with remarkable fidelity. One of the most extraordinary cases of successful simulation on record is one which, in spite of modern facilities of detection, occurred in recent years. This artist, who, up to last year, was a frequent inmate in one or other of the London hospitals, visiting some of them more than once, showed his confidence in his own powers by selecting one of the most difficult parts presented in the whole range of disease. To feign paralysis of one half of the body, which he frequently did, is not so uncommon a thing; but his leading part was tetanus, a condition in which the muscles are thrown into a state of violent and continuous contraction. Some medical jurists had, indeed, pronounced it impossible to simulate this affection with even tolerable accuracy. To do so must require not only extraordinary command over the muscular system, but must involve a very considerable and constant expenditure of physical energy, with great discomfort, through a weary succession of restless days and sleepless nights. In spite, however, of all these difficulties and inconveniences, this man rendered the part so well as to deceive the practised eyes which watched him. At first, as was to be expected, his acting contained a few mistakes; but these were often considered merely anomalous deviations from the usual course of the disease, which rendered his case in a medical view all the more interesting. Like a careful artist, however, he gradually perfected himself in his part. Anything which in one hospital he gathered not to be strictly according to rule, was rectified on his appearance at another, until, it is said, he could render the disease from its onset through the different gradations of symptoms from slight to grave with almost faultless fidelity. One would like to know something of the thoughts of the rascal when a learned professor on one occasion delivered a clinical lecture to his students on his very interesting case. He must have needed all the artistic satisfaction which he experienced to enable him to brave the discomforts of his position. How he stood the variety of active treatment to which he was subjected, is something wonderful. Enormous quantities of powerful drugs, including some very potent poisons, were administered internally, while his head and back were kept externally at something like the temperature of an iceberg. On one occasion his death appearing

imminent, the services of the chaplain were called in, and the sufferer viewed his approaching end with patience and Christian fortitude. He proceeded to settle his worldly affairs, made his will, in which he considerately left a round sum, 'free of legacy-duty,' to the hospital which sheltered him, not forgetting also the physician's assistant who had charge of him. In return for so much consideration, the hospital authorities looked well after his comforts, allowed him any quantity of stimulants, with soups specially procured for him. His career at this institution was at last put an end to by one of his previous dupes happening to call and expose him. It is probable that this genius, after a very successful run on several metropolitan boards, is now starring it in the provinces.

The

The way in which artists in disease have occasionally been balked of their hardearned success, after they had all but attained it, must have not a little tantalised them. A seaman of the navy feigned a chronic decline so well that he was on the point of being discharged when the real nature of his disease was very unexpectedly elucidated. The mail from the sea-port at which the man was in hospital had been robbed, and the letters broken open with a view to search for money. burglars were captured, however, and the letters recovered. Among them was one from the sick seaman to his wife, in which he told her his scheme had succeeded, that he was to be invalided on a certain day, and desiring her to make good cheer against his arrival. The feelings of the malingerer may be imagined when his own letter was read to him. A soldier who avowed that he had lost the power of locomotion was detected by a very simple ruse, after other means had failed. The doctor gently tapped at the window of the room in which the paralysed man was sitting alone after dark, at the same time softly calling his name, when he at once appeared at the window. How long have you been dumb, my friend ?' said a passenger on shipboard once to a pretended mute. 'Three weeks, sir,' replied the incautious simpleton. An old device of army surgeons, in suspicious cases of deafness, was to commence a conversation in a high tone, and gradually to lower the voice to an ordinary pitch. A common malingerer would probably continue to reply to the questions put, from not observing the alteration. The

most remarkable example on record of success in simulating deaf-dumbness (or deafness from birth) is that of a Frenchman, best known under his assumed name of Victor Foy, at the beginning of the present century. This young man travelled about, ostensibly in search of his father, but really, in his character of a deaf-mute, to escape military conscription. For four years his extraordinary ingenuity baffled all the tests to which he was subjected by some of the, most scientific men in France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy. In Switzerland he was tempted to avow the deceit by a young, rich, and beautiful woman offering him her hand; but even this bait did not take. In the prison at Rochelle, the turnkey was ordered to watch him closely, to sleep with him, and never to quit him; and even the prisoners were encouraged to make him betray himself. To throw him off his guard, he was often violently awakened out of sleep, but his fright was expressed only in the usual plaintive cry of a mute; and it is said that even in his dreams only guttural sounds were heard. At last, the Abbé Sicard, director of the institution for deaf-mutes at Paris, to whom a specimen of his writing had been transmitted, promptly pronounced him an impostor, on the ground that his blunders in spelling were phonetic in their character -that he wrote, not as he saw, but as he heard. M. Sicard afterwards subjected him to a personal examination, at the end of which he was obliged to confess the imposition.

