III. Catherine’s Psycho-physical Condition, its Likeness and Unlikeness To Hysteria

Only by a quite unfair magnifying or multiplying of the two incidents just described could we come to hold, with Mr. Baring-Gould, that Catherine was simply a sufferer from hysteria, and that the Roman Church did well to canonize her on the ground of her having, in spite of this malady, managed to achieve much useful work amongst the sick and poor. Here we shall do well to consider three groups of facts.

1. Misapprehensions as to hysteria.

The first group gives the reasons why we should try and get rid of the terror and horror still so often felt in connection with the very name of this malady. This now quite demonstrably excessive, indeed largely mythical, connotation of the term springs from four causes.

First, the very name still tends to suggest, as the causes or conditions of the malady, things fit only for discussion in medical reviews. But then, ever since 1855, all limitation to, or special connection with, anything peculiarly female, or indeed generally sexual, has been increasingly shown to be false, until now no serious authority on the matter can be found to espouse the old view. The malady is now well known to attack men as well as women, and to have no special relation to things of sex at all.

Next, probably as a consequence from the initial error, this disorder was supposed to predominantly come from, or to lead to, moral impurity, or at least to be ordinarily accompanied by strong erotic propensions. But here the now carefully observed facts are imperatively hostile: of the 120 living cases most carefully studied by Prof. Janet, only four showed the predominance of any such tendencies, a proportion undoubtedly not above the percentage to be found amongst non-hysterical persons.

And again, the term was long synonymous with untruthfulness and deceit. But here again Prof. Janet shows how unfounded is this prejudice, since it but springs from the misplaced promptitude with which the earlier observers refused to believe what they had not as yet sufficiently examined and could not at all explain, and from the malady being itself equivalent to a more or less extensive breaking-up of the normal inter-connection between the several, successive or simultaneous states, and, as it were, layers of the one personality. He is convinced that real untruthfulness is no commoner among such patients than it is among healthy persons.

And, finally, it is no doubt felt that, apart from all such specifically moral suspicions, the malady involves all kinds of fancies and inaccuracies of feeling and of perception, and that it frequently passes into downright insanity. And this is no doubt the one objection which does retain some of its old cogency. Still, it is well to note that, as has now been fully established, the elements of the human mind are and remain the same throughout the whole range of its conditions, from the sanest to the maddest, whilst only their proportion and admixture, and the presence or absence and the kind of synthesis necessary to hold them together differentiate these various states of mind. In true insanity there is no such synthesis; in hysteria the synthesis, however slight and peculiar, is always still traceable throughout the widespread disgregation of the elements and states. And it is this very persistence of the fundamental unity, together with the strikingly different combination and considerable disaggregation of its elements, that makes the study of hysteria so fruitful for the knowledge of the fully healthy mind and of its unity; whilst the continuance of all the elements of the normal intelligence, even in insanity, readily explains why it is apparently so easy to see insanity everywhere, and to treat genius and sanctity as but so much degeneracy.

2. Hysteriform phenomena observable in Catherine’s case.

The second group of facts consists in the phenomena which, in Catherine’s case, are like or identical to what is observable in cases of hysteria.

There is, perhaps above all else, the anaesthetic condition, which was presumably co-extensive with her paralytic states. “Anaesthesia,” says Prof. Janet, “can be considered as the type of the other symptoms of hysteria; it exists in the great majority of cases, it is thoroughly characteristic of the malady. In its most frequent localization (semi-anaesthesia) it affects one of the lateral halves of the body, and this half is usually the left side.” Or, “a finger or hand will be affected.” Such “insensibility can be very frequent and very profound”; but “it disappears suddenly” and even “varies from one moment to another.”

Then there is the corresponding counter-phenomenon of hyper-aesthesia. “The slightest contact provokes great pains, exclamations, and spasms. The painful zones have their seat mostly on the abdomen or on the hips.” And “sensation in these states is not painful in itself, by its own intensity, but by its quality, its characteristics; it has become the signal, by association of ideas, for the production of a set of extremely painful phenomena.” So, with the colour-sense: “one patient adores the colour red, and sees in its dullest shade ‘sparkling rays which penetrate to her very heart and warm her through and through.’” But “another one finds this ‘a repulsive colour and one capable of producing nausea.’” And similarly with the senses of taste and odour.

Then, too, the inability to stand or walk, with the conservation, at times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed by the rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in the throat or stomach, and the curious, mentally explicable, exceptions to this incapacity; the sense, even at other times, of strangulation; heart palpitations, fever heats, strange haemorrhages from the stomach or even from the lung; red patches on the skin and emotional jaundice all over it, and one or two other peculiarities.

Then, as to a particular kind of quietude, from which Catherine warns her attendants to rouse her, we find a patient who “ceases her reading, without showing any sign of doing so. She gets taken to be profoundly attentive; it is, however, but one of her attacks of ‘fixity.’ And she has promptly to be shaken out of this state, or, in a few minutes, there will be no getting her out of it.”

As to Catherine’s consciousness of possessing an extraordinary fineness of discrimination between sensibly identical objects, we see that “if one points out, to some of these patients, an imaginary portrait upon a plain white card, and mixes this card with other similar ones, they will almost always find again the portrait on the same card.” And similarly as to her attaching a particular quasi-sensible perception to Marabotto’s hand alone, we find that, if M. Janet touches Léonie’s hand, he having suggested a nosegay to her, she will henceforth, when he touches the hand, see that nosegay; whereas, if another person touches that same hand, Léonie will see nothing special.

