frightful illness, a sort of hysteria of murder. The name of illness, of nervous affection, was really the only one to give to the terror that Laurent experienced. His face became convulsed, his limbs rigid, his nerves could be seen knotting beneath his skin. The body suffered ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... 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
... 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 upon ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... continued to ascend, but the thick tropical growth did not lessen during the tramp of the morning. Leith walked with the Professor, who appeared to be in a state of joy bordering upon hysteria, while Holman and I in the rear tried to assist the two girls over the roughest sections of the road. I thought as we scrambled through impenetrable scrub and crawled over rocky piles that it was the strangest expedition that had ever set forth. If Leith was the wicked ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... du ciel, Madame la Comtesse," said St. Jerome, but Grandmamma heard him not. She covered her face with her hands, and her sobs soon passed to hiccups and hysteria. Mimi and Gasha came running in with frightened faces, salts and spirits were applied, and the whole house was soon ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... that seized and shook him and thrust him away. The make-believe of ferocity passed out of his growls; the ferocity in them became real. Also, in the moments when he was shoved away and was springing back to the attack, he yelped in high-pitched puppy hysteria. And Captain Van Horn, realizing, suddenly, instead of clutching, extended his hand wide open in the peace sign that is as ancient as the human hand. At the same time his voice rang out the single word, "Jerry!" In it ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... calmly poised woman of the world held the clinging hand in a firm, warm grasp, the low voice spoke evenly. "Many people feel just as you do, dear, on the eve of sailing. Some are made actually ill, even quite old travelers. But they know that it is pure hysteria and they fight it off, and afterward they are able to laugh at their fears. My dear, you are quite mistaken about there being any danger threatening your father. He is in the best of hands, and he himself ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... shall be able to meet your wishes in a much simpler way, and yet throw sufficient safeguards around the new system to keep it from proving hurtful, should an attack of political hysteria ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... Sarah; she would have played it with the voice you wish in the love scenes; I cannot do any better. You irritate me too much: I have had enough of it!" And she ran off, sobbing, into the little guignol, where she had an attack of hysteria. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... of his father, Gilbert a 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 ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found Kennicott waiting for her, and exulting, "Have a walk? Well, like the town? Great lawns and trees, eh?" she was able to say, with a self-protective maturity new to her, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... new rites, it based itself on and became the cause of a deepening devotion to morality. Luria would have looked with dismay on the moral laxity which did later on intrude, in consequence of unbridled emotionalism and mystic hysteria. There comes the point when he that interprets Law emotionally is no longer Law-abiding. The antinomian crisis thus produced meets us in the careers of many who, like Sabbatai Zebi, assumed ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... 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 plunging ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... filled with wonder and anxiety when he saw his apparently lifeless daughter. He was amazed that she should have been overcome by such influence as, he understood, the old gentleman must wield. She had always, he said, enjoyed the finest health, and was as little inclined to hysteria as woman well could be. Lefevre told the father that this was something other than hystero-hypnotism, which, while it reassured him as to his daughter's former health, made him the more anxious ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... and trembled all over with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided. "There! That comes of strangling people with hymns!" she said at last. "Hold me, hold me still. It is ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... on to spell out his charges. The regiment was unreliable (p. 437) in combat, particularly on the defensive and at night; it abandoned positions without warning to troops on its flanks; it wasted equipment; it was prone to panic and hysteria; and some of its members were guilty of malingering. The general made clear that his charges were directed at the unit as an organization and not at individual soldiers, but he wanted the unit removed and its men reassigned ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... his long hair rose with it until he appeared to be expanding himself like some elastic snake. One gentleman on the front bench below the gangway actually fell from his seat and rolled upon the floor, and the House laughed itself almost into hysteria, whilst the hapless orator stood waving in apologetic dumb show. Now here was a tragedy indeed: to have the dream of a whole lifetime at last actually realised and concrete and then to see it go to ruin in that way. So swift a transition from the very height of triumph to the very ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... seeing me the slightly larger of the two advanced with a half-hearted attempt at solemnity, though unable to resist a Parthian shaft at his companion, who was seized on the instant with a paroxysm of suppressed hysteria. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... prayer and faith are cited; such incidents as the 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 tonics, fake ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... abnormal features of the situation, and thus brings the psychotherapeutic process too much into the neighborhood of pathology. Psychotherapy became in such hands essentially a study of hypnotism, with especial interest in its relation to hysteria and similar diseases. The much more essential relation of psychotherapy to the normal mental life, the relation of suggestion and hypnotism to the normal functions seemed too often neglected. Whoever wants to influence the mind in the interest ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... collarbone crackled under the coupling pin and he fell forward with a yell. Then over him and over the fallen door came the rush. The handful of defenders chose their corners and fought in them, each in his own way; some in a sort of hysteria, screaming curses, some striking silently, and one, the singer, with a laugh on his lips. When the fireman was struck senseless, this man fought over him until forced back by press of numbers, so that he no longer had room ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... got into the hall and saw them all sitting in a row with their faces blacked, I said "I'm sure they can't be the Young Men's Christian Association!"... Hysteria? my poor dear wife is a dreadful sufferer from it—I've known her unable to sleep at all except with one foot curled round her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 11, 1893 • Various
... intellectual deficiency or perversity, but that it is the result, in the majority of cases—I might almost say in all-of an alienated will. Therefore, if you wish to love, do not try to work yourself into a hysteria of affection, but take into your hearts and minds the Christian facts, and mainly the fact of the Cross, which will set free the frozen and imprisoned fountains of your affections, and cause them to flow out abundantly in sweet water. First faith, then ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... enters from corridor. She is a woman of forty, dressed in a tailor-made costume. She has searching eyes. There is something of hysteria about her ...
— Three Plays • Padraic Colum
... reply, but rocked herself backwards and forwards on the chair. She sobbed so violently that she appeared to be threatened with an attack of hysteria. Kemp watched her silently. The cat on the sofa-bedstead, as if awakened by the noise, got up, yawned, looked inquiringly round, and then with a measured leap sprang into the girl's lap. She was startled by his act and then she smiled ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... the pitiful calamity whose last scene she had discovered, her thoughts once more upon her husband and herself. Had the shock of that spectacle in the Cresslers' house, and the wearing suspense in which she had lived of late, so torn and disordered the delicate feminine nerves that a kind of hysteria animated and directed her impulses, her words, and actions? Laura did not know. She only knew that the day was going and that her husband neither came near her ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... for revenge, or in self-defense, he did that also without hysteria, for it was a very businesslike proceeding ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... earnestness and the pitiless logic of those days press, 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.
... swings down and hands him one folded sheet of yellow paper. Ed says, what's the matter—couldn't he get to copy the report? Charlie says the report is all there on that sheet, every word of it. One sheet! And Ed had been expecting at least forty pages of able narrative, even without hysteria. Even before he looks at it Ed says ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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
... the nerves, brought on by anxiety or disease, leads to ordinary hysteria, emotional and foolish. A similarly high tension, brought about by the will, renders a man sensitive to super-physical vibrations Going to sleep has no significance, but going into Samadhi is a priceless power. The process is largely the same, but one is due to ordinary ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... have called Dr. Browne, apparently as amicus curiae, to give his view of the fits which were supposed to be the work of the witches. He was clearly of the opinion that the Devil had even more to do with that case than he has with most cases of hysteria; and consequently the witches, it must be said, fared no better in Sir Matthew Hale's court than many of their kind in various parts of Christendom about the same time. But it would be unreasonable for us ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... 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 may exert this effect, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... shrill laugh of hysteria. Jane led her to the couch and sat beside her. Kitty leaned forward, staring at the floor. Now and then she pressed her handkerchief to her mouth, stifling. Suddenly she looked up ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... 