A very simple incident will often suffice to throw a good simulator off his guard. The letter-carrier, on entering a French barrack-room on one occasion, called out the names of the men for whom he had letters, and among them that of a man believed by everybody to be laboring under almost total deafness. For one moment he forgot his part, and answered to his name. Casper, the celebrated German medical jurist, on one occasion neatly exposed a case of counterfeit deafness in open court. The panel, an old woman, pretended to be as deaf as a post. 'You are accused,' roared Casper in her ear, 'of severely injuring the woman Lemke.' 'It is not true.' But,' roared Caspar again, 'the woman Lemke asserts that it is true', and then rapidly added in a low tone, and she is certainly not a liar.' Her wrath for a moment got the better of her consisten

cy, and she rejoined, to the amusement of the whole court: 'Yes, indeed, she is a liar.' Possibly the nationality of the hero of the following incident is chargeable with the impulsive imprudence which betrayed him. An Irish army recruit who had suddenly lost his hearing was sent into hospital, and put, by the doctor's order, on spoon-meat. For nine days the latter in his visits passed the deaf man's bed without seeming to notice him; on the tenth day, after examining the state of his tongue and pulse, he asked the attendant what kind of food the patient was getting. On being told he was on spoon-meat he affected to be very angry. 'Are you not ashamed of yourself?' said he to the nurse. The poor fellow is almost starved to death. Let him at once have a beef-steak and a pint of porter.' 'God bless your honor,' blurted out the deaf recruit; you are the best gentleman I have seen for many a day!' Under the influence of strong emotion of any kind, only a limited class of malingerers have sufficient self-command to play their parts. An amusing example of the way in which, in the heat of passion, every vestige of pretence is sometimes thrown away, is related by a surgeon of the navy, to whose experiences we have already been indebted. A seaman on board a frigate, who pretended to be totally blind, and was believed to be so, was on one occasion allowed to go on shore with an attendant to lead him. The pair happened to quarrel, and come to blows; when the blind man, finding himself unduly handicapped, instantly regained his sight, and got the better of his astonished guide. The latter took to flight, was pursued through a great part of the town by his late protégé, and finally got a severe drubbing from him. The application of the cat-o'-nine-tails next day to the back of the impostor, effectually cured him of any further tendency to defect of vision.

The amount of fortitude-call it obstinacy, if you will-displayed by some of this class of impostors is something amazing. Day and night they will remain in the most constrained and irksome positions. For weeks, and even months, men have sat and walked with their bodies bent double. A man feigning palsy of the lower limbs was placed by himself in a room with food which he could reach only by walking to the place where it was laid, and at the end of two days he had not tasted it.

Another, simulating paralysis of the arm, allowed the amputating knife to be placed beneath it, and would have submitted to the operation for its removal. A soldier counterfeiting blindness was placed on the steep bank of a river, and ordered to march forward, which he unhesitatingly did, and fell into the stream. The medical writer who relates this case queries whether the cheat would have gone forward had a precipice instead of a river been before him. No doubt these may be called exceptional in stances of fortitude, as the great majority of malingerers are made of more commonplace stuff. A mere hint from a navy surgeon that an equivocal complaint would be benefited by transference to an African climate, or the application of the actual cautery, has been the means of effecting a miraculously rapid cure. A French physician, after watching a spurious epileptic fit for some time, put his hand on the heart of the cheat, and turning to the attendants, said: 'It is all over with him; carry him to the dead-house.' Immediate resuscitation was the result, and the man never had another attack. A Shetland clergyman was greatly annoyed at the weekly occurrence of a kind of contagious convulsions which attacked many of his congregation in church. At length the good man hit on a plan which put a speedy termination to the infliction. He announced from the pulpit that he had learned that no treatment was so efficacious as an immediate ducking in cold water; and as his kirk was fortunately contiguous to a fresh-water lake, the proper hydropathic treatment could always be secured. It is a most unfortunate coincidence for the malingerer that the means which would be the most beneficial in the treatment of the real disease are often the most distasteful to him.

