Pinel, one of the greatest celebrities in the domain of mental diseases, always began the examination of a patient by asking him whether he had not had some fright or some great vexation. In the study of every nervous malady great importance must always be attributed to the investigation of the moral causes. The vivid impression of a strong emotion may produce the same effects as a blow on the head or some physical shock. There are men who, through fear, have lost consciousness, sight, or speech; others, still more sensitive, have remained for a long time paralytic, unable to move legs or arms, and have lost all sensibility. Some remain for a long time sleepless, others fall into a sort of exaltation resembling the outbreak of mental disease, many lose their appetite, or are afflicted with articular diseases, and in some the nervous system suffers such a shock as to cause violent fever.
Dr. Kohts, in his account of the maladies caused by fright during the siege of Strasburg in 1870, gives a minute description of the cases of _paralysis agitans_ and of convulsions which he observed. The tremor and singing in the ears arose suddenly, often lasting for months, and even for life in very nervous persons, as is also the case in catalepsy, paralysis, and aphasy.
Leyden considers fright as one cause of myelitis. Likewise, in sclerosis of the arteries, cardiac hypertrophy, fright may produce hemiplegy. Berger instances two cases of perfectly healthy persons who, immediately after a fright, were attacked by paraplegy, with accompanying insensibility, without any serious anatomical injury, for the phenomena rapidly disappeared.
It is often said, and with good reason, that children should not be allowed to witness an epileptic fit, for the fright and emotion which they suffer may prove dangerous, causing later a similar attack in themselves. However difficult it may be to comprehend such a thing, it is yet admitted by all. Quite recently Eulenburg and Berger saw two old men, the one seventy, the other sixty-five years of age, who had an epileptic fit immediately after such a fright, although they had never had one before, nor were they predisposed to it. Romberg gives an instance of a boy, ten years old, who was frightened in the morning by a dog, and in the evening had an attack of St. Vitus’s dance.