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 known to be hydrophobic; and we can, without difficulty, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... broke into applause. Then it was hysteria, pandemonium. Fifty thousand knew their city was ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... of the problem. But a thing happened: one of those shocking blunders we too often let happen. The efforts of the chief of police were set back, because of that blunder, no one can tell how far. A new hysteria of vice and disorder dates from the ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... Admission to picture galleries and concerts and so forth will remain quite low. The views from Richmond Hill or Hindhead, or along Pall Mall at sunset, the smell of the earth, the taste of fruit and of kisses—these things are unaffected by the machinations of trusts and the hysteria of stock exchanges. Travel, which after books is the finest of all embroideries (and which is not to be valued by the mile but by the quality), is decidedly cheaper than ever it was. All that is required is ingenuity in one's expenditure. And much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... pitiable, 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 ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and heavy failures. Esquire Camford went among the first in the general crash, and his fair consort's nerves went also. The nerve-reviver failed to produce the least soothing effect in this dreadful emergency, and she sank into a bed-ridden ghost of hysteria, with Thisbe for her constant attendant, to minister to her numerous wants, and feed her with lobsters' claws and Graham crackers, which constituted her sole food ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... seven pilots pretty much represented the feelings of a lot of the airline pilots. They weren't wide-eyed space fans, but they and their fellow pilots had seen something and whatever they'd seen weren't hallucinations, mass hysteria, balloons, or meteors. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... such a kind boy—they both were,' sobbed Lady Durwent in an enveloping hysteria, 'and so devoted to ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... rock back and forth, laughing the thin high laugh of hysteria. James silently walked to a water hydrant and filled a plastic cup. He brought ...
— Homesick • Lyn Venable
... front, on both sides from Independence to the river landing at Westport, the great spring caravan lay encamped, or housed in town. Now, on the last days of the rendezvous, a sort of hysteria seized the multitude. The sound of rifle fire was like that of a battle—every man was sighting-in his rifle. Singing and shouting went on everywhere. Someone fresh from the Mexican War had brought a drum, another a bugle. Without instructions, these began to sound their summons ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... insanity, hysteria, and nervous diseases the mumia of the sufferer must be planted, at 2 a.m., with a cutting of white poplar, and as soon as the latter shows evidences of decay, the ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... nation was making less preparations or was in point of fact so illy prepared for a conflict as England, nevertheless Germany, with a completeness of preparation such as the world has never witnessed, was constantly indulging in a very hysteria of fear at the imaginary designs of England upon Germany's ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... gentleman-in-waiting snorted in a most unbecoming manner, and dived under the counter, from beneath which he alternately mewed like a cat and crowed like a cock. It was a clear attack of hysteria. While the poor man was recovering from his seizure the old gentleman absent-mindedly ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... passion for justice, for democratic equality and the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet direct—these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling, rewriting again ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... kind of agony calls on God and man to realise the meaningless horror of it all and forbid, at any price, the possibility of its recurrence. If sometimes unjust and nearly always tragical, the book none the less is free from anything like hysteria. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... observances however were often tinctured with a good deal of heathenism, the traditional folk-lore of the country, in the form of charms, magic and starcraft. It is evident, wrote the author of "Social England,"[214:1] from the cases preserved by monkish chronicles, that the element of hysteria was prominent in the maladies of the Middle Ages, and that these affections were therefore peculiarly susceptible to psychic treatment. The Angles and Saxons brought with them to England a belief in medicinal runes and healing spells, and the cures wrought by their medical men were attributed to ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... temporary camp at a spot 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 terrible, ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... the same time calling them cowards. That was how I felt. I told myself that if I went—and the if seemed very remote—I should go on a conviction and not because of shoving. They could hand me as many white feathers as they liked, I wasn't going to be swept away by the general hysteria. Besides, where would be the sense in joining? Everybody said that our fellows would be home for Christmas. Our chaps who were out there ought to know; in writing home ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... were off, having handed over the keys to the new tenant, and Julia Cloud leaned back on the luxurious cushions and laughed. Not from mirth, for there were tears in her eyes; and not from nervousness, for she was never subject to hysteria; but just from sheer excitement and joy to think that she was really going out in the world at last to see things and live a ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... LADIES SMOCK. The Leaves. L. E. D.