Demonomania
M., now forty-nine years of age, living in the country, and a wool-spinner by occupation, has often heard accounts of sorcerers. At fifteen years of age, the menses appear spontaneously. Thirty-seven. When on the point of marriage, she leearns that her pretended lover is deceiving her. she will no longer listen to him, and a year after marries another person. He whom she has forsaken, threatens her with vengeance, and dooms her to the dwelling place of devils. A man in the village where she resides, who passes for a sorcerer, hives his body, without the least doupt on her part, to the devil. At forty years of age the menses cease. At this period her ideas become deranged, but in a manner imperceptible to strangers, and she suffers from cephalalgia.  Forty-two years. Returning from a long excursion, she is fatigued, and lies down upon the earth to refresh herself. Shortly after, she experiences in her head a motion and noise like that of a spinning wheel. She is frightened, but nevertheless resumes her course, and on the way, is raised from the earth, to the height of more than seven feet. Having reached her place of residence she can neither eat nor drink. She calls to mind the threat that had been made with reference to her, four years previously, and no longer doubts that she is bewitched. Many remedies are administered, and she makes prayers, performs devotions of nine days' duration, and also pilgrimages. She wears a stole, which has been presented her by a priest. But all in vain. The devil and his torments no longer leave her, and three years afterwardm she is brought to the Salpêtrière.
    At the time of her arrival at the hospital she is extremely emaciated, her skin is sun-burnt, earthy, and hot; the pulse is feeble and small, the head is bowed down, the face bloated and the forehead wrinkled. The eye-brows, at times mingled with the folds of the forehead, are lost in the hair: the abdomen is hard and voluminous, and the patient has her hand constantly on it. She assures us that she has, in her uterus, an evil spirit, in the form of a serpent, which leaves her neither day nor night, although her organs of generation are not like those of other women. She complains of a great degree of constriction about the throat, and experiences a necessity to walk about, and suffers much more acutely if prevented from doing so. She walks slowly, speaking in a low tone of her coondition, which she deplores. She conceals herself when she eats and drinks, as well as when called to evacuate the bladder and bowels, inorder the better to persuade us that she is not a body, but merely a spectre and imaginary being.
    'The Devil has taken from me my body, and I have no longer a human shape. there is nothing so dreadful as to appear to live and yet not to be of this world. i burn, sulphur exhales with my breath. I neither eat or drink. i feel nothing, and should I be placed in a terrestrial fire, I should not burn. i shall live millions of years; that which is upon the earth not being able to die. Were it not so, despair would have caused me, long since, to terminate my existence.'
    Nothing undeceives her, and she is abusive in her language to those who seem to doubt the truth of what she affirms. Those who contradict her, she calls sorcerers and demons. If they insist upon the correctness of their opinion respecting her, she becomes irritated, her eyes project, and are red and haggardl Look then, she says, at this beautiful figure; is it that of a woman or a devil? She strikes herself violently with her fist upon her chest. She pretends also, to be insensible, and to prove it, pinches her skin with all her might, and strikes her chest with a wooden shoe. i have myself pinched her, pricked her often with a pin, and transfixed the skin of her arm, without her testifying the least suffering. Still she manifests pain when not forewarned. this woman is tranquil, is not mischievous, and speaks rationally upon every other subject, when we can divert her thoughts. On pretext of delivering her out of the power of the devil and unbewitching her, she was thrice magnetized, but without my being able to witness any magnetic effect [Esquirol, 1845/1965, 240-1].
 
 
 
 

*Esquirol identifies the picture as one of demonomania, but not necessarily the one described in this case history.

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While Esquirol was physician-in-chief at the Salpêtrière, he permitted extensive experiments with animal magnetism. Attempts to treat eleven 'maniaca' by means of animal magnetism were not successful. The most enthusiastic experimenter at the Salpêtrière was E. J. Georget [1795-1829]. He published his results in De la physiologie du système nerveux [1821] [Gauld, 1992, 129].