The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Scarlet Stigma, by James Edgar Smith

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Title: The Scarlet Stigma
A Drama in Four Acts

Author: James Edgar Smith

Release Date: January 28, 2010 [EBook #31112]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Scarlet Stigma

A Drama
In Four Acts

By

JAMES EDGAR SMITH.

Founded upon Nathaniel Hawthorne's Novel,
"The Scarlet Letter."

WASHINGTON, D.C.
JAMES J. CHAPMAN,
1899.

Copyright, 1899, by JAMES EDGAR SMITH.

All rights reserved.

Press of George S. Krouse. Bindery of Edwin F. Price.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Stigmatization is a rare incident of ecstasy. Not many well
authenticated cases have been reported by competent medical
authorities, and yet there can be no doubt of its occasional
occurrence. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, article on Stigmatization
by Dr. Macalister, and references therein cited; also the work on
Nervous and Mental Diseases by Dr. Landon Carter Gray, page 511.
That it may occur in men of a high order of ability is instanced by
the case of St. Francis of Assisi.

It ought not to be necessary to point out that the entire third
scene in the second act of this play is a dramatic transcript from
the diseased consciousness of Mr. Dimsdell, that the Satan of the
play is an hallucination, and that the impress of the stigma upon
Dimsdell's breast is merely the culmination of his auto-hypnotic
ecstasy, or trance.

PERSONS REPRESENTED.

ROGER PRYNNE, called _Chillingworth_, a physician.
ARTHUR DIMSDELL, a youthful divine.
JO