Two strange cases of functional disorder : with remarks on the association of hysteria and malingering / by F. Parkes Weber.

  • Weber, Frederick Parkes, 1863-1962.
Date:
1912
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Two strange cases of functional disorder : with remarks on the association of hysteria and malingering / by F. Parkes Weber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    students can (or used to be able to) induce vomiting without any difficulty after having filled their stomachs with beer. REMARKS ON THE ASSOCIATION OF HYSTERIA WITH MALINGERING Both these strange cases present many other points of interest which I cannot here discuss. In both cases organic changes were to some extent associated with the functional nervous symptoms. In neither case, it should be noted, was any method of psychical analysis (Freud) resorted to. I shall confine my further remarks to the subject of the association of functional nervous (hysterical) symptoms with simulation, an association not rarely met with, and well illus- trated by both the above cases. My explanation of this association has been already given in a paper entitled “ On the Association of Hysteria with Malingering, and on the Phylogenetic Aspect of Hys- teria in Pathological Exaggeration (or Disorder) of Tertiary (Ner- vous) Sex Characters,”12 but of course it must likewise be remem- bered that in girls and young women of the lower classes who for any reason have been kept long in hospitals the temptation toward malin- gering may become very great. In hysterical subjects this temptation may become irresistible. They may naturally dread return to the hard and wearisome dull routine of daily work and to the struggle for life, a struggle for which they feel themselves less well equipped than others. Hysteria was at one time, as the derivation of the word from the Greek boripa (“ uterus”) shows, regarded as a disorder connected with the female sexual organs, but the frequent occurrence of similar symptoms in the male (hysteria being sometimes as pronounced in males as in females) has long since proved that the idea of the ex- clusive connection of hysteria with the female sexual organs is absurd. Sex characters may be divided into: (1) primary, those concerned with the sexual organs; (2) secondary, those concerned with the breasts, the facial hair, the features, the voice, the form of the skele- ton, the development of the skeletal muscles and the general conforma- tion ; and (3) tertiary. Tertiarv sex characters are those dependent on the nervous system, including both characters of instinct and char- 13 Royal Society of Medicine (London), Medical Section, Proceedings for November, 1911.