story of a primipara of twenty-eight,
married one year, to whom he was called. On entering the room he was
greeted by the midwife, who said she expected the child about 8 P.M.
The woman was lying in the usual obstetric position, on the left side,
groaning, crying loudly, and pulling hard at a strap fastened to the
bed-post. She had a partial cessation of menses, and had complained of
tumultuous movements of the child and overflow of milk from the
breasts. Examination showed the cervix low down, the os small and
circular, and no signs of pregnancy in the uterus. The abdomen was
distended with tympanites and the rectum much dilated with accumulated
feces. Dr. Madden left her, telling her that she was not pregnant, and
when she reappeared at his office in a few days, he reassured her of
the nonexistence of pregnancy; she became very indignant, triumphantly
squeezed lactescent fluid from her breasts, and, insisting that she
could feel fetal movements, left to seek a more sympathetic accoucheur.
Underhill, in the words of Hamilton, describes a woman as "having
acquired the most accurate description of the breeding symptoms, and
with wonderful facility imagined that she had felt every one of them."
He found the woman on a bed complaining of great labor-pains, biting a
handkerchief, and pulling on a cloth attached to her bed. The finger on
the abdomen or vulva elicited symptoms of great sensitiveness. He told
her she was not pregnant, and the next day she was sitting up, though
the discharge continued, but the simulated throes of labor, which she
had so graphically pictured, had ceased.

Haultain gives three examples of pseudocyesis, the first with no
apparent cause, the second due to carcinoma of the uterus, while in the
third there was a small fibroid in the anterior wall of the uterus.
Some cases are of purely nervous origin, associated with a purely
muscular distention of the abdomen. Clay reported a case due to
ascites. Cases of pseudocyesis in women convicted of murder are not
uncommon, though most of them are imposters hoping for an extra lease
of life.

Croon speaks of a child seven years old on whom he performed ovariotomy
for a round-celled sarcoma. She had been well up to May, but since then
she had several times been raped by a boy, in consequence of which she
had constant uterine hemorrhage. Shortly after the first coitus her
abdomen began to enlarge, the breasts to develop, and the areolae to
darken. In seven m