Reiteration

Abstract

In an article published in December 1832, Professor Elliotson – the same man who defended the use of mesmerization in surgical operations – described a neuralgia resistant to all forms of treatment. This clinical history alternated between medical specifications and the inability to produce not only a cure, but also a temporary relief from the symptoms. “I am sorry to say I did no good whatever, or at least only produced a temporary alleviation from time to time,” he wrote. The illness was present in the legs, arms, and wrists, as well as on the right side of the face, in the submandibular nerve. Though the patient had been in this predicament for some years, his ailment had its beginnings in the more distant past. At the outset, the pain – agonizing, lacerating – was concentrated in the index finger of the left hand. It was so acute that the slightest friction produced a very violent reaction, as though someone were running a penknife along the finger, like an electric shock. The agony was such that the patient, a journeyman printer aged 32, bit off the whole fingernails of his healthy hand, as if with this gesture he might free the other from its extreme suffering. The doctor, who did not know the immediate cause of the ailment, made no reference to hypnotism or mesmerization. On the contrary, he attempted to reach a diagnosis based on the negative elements that emerged in the examination: there was no inflammation, redness, or increase in temperature. “There is nothing whatever to be seen,” he said, “but yet there was agonizing pain.”²

Nothing is so soon forgot as pain.¹