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Hysteria   Listen
noun
Hysteria  n.  (Med.) A nervous affection, occurring almost exclusively in women, in which the emotional and reflex excitability is exaggerated, and the will power correspondingly diminished, so that the patient loses control over the emotions, becomes the victim of imaginary sensations, and often falls into paroxism or fits. Note: The chief symptoms are convulsive, tossing movements of the limbs and head, uncontrollable crying and laughing, and a choking sensation as if a ball were lodged in the throat. The affection presents the most varied symptoms, often simulating those of the gravest diseases, but generally curable by mental treatment alone.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hysteria" Quotes from Famous Books



... extortion from Dick was more conventional—a tea set from Tiffany's. From Joseph Bloeckman came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him want to weep—indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with remembrances of Gloria's ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... fanaticism, infatuation, craze; oddity, eccentricity, twist, monomania (caprice) 608; kleptodipsomania^; hypochondriasis [Med.] &c (low spirits) 837; melancholia, depression, clinical depression, severe depression; hysteria; amentia^. screw loose, tile loose, slate loose; bee in one's bonnet, rats in the upper story. dotage &c (imbecility) 499. V. be insane &c adj.. become insane &c adj.; lose one's senses, lose one's reason, lose one's faculties, lose one's wits; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... woman of the world held the clinging hand in a firm, warm grasp, the low voice spoke evenly. "Many people feel just as you do, dear, on the eve of sailing. Some are made actually ill, even quite old travelers. But they know that it is pure hysteria and they fight it off, and afterward they are able to laugh at their fears. My dear, you are quite mistaken about there being any danger threatening your father. He is in the best of hands, and he himself would be ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond

... the verge of hysteria and struggled for calmness. Annie sensibly kept silent, and presently the ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... took an autumn walk through Sussex and Hampshire while his wife was at Bognor. In the next year his wife died, after being afflicted for some time by troubles connected with her property, by dropsy, valvular disease of the heart, and "hysteria." Borrow was melancholy and irritable, but apparently did not go for another walk in Scotland as was suggested for a cure; nor ever again did he get ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... different temperatures, employed in baths and for drinking purposes, as well. Except in very hot weather the water is inodorous, but its sedative properties have placed it in the first rank. It has been used with great benefit in all nervous complaints, hypochondria, hysteria, intestinal complaints, indigestion, &c., its action ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough

... strange t'ings dan dat 'round here," began the negress, but the physician hushed her in a seldom employed peremptory, concentrated voice with which he had often allayed hysteria itself. He returned to the other room, closing the door softly behind him. The man on the bed had not moved, but his eyes were open. His lips seemed to form words. Doctor James bent his head to listen. "The money! the money!" was ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... trade-rovers of the sea. Neither by day nor by night did the Babel of commerce cease. Unlike other West Indian towns, where such a condition led to gaiety and pleasure, Fort Oranje retained its Dutch character. It was a hysteria, but a hysteria ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... Madame la Comtesse," said St. Jerome, but Grandmamma heard him not. She covered her face with her hands, and her sobs soon passed to hiccups and hysteria. Mimi and Gasha came running in with frightened faces, salts and spirits were applied, and the whole house was soon in ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy

... "That's all. There is so much hysteria in the air now, that Mr. Arton was frightened and called upon the police at once. The Artons have been telephoning to everyone they know. It isn't like Eunice to slip out at ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings

... And he had almost succeeded by the time they reached the brownstone house of sitters, bedrooms and baths, gas stoves, cubby-holes, the persistent reek of onions, cigarettes and hot cheese. The hysteria of the artistic temperament, or the natural exaggeration of an artificial life, had worn itself out for the time being. Rather pathetic little sobs had taken its place, it was with a face streaked with the black stuff from her eyelashes that ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... I wrote, "who are so wise in the ways of those tricky things called nerves, must know that it was only a mild hysteria that made me say those most unladylike things. I have written Norah all about it. She has replied, advising me to stick to the good-fellow role but not to dress the part. So when next you see me I shall be a perfectly ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... general interest which she was arousing, Audrey leaned on the rail of the screen of flowers, and gave herself up afresh to laughter. Monsieur Dauphin was decidedly puzzled. The affair might have ended in hysteria and confusion had not Miss Ingate, with Nick and Tommy, come hurrying ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... three minutes Mrs. Armine heard nothing but the noise of the wind, which seemed to have taken entire possession of the chamber, and she felt as if she were its prey and the prey of the darkness. Something that was like hysteria seized upon her, a desperate terror of fate and the unknown. In the wind and in the darkness she had a grievous sensation of helplessness and of doom, of being lost for ever to happiness and light. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... there came over Gordon an uncontrollable desire to laugh. "The Bull" looked so funny, with his hair ruffled, and his eyes flaming with wrath. Gordon had to look the other way, or he would have burst into paroxysms of laughter. When one is overexcited and worried, hysteria is not far ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... not so boastful. "You mean, of course, that some of these highly cultured ladies would develop hysteria?" ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... Izzy had promised, the people had begun to quiet down, however. The anger and hysteria were giving way to a sullen, ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey

... action upon them, but may nevertheless become isolated from its proper connections, and function without issue. The extreme cases of this are the pathological states of mania and depression, where such feelings assume proportions dangerous to the existence of the individual. Intoxication and hysteria present analogous, though more transient phenomena. And one may observe the autonomous development of mere feeling even in the healthy life, as when one remains jolly after all occasion for it has ceased, or angry after the cause for ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... of spleen to which women were supposed to be peculiarly liable, something like our modern hysteria. It seems to have taken its name from the fogs of England which ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... limbs, tears a cry of desire from an old man; who, with her eddying breasts, her palpitating body, her quivering thighs, breaks the energy, melts the will, of a king; she has become the symbolic deity of indestructible Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty, chosen among many by the catalepsy that has stiffened her limbs, that has hardened her muscles; the monstrous, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible Beast, poisoning, like Helen of old, all that go near to her, all that ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... Haydn's. He created the thing, and it ended with him. He has sanity lucidity, pointedness, sometimes epigrammatic piquancy, of expression, dignity without pompousness or grandiloquence, feeling without hysteria. His variety seems endless, his energy never flags, and often he has more than a touch of the divine quality. He did not attempt to compose tragedies of life, for his temperament forbade it; but in his finest music he is never commonplace, because he had a strongly marked temperament and was poetically ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman

... seemed to frighten him; for he stole on quickly to his own room, and went to bed. Even there he could hear a shrill note of conversation occasionally from the opposite room, where Marian was sitting on a sofa, trying to subdue the hysteria which had been gaining on her since her escape from the balcony; whilst Elinor, seated on the corner of a drawer which projected from the dressing-table, talked incessantly ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... day an almost identical scene pushed Judith's strained nerves to the verge of hysteria. In the afternoon when the old man came to relieve her he returned almost immediately from the sick-room, called her downstairs once more, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... her face showed Barry that she was on the verge of hysteria. "Come, Mrs. Tracey, ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke

... munitions demanded. Sir PHILIP admits all that, but in a kind of agony calls on God and man to realise the meaningless horror of it all and forbid, at any price, the possibility of its recurrence. If sometimes unjust and nearly always tragical, the book none the less is free from anything like hysteria. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various

