hat it is a morbid form of relief. The same character of hysteria is
seen, with more satisfactory results for the most part, in the influence
of external nervous shock. It was the misunderstood influence of such
shocks in removing hysteria which in former times led to the refusal to
regard hysteria as a serious disease. During the Rebellion of 1745-46 in
Scotland, Cullen remarks that there was little hysteria. The same was true
of the French Revolution and of the Irish Rebellion, while Rush (in a
study _On the Influence of the American Revolution on the Human Body_)
observed that many hysterical women were "restored to perfect health by
the events of the time." In such cases the emotional tension is given an
opportunity of explosion in new and impersonal channels, and the chain of
morbid personal emotions is broken.

It has been urged by some that the fact that the sexual orgasm usually
fails to remove the disorder in true hysteria excludes a sexual factor of
hysteria. It is really, one may point out, an argument in favor of such an
element as one of the factors of hysteria. If there were no initial lesion
of the sexual emotions, if the natural healthy sexual channel still
remained free for the passage of the emotional overflow, then we should
expect that it would much oftener come into play in the removal of
hysteria. In the more healthy, merely hysteroid condition, the psychic
sexual organism is not injured, and still responds normally, removing the
abnormal symptoms when allowed to do so. It is the confusion between this
almost natural condition and the truly morbid condition, alone properly
called hysteria, which led to the ancient opinion, inaugurated by Plato
and Hippocrates, that hysteria may be cured by marriage.[288] The
difference may be illustrated by the difference between a distended
bladder which is still able to contract normally on its contents when at
last an opportunity of doing so is afforded and the bladder in which
distension has been so prolonged that nervous control had been lost and
spontaneous expulsion has become impossible. The first condition
corresponds to the constitution, which, while simulating the hysterical
condition, is healthy enough to react normally in spite of psychic
lesions; the second corresponds to a state in which, owing to the
prolonged stress of psychic traumatism,--sexual or not,--a definite
condition of hysteria has arisen. The one state is healthy, though
abnormal; the oth