coolly observed to an official: 'I will try to put down my leg: it may be of use to me now.' He was as good as his word, threw away his crutch, and walked off with a firm step! With some, the temptation to give an airing to the little secret which they have been obliged to keep so long close, and which has stood them in such good part, is wholly irresistible. Without this flaunting of their imposture in the face of their victims, some rascals would deem their triumph only half achieved. A trooper who pretended he had lost the use of his right arm, after resisting for a length of time the most testing hospital discipline, at last succeeded in procuring his discharge. When he was leaving the regiment, and fairly seated on the top of the coach, he waved the paralytic arm in triumph, and cheered at the success of his stratagem. An Irish soldier, reported unfit for service from loss of power of the lower limbs, arranged for a more dramatic avowal of his deceit. Having obtained his discharge, he caused himself to be taken on a field-day in a cart to the Phoenix Park, Dublin, in front of his regiment, which was drawn up in line. He had the cart driven under a tree, on which he hung his crutches, jumped suddenly with agility out of the cart, sprung three times from the ground before the faces of his astonished comrades, then turned his back to the regiment, and after a series of expressive gestures, which we cannot particularly describe, scampered off at full speed! In a case of deception once practised in a New York court of sessions, there seems to have been no pre-arrangement of the dénouement which occurred. A man who had been for some time in prison awaiting his trial for perjury, had a paralytic seizure a few days before the period fixed for the trial, and one of his sides was thus rendered completely powerless. In this helpless condition he was carried on a bed from prison into court. During the trial he became so faint that a recess was granted to enable him to recover, the prosecuting attorney kindly lending his assistance in conveying him out of court. The sight of an infirm fellow-being trembling on the brink of the grave had a visible influence on the court and the jury. The evidence, however, was conclusive, and the jury convicted him. The court, in view of his speedily being called to a higher tribunal, instead of sentencing him to the state prison, sim

The difficulties and discomforts to be endured in this department of art in attaining the desired object, no doubt enhance the enjoyment of it in those few cases in which success at last crowns their labors. A convict sentenced to seven years' penal servitude kept his right knee bent so as not to touch the ground with his foot during all that period, and, on account of his infirmity, was exempted from the usual kinds of convict labor, and employed at work which he could do in a sitting posture. When being discharged at the expiry of his period of involuntary service, he NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVIII., No. 1

5

ply imposed a small fine, which his brother, who manifested the utmost fraternal solicitude, promptly paid. The next day the prosecuting attorney met the fellow apparently in good health on the street. The latter laughingly told him that he had recovered, and dropping his arm, and contracting his leg, hopped off, leaving the learned counsel to his own reflections.

It is, however, a rare thing nowadays for a clinical artist to attain his end and enjoy the full fruition of his labors. In most cases he has no other reward than the pleasure received from the exercise of his art. This æsthetic satisfaction would need to be great, to enable him to bear even the ordinary prosaic hardships and discomforts of his lot. But in addition to these, he is sometimes overtaken by a species of poetical justice in the shape of a penalty paid in kind. The feigned disease, in fact, occasionally becomes a real one. Montaigne mentions some curious instances of this occurring within his own experience. It is chiefly in simulating the class of nervous diseases that the danger lies of this avenging Nemesis. The continued repetition of the manifestations of the affection seems eventually to make an

ineradicable impression on the nervous centres. Two French sailors taken prisoners by the English in the wars of the First Napoleon successfully feigned insanity for six months, and at the end of that period got the reward of their clever deception by recovering their liberty; but it was at the expense of their reason, which was really gone. The means adopted to simulate one disease have sometimes produced another of a more serious kind. Soldiers have so persistently kept up a state of irritation in a factitious sore as to bring on a disease which required amputation of the limb. Others have lost their sight by the methods taken to induce a temporary inflammation in the eye. The historian Robertson mentions a case which, whether true or not, is, at all events, physiologically possible. He says that Pope Julius III. feigned sickness to avoid holding a consistory, and in order to give the greater color of probability to his illness, he not only confined himself to his apartment, but changed his diet and usual mode. of life. By persisting in this plan, however, he contracted a real disease, from which he died in a few days.-Chambers's Journal.

CHAPTER XXXIII.-RECOVERY.

IN a few days Bertha had made rapid progress; her youth and good health battled vigorously against the fever; but still it lingered, although now in a more intermittent from.

"She will not gain strength till we get her out of Rome," Miss Fraser said one morning; "I believe we are about the only reasonable people left in the city; you ought to have left a month ago, you know." She gave Mr. Williams a sharp glance of reproof.

"We will go anywhere you please," he said, humbly; "only tell me what to do." Miss Fraser smiled graciously. Excepting Michael Helder, whose will was the law of her life, she liked men to submit to her judgment, and she thought Mr. Williams showed much common sense in knowing when he was in good hands.

"Your padrona, as the people call her,

"PATTY."

tells me she has a sister at Albano who will let us have part of a villa there; she says there is a pleasant garden, and this would be excellent for Bertha. What do you say? She is not sure about the rent, but she thinks it would be much the same that you pay here."

Mr. Williams looked at her gratefully. Miss Fraser was not another Sophy; no one could ever smooth away the thorns and briers of life as she had smoothed them; but after the misery of this desolate time it was very comforting to feel that an experienced steerswoman was at his side ready to take the trouble of guidance from his thoughts.

"I am very much obliged to you," he said; "why should not you and Bertha go at once? I have a few days' work here, arrears which have accumulated under this sad trouble. I will join you as soon as possible."

"Very well." Miss Fraser smiled cheer