... that seemed merely a rejoicing tyranny, for testimony. It was a scene of tension. Church members were timid before the ordeal of experience or pleading, and the unconverted were strained to the verge of hysteria over a prospect of being haled into the open and prayed for. Neither Raven nor Nan knew how unpopular Tenney had become, because he could not enter the conventional limits of a prayer-meeting without turning ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... to myself, having walked to the far side of the open square, "sit on this bench, unfold the paper, and use your intelligence to overcome the hysteria which last night's experience and this odd affair of the Sheik have aroused. Be sensible. This message is a matter to be explained, just as all things are to be explained by any one who is not the victim ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... age of twenty-two. She was soon left a widow and her only son was born after his father's death. The story of the years which follow is unhappy. She was poor, dependent upon relatives whose patience she tried and whose hospitality was from time to time exhausted. Her attacks of hysteria continued and grew more violent. Her father sometimes rocked her to sleep like a child. The Tiltons built a cradle for her which is one of the traditions of this unhappy period of her life. She tried mesmerism and clairvoyance ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... attributes which we of the twentieth century should most strenuously encourage, that of common sense ranks first, in the face of the hysteria which threatens to weaken, if it does not swamp, all the wonderful new spirit ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn

... Globus hystericus.—Dr. TROLLIET, of Lyons, observes that hysteria cannot, with propriety, be said to exist in the male sex; that it arises, as its name imports, from derangement of the uterus, and that CULLEN and SYDENHAM have done wrong, and stand alone, in teaching the contrary. When there exists a real hysteria, the contractions are ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... pouring forth an ecstatic song—a song so out of proportion to his tiny body that he was fairly shaken by his own tumult—trills and whistles, calls and chuckles, all incoherently mingled and shouted forth in glorious hysteria. Miss Gordon looked up at the mad little musician and her face grew sad. She had recognized the cause of her renewed longing for home. At the little gate of her Edinburgh garden there grew just such a hawthorn, and the perfume of this one ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... to say she was not shocked. She was profoundly and awfully shocked. Her whole state was perhaps largely the result of shock: a sort of play-acting based on hysteria. But the dreadful things she saw in the lying-in hospital, and afterwards, went deep, and finished her youth and her tutelage for ever. How many infernos deeper than Miss Frost could ever know, did she not travel? the inferno of the human animal, the human organism in its ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... by rational and democratic interest in life." Why did you quote these sentences with approval? There is no distinction between individual and social morality, or, if there is, the order is quite the other way. All this democratic sympathy and social hysteria is merely the rumour in the lower rooms of our existence. Still to-day, as always, in the upper chamber, looking out on the sky, dwells the solitary soul, concerned with herself and her God. She passes down now and again into the noise and constant coming and going of ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... That tetanus, hysteria, and other spasmodic affections have often been mistaken for rabies, there is no doubt, and we can easily imagine the mental effect produced upon an individual of a highly nervous temperament, by the knowledge of his being bitten by an ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... somewhat glassy brightness, and there was a touch of hysteria in her manner. Mrs. Lewin thought she had been drinking. Many of her customers ended that way—took to cognac and ratafia, when choicer pleasures were exhausted and wrinkles began to show through ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl-buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea and its ways than a ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... healthier atmosphere of an English churchman's common sense, most unhappily a strong breath of French fanaticism suddenly set across his path, from quite another quarter. And the singular phenomenon now presented itself of an epidemic religious-hysteria commingling with, and emphasizing into lamentable extravagance, all the most dangerous features of the Methodist-Moravian doctrine about the new birth. So wonderfully is all the world connected together! ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various

... as in all things Californian, a good deal of hysteria over this matter, and I think your Progressive friends are trying to put the Democrats in a bit of a hole by making it appear that the Democrats are being influenced by the Federal Government to take a more conservative course than ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... too seriously worried for hysteria; and when she found Kennicott waiting for her, and exulting, "Have a walk? Well, like the town? Great lawns and trees, eh?" she was able to say, with a self-protective maturity new to her, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... him and Buck, and evinced no intention of getting out of the way. Hal drew his long hunting-knife. Mercedes screamed, cried, laughed, and manifested the chaotic abandonment of hysteria. Thornton rapped Hal's knuckles with the axe-handle, knocking the knife to the ground. He rapped his knuckles again as he tried to pick it up. Then he stooped, picked it up himself, and with two strokes ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London

... the ruins of Palmyra by moonlight. The following day we explored the caves, and found human bones and things, which I helped Richard to sort, much to the disgust of the Vicomte de Perrochel, who was shocked at my want of sensibility, and said that a Frenchwoman would certainly have had hysteria. We also explored the ruins, and wrote descriptions of our journey to Palmyra. We had all retired to rest, when I was aroused by hearing a roaring like that of a camel. I ran out of my tent to see what was the matter; and ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... Hysteria.—This is usually brought on by some excessive strain upon the brain nerves, and may show itself either in the violent or in the fainting form; it may even pass from the one to the other, fainting alternating with violent movements and cries. It may often be checked ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... seemed as if she were going to hover there, in that spot, through all eternity. And when at last she condescended to surrender to the wind and vanish like a falling star into the horizon, our friend was as near nervous prostration and hysteria as a bird can be. A very little longer and I believe he would actually have died from sheer ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... outbreak of lawlessness. Another evil result from the impetuous way in which we make laws is that they are not enforced because they are not in harmony with the views of the community. The statute books of every State are encumbered with laws passed in moments of hysteria and never put into operation, or else allowed to lapse after a few months of confusion. Every newspaper in California, for example, breaks the law every day when it prints a news item without appending the name ...
— Morals in Trade and Commerce • Frank B. Anderson

... impress itself upon her or her friends. Sickness, however, ensues, and headaches, growing in intensity, are developed. These are frequently attended by obscuration of vision or temporary blindness. Such a girl passes into what appears to her friends and medical adviser as ordinary hysteria. This gradually deepens without warning, until she is suddenly seized with a convulsion, beginning in one half of the face, then involving the arm, next the leg of the same side of the body, until the convulsion, violent and purely epileptic form in character, becomes universal. This is ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... arrival of Timothy with news from Thessalonica. The apostle's reasons for writing were: (a) to calm and encourage the converts whom he had so abruptly left; (b) to urge them to perform their ordinary duties. They had fallen into a state bordering on religious hysteria. Quite determined to be true to Christ, they had been demoralized by the strain of facing constant hostility. They had begun to take excessive interest in unfulfilled prophecy and eschatological speculation. The result was that individuals ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... Suffragists, Little Englanders, and the like, have taught us to beware of the signs and tokens of the unbalanced mind; and it becomes the duty of every healthy person to fly from the contamination of their hysteria, even though the principles which lie at the base of their doctrines may not be entirely without reason. We must avoid hasty and violent judgment as we would the plague. No honest man will deny that the closing of Philae for half the year is anything but a very regrettable ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... taken as an oily fluid or in alcohol. Taken in any of these forms, it literally makes the nerves walk, dance, and run. It heightens the feelings and sensibilities to distraction, producing what is really hysteria. If the weather is clear, this drug will make life gorgeous; if it rains, tragic. Slight vexation becomes deadly revenge; courage becomes rashness; fear, abject terror; and gentle affection or even a passing liking is transformed into passionate love. It is ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... hours to tell the story, and when we had all finished and Aggie had gone to bed in Tish's spare room with hysteria, and Tish had gone to bed with tea and toast, Charlie Sands was still walking up and down the parlor, stopping now and then to mutter: "Well, I'll be——" and then going on ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... choked with hysteria—"What are you leading to, Mr. Carroll? It is absurd to think that Gerald had anything to ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen

... plain New Yorker," she said, laughing aloud in sudden hysteria. For some reason she drew quickly away from him. "You are not disappointed, are you? Does it spoil ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... hers, that child-like softening and breaking down under him, in itself so unexpected (I didn't know she could do it), that sudden and innocent catastrophe, was the first sign to me that I was done for—wiped out. There wasn't any violence or any hysteria about it, only grief, only pity. It was an entirely simple, gentle and beautiful performance, and it took place in my rooms after Jevons had left us. But, as I say, this was long afterwards. The agony of my undoing ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair

... long-continued and deliberate education for that purpose, the German people lost its moral sense and set up diabolical standards in place of those common to all civilized races. We know that religious hysteria has at different times, like the influenza, swept over a nation, or that a society has lost its taste for generations together in art, and in poetry. We remember that the Witchcraft Delusion obsessed our ancestors. It is ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... laid her on the caned couch in the living-room, looking like a great, big, helpless, gray-haired baby, as any man is prone to do when he has hysteria to deal with in a ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... though he had had many opportunities of late to train his delicate organisation into manly endurance, yet the sudden anguish of this unexpected blow quite conquered him. A thrilling cry broke from his lips, and the next moment, when the cane again tore his shoulders, a fit of violent hysteria supervened, which alarmed the brutes who were trying to master ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... where he usually had his abode, he came little short of being adored by the women of his own particular sect, who crowded to listen to his fervent discourses, and came away from them on the verge of hysteria, so profoundly moved were their sensitive souls by his damnatory doctrines. The men were more reluctant in their admiration, yet even they were always ready to admit "that he was an excellent fellow, with his heart in the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... ordinary lines. They had not, like the enterprising Director of the Independent Theatre, undertaken the dreadful trade of educating the public. As a matter of fact, they fought shy of a piece in which "the new hysteria" was studied, and which ended badly, or at ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter

... and presently, calling up the servants behind, explained the situation and his plan. The French maid showed signs of hysteria and Isabel had to take her aside and quiet her, while the men consulted. Then it was arranged, and the servants presently dropped behind again a few yards, though the maid still rode with Isabel. Then they came to the road on the right that would have led them to Kingsdown, and down ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... De Gex said breathlessly. "She—she has been subject to fits of hysteria. The doctor has warned her of her heart. You heard her cries. ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux

... hysteria he seized her thin, long hand and dragged her along the deck to another gangway, down whose steep slope they stumbled together. The crowd of sightseers and handkerchief-wavers jostled them. They could see nothing but heads and ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... Dr Evans's assistant she again fainted, and upon that followed an attack of hysteria. When at length the medical man had seen her, Harvey received an adequate, but far from reassuring, explanation of the state of things. At nightfall Dr Evans came in person, and was with the patient for a long time. He spoke less gravely of ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... wooden post and slimy timbers. I had reached one bound of my watery prison. More fire fell from above, and the scream of hysteria quivered, unuttered, in ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... the town, with their heads cocked on one side and their forefingers on a paragraph in Baedeker; but just because of this, because everybody on earth who ever has been to Naples—man or woman, Jew or Gentile, black or white, bond or free—has wept and gurgled and had hysteria over its mild and placid beauty, is one reason why I find it somewhat tame. Italian scenery seems to me laid out by a landscape-gardener. Its beauty is absolutely conventional. Nobody will blame you if you admire it. To rave over it is like going to church—it is the proper ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell

... golden hour. Women sniffed sharply, dabbled with toil-hardened hands at their eyes; the men, standing in the grass, shuffled their feet uneasily. "Let us pray," the speaker dropped upon his knees, and his voice rose, grew more insistent, shrill with a touch of hysteria. From the back of the house a hen clucked ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... formerly believed by the public and by many physicians that only persons afflicted with hysteria and nervous troubles could be put to sleep in this way, but it was a mistake; artificial somnambulism may be produced on many subjects who are ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot

... strike a note that should be more heroical; but the ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... which Mary Rogers failed to recognize, and which brought back vividly to Clarence's recollection her own childish exaggerations of the Indian massacre. I am far from saying that she was entirely insincere or merely acting at these moments; at times she was taken with a mild hysteria, brought on by the exciting intrusion of this real event in her monotonous life, by the attentions of her friends, the importance of her suffering as an only child, and the advancement of her position as ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... contemporaries—certainly not by Martyr, whose portrait of her character is perhaps the most accurate contemporary one we possess. He traces her malady from its incipiency, through the successive disquieting manifestations of hysteria, melancholia, and fury, broken by periods of partial and even complete mental lucidity. Such intervals became rarer and briefer as time ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... children young than go to the expense of bringing them up before they are killed!" she went on, not hysterically, unless frozen intensity is hysteria. "Children clinging to your knees might stop you, but I suppose you would have a police force to tear the children away rather than miss the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... lapsed into a pose of deep concentration, like a two-bit swami. Cam noticed a tiny, rodent-type nose thrusting itself up from Everett's side pocket. "Fear ... I detect great apprehension—panic—hysteria verging on the loss of reason ... third booth this side of the ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds

... "Nerves, hysteria—any other silly womanish thing a cripple could have. Let me alone, Phyllis. I wish you could put me out of the ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer

... the maiden's blush, at the encouragement of the mealy-mouthed and hypocritical; but it is a ground of very solid satisfaction, be the cause what it may, that recent American literature has been so free from the emasculate fin-de-siecle-ism, the nauseating pseudo-realism, the epigrammatic hysteria, that has of late been so rife in certain British circles. Moreover, it is impossible to believe that any really strong talent could have been stifled by the frown of the magazine editor. Walt Whitman made his mark without that potentate's assistance; and if America ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... disease far more dreaded than any bodily affliction, or than even death itself, by this little colony of martyrs. This is a form of hysteria chiefly prevalent amongst women, but common to all, officials, exiles, and natives alike, who reside for any length of time in this hell upon earth.[42] The attack is usually unexpected; a person hitherto calm and collected will suddenly commence ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... sensitive, high-strung, nervous. The seclusion of their lives, the monotonous routine of their every-day occupations, and the possibilities afforded for dangerous, morbid introspection, could not but have a baneful effect on such natures, leading inevitably to actual insanity or to hysteria. That the possessed were hysterical is abundantly shown by the descriptions their historians give of the character of their convulsions, contortions, etc., and by the references to the anesthetic, or non-sensitive, spots on their bodies. ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... passion for justice, for democratic equality and the abolition of privilege. He had something to say and he succeeded in saying it vigorously, effectively, with clearness and moderation of statement. How to avoid hysteria; how to set others on fire instead of only making of himself a fiery spectacle; how to be earnest, yet calm; how to be satirical yet sincere; how to be interesting, yet direct—these were his objects, pursued with incessant toiling, rewriting again and again, recasting of sentences, ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... the first opportunity, to beg the forgiveness of his parents for this mad adventure. Now he knew that he might never return to them. The blood of a fellow man was upon his hands—in his morbid reflections he had long since ceased to attribute the death of Condon to the ape. The hysteria of panic had fastened the guilt upon himself. With money he might have bought justice; but penniless!—ah, what hope could there be for ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... process of this chauvinistic hysteria, Swedish politicians have naturally had an exceedingly delicate problem to solve. On one point opinion in Sweden has been unanimous. It has emphatically refused to accept a mere personal Union as a solution of the question. This on two grounds: ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund

