Peter the Great was frightened,when an infant,by falling from a bridge into the water.Long afterward,when he had reached manhood,this hardy and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound,in spite of his dread of it,in order to overcome his antipathy.The story told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter.As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly,his horses took fright and ran away,and the leaders broke from their harness and sprang into the river,leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on the bridge.Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss,ready to fall over.
What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church,as it is recorded?
The old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one,that it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her,and who,when she entered the holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the sacred symbols,"cried with a loud voice,and came out of"her.A very singular case,the doctor himself had recorded,and which the reader may accept as authentic,is the following:At the head of the doctor's front stairs stood,and still stands,a tall clock,of early date and stately presence.A middle-aged visitor,noticing it as he entered the front door,remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that clock.He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a profound agitation,which he dreaded to undergo.This very singular idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms of his nurse.
She was standing near one of those tall clocks,when the cord which supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke,and the weight came crashing down to the bottom of the case.Some effect must have been produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered.Why should not this happen,when we know that a sudden mental shock may be the cause of insanity?The doctor remembered the verse of "The Ancient Mariner:""I moved my lips;the pilot shrieked And fell down in a fit;The holy hermit raised his eyes And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars;the pilot's boy,Who now doth crazy go,Laughed loud and long,and all the while His eyes went to and fro."This is only poetry,it is true,but the poet borrowed the description from nature,and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.
More than this,hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person,a child commonly,killed outright by terror,--scared to death,literally.Sad cases they often are,in which,nothing but a surprise being intended,the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life depends.If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like these,such an impression might of course be followed by consequences less fatal or formidable,but yet serious in their nature.If here and there a person is killed,as if by lightning,by a sudden startling sight or sound,there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,--a shock which falls short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life,yet leaves a lasting effect upon the subject of it.
This point,then,was settled in the mind of Dr.Butts,namely,that,as a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human being,there is no perversion of the faculties,no prejudice,no change of taste or temper,no eccentricity,no antipathy,which such a cause may not rationally account for.He would not be surprised,he said to himself,to find that some early alarm,like that which was experienced by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal,had broken some spring in this young man's nature,or so changed its mode of action as to account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life.But how could any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man aloof from all the world,and make a hermit of him?He did not hate the human race;that was clear enough.He treated Paolo with great kindness,and the Italian was evidently much attached to him.He had talked naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his dangerous situation when his boat was upset.Dr.Butts heard that he had once made a short visit to this young man,at his rooms in the University.
It was not misanthropy,therefore,which kept him solitary.What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case?Nothing that the doctor could think of,unless it were some color,the sight of which acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned,who could not look at anything red without fainting.Suppose this were a case of the same antipathy.How very careful it would make the subject of it as to where he went and with whom he consorted!Time and patience would be pretty sure to bring out new developments,and physicians,of all men in the world,know how to wait as well as how to labor.
Such were some of the crude facts as Dr.Butts found them in books or gathered them from his own experience.He soon discovered that the story had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim of an "antipathy,"whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of the people of the place.If he suspected the channel through which it had reached the little community,and,spreading from that centre,the country round,he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a domestic casus belli.Paolo might have mentioned it to others as well as to himself.Maurice might have told some friend,who had divulged it.But to accuse Mrs.Butts,good Mrs.Butts,of petit treason in telling one of her husband's professional secrets was too serious a matter to be thought of.He would be a little more careful,he promised himself,the next time,at any rate;for he had to concede,in spite of every wish to be charitable in his judgment,that it was among the possibilities that the worthy lady had forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put their tongues out,and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.
