Observations placeholder

As described in Illustrations Of The Influence Of The Mind Upon The Body In Health And Disease, Designed To Elucidate The Action Of The Imagination - Daniel Hack Tuke, M.D., M.R.C.P.,

PART II. THE EMOTIONS.
CHAPTER VIII. INFLUENCE OF THE EMOTIONS UPON THE VOLUNTARY MUSCLES.
SECTION II. — Irregular and Excessive Muscular Contraction : Spasms and Convulsions.

Marie Meyer lost her child, eight months old, to whom she was greatly attached. The grief this circumstance occasioned produced a painful sense of constriction in the larynx. Emotion of any kind at once aggravated it, causing great difficulty of breathing. On one occasion, for two hours, the attack was so violent, that she was blue in the face, speechless, scarcely conscious, and in fact all but suffocated. On the following day she was admitted into the Hotel Dieu, Lyons, under Dr. Lavirotte's care, after having suffered from her malady for seven months. She only remained in the hospital about three weeks, during which she was very simply treated, and left relieved, but not cured. Trousseau, after observing that laryngismus stridulus generally comes on "under the influence of some mental emotion or of a fright," adds, " I was once consulted for a little boy, who, from the beginning to the end of his first dentition, was subject to such seizures. He was of a very excitable temperament, and the least annoyance brought on an attack" (Trousseau's Clinical Medicine. Translated for the New Sydenham Society by Dr. Bazire. 4 vols. 1868, I, p. 356).