As to Catherine’s feelings of criminality and of being already dead, M. Janet quotes M., who says, “I am like a criminal about to be punished”; and R., who declares, “It seems to me that I am dead.” As to the hallucination of a Beast, Marcelle suffers from the same impression.

And,—perhaps the most important of all these surface-resemblances,—there is Catherine’s apparent freedom from all emotion at the deaths of her brothers and sister, and her extraordinary dependence upon, and claimfulness towards, her Confessor alone. “These patients rapidly lose the social feelings: Berthe, who for some time preserved some affection for her brother, ends by losing all interest in him; Marcelle, at the very beginning of her illness, separates herself from every one.” “It is always their own personality which dominates their thoughts.” Yet these patients have “an extraordinary attachment to their physician. For him they are resolved to do all things. In return, they are extremely exacting,—he is to occupy himself entirely with each one alone. Only a very superficial observer would ascribe this feeling to a vulgar source.”

3. Catherine’s personality not disintegrated.

But a third group of facts clearly differentiates Catherine’s case, even in these years of avowed ill-health, from such patients; and these facts become clearer and more numerous in precise proportion as we move away from peripheral, psycho-physical phenomena and mechanisms, and dwell upon her practically unbroken mental and moral characteristics, and upon the use and meaning, the place and context of these things within her ample life.

For as to her relations with her attendants, even now it is still she who leads, who suggests, who influences; a strong and self-consistent will shows itself still, under all this shifting psycho-physical surface. Thus Don Marabotto now administers, it is true, all her money and charitable affairs for her. But it is she who insists, alone and unaided, upon the true spiritual function of that impression of odour on his hand.—Vernazza, no doubt, has now to help her in the fight against subtle scruples, on occasion of her deepest depressions. But her far more frequent times of light and joy are in nowise occasions of a simply subjective self-engrossment or of a purely psycho-physical interest, for her mind is absorbed if in but a few, yet in inexhaustibly fruitful and universally applicable ideas and experiences of a spiritual kind, such as helped to urge this friend on to his world-renewing impulses and determinations.—Her closest relations and friends, one must admit, succeed by their action, taken eighteen months and then again two days before her death, in getting her to desist from ordering her burial by the side of her husband. But we have seen, in the one case, how indirectly, and, in the other case, how suddenly and even then quite informally, they had to gain their point.—Her attendants in general, and Marabotto in particular, certainly paid her an engrossed attention, and the all but endlessness of her superficial fancies and requirements have been chronicled by them with a naïve and wearisome fulness. But then she herself is well aware that, had they but the requisite knowledge as to how and when to apply them, some sturdy opposition and a greater roughness of handling would, on their part, be of the greatest use to her, in this her psychical infirmity; indeed her shutting herself away from Marabotto, as late as January 1510, is directly caused by her sense and fear of being spoilt by him.

It is true again that, already in 1502, we hear, in a probably exaggerated but still possibly semi-authentic account, of her indifference of feeling with regard to the deaths of two brothers and of her only sister; and that, from January 1510 onwards, she gradually excludes all her attendants from her sick-room, with, eventually, the sole exceptions of Marabotto or Carenzio and Argentina. But her Wills show conclusively how persistent were her detailed interest in, and dispositions for, the requirements of her surviving brother, nephews, and nieces; of poor Thobia and the girl’s hidden mother; of her priest-attendants, and of each and all of her humblest domestics; of the natives in the far-away Greek Island of Scios; and, above all, of the Hospital and its great work which she had ever loved so well.

We have indeed found two cases, both from within the last week of her life, of mentally opaque and spiritually unsuggestive and unutilized impressions which are truly analogous to those characteristic of hysteria. But we have also seen how forcibly these two solitary cases bring out, by contrast, the spiritual transparency and fruitfulness of her usual, finely reflective picturings of these last years. For here it is her own deliberate and spiritual mind which joyously greets, and straightway utilizes and transcends, the psycho-physical occurrences; and it does so, not because these occurrences are, or are taken to be, the causes or requisites or objects of her faith and spiritual insight, but because, on the contrary, they meet and clothe an already exuberant faith and insight—spiritual certainties derived from quite another source.

And finally, if the monotony and superficial pettiness of the sick-room can easily pall upon us, especially when presented with the credulities and hectic exaggerations which disfigure so much of the Vita’s description of it; we must, in justice, as I have attempted to do in my seventh and eighth chapters, count in, as part of her biography, her deep affection for and persistent influence with Ettore and Battista Vernazza, and the exemplification of her doctrine by these virile souls, makers of history in the wide, varied world of men.

In a word, it is plain at once that, given the necessarily limited number of ways in which the psycho-physical organism reacts under mental stimulations, certain neural phenomena may, in any two cases, be, in themselves, perfectly similar, although their respective mental causes or occasions may be as different, each from the other, as the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven, or the working out of the Law of Gravitation by Newton, or the elaboration of the implications of the Categorical Imperative by Kant, are different from the sudden jumping of a live mouse in the face of an hysterically-disposed young woman, or as the various causes of tears and laughter throughout the whole world.