—Long ago it was employed as a diuretic; and, of late, it has been introduced in nervous diseases, as epilepsy, hysteria, choraea, asthma, &c. A dram or two of the powder is given twice or thrice a-day. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... free from hysteria and sticks straight to the unadulterated truth. A valuable addition to any man's ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... that harbor, and found his way to the wharf. His real difficulties confronted him at the village telegraph office. The visiting yachtsmen had flooded the place with messages, and the flustered young woman was in a condition nearly resembling hysteria. She was defiantly declaring that she would not accept any more telegrams. Instead of setting at work upon those already filed she was spending her time explaining her limitations to ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... 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
... 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 ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the 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 ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... heard. They seemed to frighten him; for he stole on quickly to his own room, and went to bed. Even there he could hear a shrill note of conversation occasionally from the opposite room, where Marian was sitting on a sofa, trying to subdue the hysteria which had been gaining on her since her escape from the balcony; whilst Elinor, seated on the corner of a drawer which projected from the dressing-table, talked incessantly ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... least indication of an improvement, give her warm praise. Be careful about bestowing caresses upon her, as she needs to be guarded against hysteria, I should judge from your description. To some children they are the sunlight, ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Starkweather is threatened with hysteria and is calmed by the frightened Connie, ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... lapsed into a pose of deep concentration, like a two-bit swami. Cam noticed a tiny, rodent-type nose thrusting itself up from Everett's side pocket. "Fear ... I detect great apprehension—panic—hysteria verging on the loss of reason ... third booth this side of the ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... he found himself incarcerated in the fortress of Peter and Paul. When the general was arrested, madame his wife—an adventuress named Gaskevitch, who had commenced life as a typist in a solicitor's office, and who was many years his junior—had a terrible attack of hysteria, for things had taken for her a most unexpected turn. The woman had been implicated in intrigue and treachery ever since. After copying some secret papers for a man in Kiev, she had blackmailed him, obtained a big ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... need support, and so we find michi, nichil, occurring quite regularly. The difficulty of i and y was met by the suppression of the latter; so that though it sometimes appears unexpectedly, as in hysteria, it is only treated as i. Between f and ph there was much uncertainty; phas, phanum, prophanus are well-known forms, or conversely Christofer, flenbothomari, Flegeton. B and p were often confused, as in babtizare, plasphemus; and p made its way into such words as ampnis, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... half-darkness, our faces mistily white. I could hear Peroxide breathing in a tremulous manner, as though in a moment she would break into hysteria. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... length this attack of Pascal’s as a well-known form of dynamical paralysis, of a similar nature with hypochondria and hysteria, proceeding from a disordered state of the nervous affections, the result of overwork acting upon a delicate organisation. The result is temporary, as distinguished from the paralysis arising from organic lesion, but indicates a highly susceptible constitution, the ready prey of melancholy ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... closing wears One more of those brief interludes from toil Which leave us still the labour-despot's spoil, Slaves of long hours and unrelaxing strain, Unstrengthened and unsolaced, soon again To tread the round, and lift the lengthening chain; Stand—till hysteria lays its hideous clutch On our girl-hearts, or epilepsy's touch Thrills through tired nerves and palsied brain. Again—again—again! How long? Till Death, upon its kindly quest, Gives ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... kestrel seemed as if she were going to hover there, in that spot, through all eternity. And when at last she condescended to surrender to the wind and vanish like a falling star into the horizon, our friend was as near nervous prostration and hysteria as a bird can be. A very little longer and I believe he would actually have died from sheer overstrain, instead ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... 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 every time you speak ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton |
