Convulsions reminiscent of fright.
Case 443. (Duprat, October, 1917.)
A soldier, 28, was blown up February 8, 1915, by a shell burst. He sustained no contusions but became completely mute. On July 3, he began to speak in a low voice. The torpillage treatment was unsuccessful because the man felt a morbid apprehension that the vibration of a loud voice or even of a rapid walk would resound in his brain. He had a sort of noise phobia, probably maintained by nightmares which frequently woke him up with a jerk though he could not remember their content. On the way back to his dépôt this man got off the train at the first station and went to a hospital complaining that the vibration of the train was going to be transmitted to his brain. Hysteriform crises developed in a few days.
According to Duprat these crises are nothing but a psychomotor development of the initial complex. The clonic and tonic convulsions are reminders of his states of extreme fright, a phenomenon of revival of the ideo-affective process, aggravated however by the oniric or post-oniric images.
Re diagnosis of hysterical fits, the absence of facial cyanosis, sub-conjunctival hemorrhages, petechiae of skin, and the Babinski reflex are suggestive for hysteria. Babinski points out that the initial cry, the fall, the loss of consciousness, the tongue-biting, the bloody frothing at the mouth, the urinary incontinence, and the post-convulsive prostration can all be consciously or unconsciously imitated. Hysterical convulsive movements are apt to be of wide range, gesticulatory, and opisthotonic.
Babinski announces to the supposed hysteric that he is going to reproduce the attack, as he is perfectly able to do by electricity. A mild current or mere electrode application suggests a fit in a hysteric, often very quickly. Babinski now announces that he can arrest the fit; carries out some selected procedure, and stops the fit. During the hysterical fit, the patient of course hears what is being said and during this time wrong suggestions must not be offered.