The woman in question was twenty-seven, of French-Canadian origin, but thoroughly American in appearance and speech. She was of a middle-class rural family and had married a farmer who finally had given up his farm and was a mechanic in a small city.
The young woman had always been irritable, egoistic, and sensitive. As a girl if anything happened to "shock her nerves", _i.e._ to displease her, she fainted, vomited, or went into "hysterics." As a result her family treated her with great caution and probably were well pleased when she married off their hands and left the home.
Married life soon provided her with sufficient to displease her. Her husband drank but not sufficiently to be classed as a heavy drinker. He was a quiet, rather taciturn man, utterly averse to the pleasures for which his wife longed. She wanted to go to dances, to take in the theaters, to live in more expensive rooms, and especially she became greatly attached to a group of people of a sporty type whom her husband tersely called "tinhorn bluffs" and whom he refused to visit.
They quarreled vigorously and the quarrels always ended one way,--she became sick in one way or other. This usually brought her husband around to her way of thinking, at least for a time, and much against his will he would go with her to her friends.
Finally, however, she set her heart on living with these people, and he set his will firmly against hers. She then developed such an alarming set of symptoms that after a while the physician who asked my opinion had made up his mind that she had a brain tumor. She was paralyzed, speechless, did not eat and seemed desperately ill.
The diagnosis of hysteria was established by the absence of any evidence of organic disease and by the history of the case. The relief of symptoms was brought about by means which I need not detail here, but which essentially consisted in proving to the patient that no true paralysis existed and in tricking her into movement and speech.
When she was well enough to be up and about and to talk freely, she and her husband were both informed that the symptoms arose because her will was thwarted, and _that_ part of their function was to bring the man to his knees. He agreed to this, but she took offense and refused to come any more to see me,--a not unnatural reaction.