n spoken in vain nor out
of season.

Hysteria In Literature.

Physicians tell us that there is no known disease, no known symptom of
disease, which hysteria cannot and does not counterfeit. Most skilful
surgeons are misled by its cunning into believing and pronouncing
able-bodied young women to be victims of spinal disease, "stricture of the
oesophagus," "gastrodynia," "paraplegia," "hemiplegia," and hundreds of
other affections, with longer or shorter names. Families are thrown into
disorder and distress; friends suffer untold pains of anxiety and
sympathy; doctors are summoned from far and near; and all this while the
vertebra, or the membrane, or the muscle, as it may be, which is so
honestly believed to be diseased, and which shows every symptom of
diseased action or inaction, is sound and strong, and as well able as ever
it was to perform its function.

The common symptoms of hysteria everybody is familiar with,--the crying
and laughing in inappropriate places, the fancied impossibility of
breathing, and so forth,--which make such trouble and mortification for
the embarrassed companions of hysterical persons; and which, moreover, can
be very easily suppressed by a little wholesome severity, accompanied by
judicious threats or sudden use of cold water. But few people know or
suspect the number of diseases and conditions, supposed to be real,
serious, often incurable, which are simply and solely, or in a great part,
undetected hysteria. This very ignorance on the part of friends and
relatives makes it almost impossible for surgeons and physicians to treat
such cases properly. The probabilities are, in nine cases out of ten, that
the indignant family will dismiss, as ignorant or hard-hearted, any
practitioner who tells them the unvarnished truth, and proposes to treat
the sufferer in accordance with it.

In the field of literature we find a hysteria as widespread, as
undetected, as unmanageable as the hysteria which skulks and conquers in
the field of disease.

Its commoner outbreaks everybody knows by sight and sound, and everybody
except the miserably ignorant and silly despises. Yet there are to be
found circles which thrill and weep in sympathetic unison with the
ridiculous joys and sorrows, grotesque sentiments, and preposterous
adventures of the heroes and heroines of the "Dime Novels" and novelettes,
and the "Flags" and "Blades" and "Gazettes" among the lowest newspapers.
But in well-regulated a