Case 104. X., aged 26, tall, and of handsome appearance. Since his earliest youth he has loved to wear female attire. As he grew up, he managed it so that, when he was a participant in theatricals, he always had a female part. After an attack of mental excitement, he imagined that he was actually a woman, and tried to convince others of it.
He liked to undress himself, and dress his hair and put on female clothing. In this state he wished to go out on the street. In other respects he was perfectly reasonable. He would spend the whole day arranging his hair and looking at himself in the glass, costuming himself in a night-dress as much like a woman as possible. In walking he imitated women. One day, when Esquirol acted as if about to lift up his dress, he flew into a passion and upbraided him for his want of modesty (Esquirol).
Case 105. Mrs. X., widow. Owing to the death of her husband and loss of fortune, she had been greatly troubled in mind. She became disturbed mentally, and was admitted to the Salpêtrière after attempting suicide.
Mrs. X., lean, thin; constantly maniacal; she believes herself a man, and flies angry if she is addressed as “madam.” Once, when male clothing was placed at her disposal, she was beside herself with joy. She died, in 1802, of a consumptive malady; and she expressed her delusion of being a man until shortly before her death (Esquirol).I have already mentioned the interesting relations existing between the facts of delusional transformation of sex and the so-called insanity of the Scythians.
Marandon (“Annales médico-psychologiques,” 1877, p. 161), like others, has erroneously presumed that with the ancient Scythians there was an actual delusion, and that the condition was not merely that of eviration. According to the law of empirical actuality, the delusion, so infrequent to-day, must also have been very infrequent in ancient times. Since it can only be conceived as arising on the basis of a paranoia, there can be no thought of its endemic occurrence; it can only be regarded as a superstitious manifestation of eviration (the result of anger of the goddess), as is also evident from the statements of Hippocrates.
The facts of the so-called Scythian insanity, as well as the facts lately learned about the Pueblo Indians, are also noteworthy anthropologically, in that atrophy of the testes and genitals in general, and approximation to the female type, physically