... poor sufferers were desperate enough to allay their raging thirst with salt water, in spite of the entreaties and warnings of those who knew how terrible are its effects. In a few hours those who had drunk it were seized with violent hysteria and raving madness, which in many ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... The latter, much broader in scope than personal consciousness, has dependent on it the entire vegetative life—circulation, trophic actions, etc. Ordinarily the conscious self is on the highest level, the subliminal consciousness on the second; but in certain extraordinary states (hypnosis, hysteria, divided consciousness, etc.) it is just the reverse. Here is the bold part of the hypothesis: Its authors suppose that the supremacy of the subliminal consciousness is a reversion, a return to the ancestral. In the higher animals and in primitive man, according ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... to affect. If you can summon tears at pleasure, a few would not be amiss; a gentle shower, not enough to make the nose and eyes red or to detract from your beauty. Men cannot resist beauty and tears. Never mar their effect with anything bordering on sobs and hysteria; such violent manifestations being neither refined nor artistic. A scene in which one person does the talking must be limited in time. No ordinary man can keep at white heat fifteen minutes; if his victim says nothing, he will soon exhaust himself. ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... irritation of the right side of the tongue, and for two years taste was totally abolished. It was normal at the time of examination. The author offered no explanation of this case, but the patient gave a decidedly neurotic history, and the symptoms seem to point with some degree of probability to hysteria. Pope reports a peculiar case in which there were daily attacks of neuralgia preceded by sweating confined to a bald spot on the head. Rockwell reports a case of unilateral hyperidrosis in a feeble old man which he thought due to organic affection ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... the corpses of the slain for soap-making. I amused myself, in those gaudy days, by collecting newspaper clippings to this general effect, and later on I shall probably publish a digest of them, as a contribution to the study of war hysteria. The thing went to unbelievable lengths. On the strength of the fact that I had published a book on Nietzsche in 1906, six years after his death, I was called upon by agents of the Department of Justice, elaborately outfitted with badges, to meet the charge that I was an intimate associate and agent ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... in treating all forms of hysteria, including grande hysterie, neurasthenia, certain forms of insanity, dipsomania and chronic alcoholism, morphinomania and other drug habits, vicious and degenerate children, obsessions, stammering, chorea, seasickness, and all other forms of ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... sure that I shall be able to meet your wishes in a much simpler way, and yet throw sufficient safeguards around the new system to keep it from proving hurtful, should an attack of political hysteria overtake you. ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... can not transgress it, especially at a ripe age, without their organism suffering more or less in consequence."[59] Debay quotes among the diseases, caused by the inactivity of the sexual organs, satyriasis, nymphomania and hysteria; and he adds that celibacy exercises upon the intellectual powers, especially with woman, a highly injurious effect. On the subject of the harmfulness of sexual abstinence by woman, Busch says:[60] "Abstinence has in all ages been considered particularly harmful to woman; ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... girls were quickly climbing up the strong trellis, and as soon as they reached the tin roof they ran to the window. Here they found a young mother sitting on the floor, rocking a baby back and forth while she cried wildly with hysteria. The child was held so tightly that it, ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... heart are not wanting. Here stalks the demon Poverty. He is by no means so hideous as some of his brethren in the infernal hierarchy, and perchance we may inspect his dominions without succumbing to moral hysteria. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have revealed to us whole systems of underground life, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which lead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary fields of consciousness, and making irruptions thereinto ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... tobacco-pipe was placed between its lips." Dr. Pidduck asserts that in no instance is the sin of the father more strikingly visited upon his children than the sin of tobacco using. "The enervation, the hypochondriasis, the hysteria, the insanity, the dwarfish deformities, the consumption, the suffering lives, and early deaths of the children of inveterate smokers bear ample testimony to the feebleness and unsoundness of the constitution transmitted ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen

... was he deceived by the seemingly overwhelming impulse in his favour. He looked beyond the hysteria of welcome to the cold and critical fit which follows; and he saw danger ahead. When Mollien complimented him on his return, he replied, alluding to the general indifference at the departure of the Bourbons: "My dear fellow! People ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... and pumps at the river's edge supplied the water to it through channels. The machine was worked by an Arab who, as far as one could tell, prayed to it. In the garden, full of moist heat and splashes of colour, lived a colony of jackals, those extraordinary spirits of hell, whose wailing and hysteria are so amazing. I do not know how Darwin would have accounted for the particular note they strike. It is probably on a level with the roaring of the lion, in that it is designed to terrify. But the jackal does not terrify by such obvious methods as the lion. He plays on your eerie, ghostly, ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne

... and thence to the square before the edifice, or even into the cemetery. At a period later than that first mentioned these dances had instrumental accompaniment and became animated even to the verge of hysteria. Thus unwittingly the people of the medieval church were gathering into a loose, but by no means unformed, union the same materials as the ancients used in the ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson

... he killed for revenge, or in self-defense, he did that also without hysteria, for it was a very businesslike proceeding which admitted ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... the cool response of the Englishman. "The trouble with you neutrals is that you laugh too much at German spies. We warn you sometimes, and then you grin and say that it's hysteria. But by and by you'll change your minds, as we did, and know the German secret service for what it is—the most competent thing, the most widely spread, and pretty much the most dangerous, that the ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti

... be absolutely frank with you, I am compelled to say that, in my opinion, your wife's case is an incurable one. The one specific cause of her mental breakdown is the Southern situation which has borne tremendously upon her. That whole region of country is affected by a sort of sociological hysteria and we physicians are expecting more and more pathological manifestations as a result of the ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... he writes, "since Mr Borrow himself was so agitated that I could get no very clear account of it. I could detect no marked organic affection about the heart or lungs, of which she chiefly complained. It seemed to me to be either a very aggravated form of hysteria, or, what appears more likely, some more serious mental affection. In any case, the chief requisite seemed very careful and intelligent nursing or management, and I doubt very much, from what I saw, whether ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... she had unwillingly entrusted for a time to an assistant; she found the conditions of her life hard. Alas, they grew harder. After Emily, two children were successively born; fate was kind to them, and neither survived infancy. Their mother fell into fretting, into hysteria; some change in her life seemed imperative, and at length she persuaded her husband to quit the town in which they lived, and begin life anew elsewhere. Begin life anew! James Hood was forty years old; he possessed, as the net result of his ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... appears to be an intelligent specimen of his race, and when he had conquered his hysteria, was extremely co-operative, showing active interest in his surroundings. I believe he would be able to assimilate training, and would make a valuable addition to the Stellar Guard. I recommend his retention ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole

... had not slept; equally plain that she had wept copiously. She sighed, she groaned, she drew in her breath, she shook her head, as she waited on table. In short, she seemed in so precarious a state, like a petard three times charged with hysteria, that I did not dare to address her; and stole out of the house on tiptoe, and actually ran downstairs, in the fear that she might call me back. It was plain that this degree of tension could ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the conclusion that either the country is in a bad way, or you are. You will pardon me if I choose the latter alternative, for I too am an optimistic American, and I like to choose the lesser of two evils. If there is an attack of "hysteria," I should like to think of it as somewhat localized, rather than having suddenly attacked ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... of the nerves, brought on by anxiety or disease, leads to ordinary hysteria, emotional and foolish. A similarly high tension, brought about by the will, renders a man sensitive to super-physical vibrations Going to sleep has no significance, but going into Samadhi is a priceless power. The process is largely the same, ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant

... inconspicuous corner; her eyes were upon me as Moa and I entered, but she did not move. The thirty-odd passengers were huddled in a group. Solemn, white-faced men, frightened women. Some of them were sobbing. One Earth-woman—a young widow—sat holding her little girl, and wailing with uncontrolled hysteria. The child knew me. As I appeared now, with my gold-laced white coat over my shoulders, the little child seemed to see in my uniform a mark of authority. She left her mother and ran ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... might have ruined me. Be the spectacle what it might, I could afford neither consternation, scream, nor swoon. Besides, I was not overcome. Tempered by late incidents, my nerves disdained hysteria. Warm from illuminations, and music, and thronging thousands, thoroughly lashed up by a new scourge, I defied spectra. In a moment, without exclamation, I had rushed on the haunted couch; nothing leaped out, or sprung, or stirred; ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... the temper of the house-holder, whether she would take that apparition quietly, deceived by Lanyard's mumming into believing she had only a poor thievish fool to deal with, or with a storm of bourgeois hysteria. In the latter event, Lanyard's hand was ready planted, palm down, on the top of the desk: should the woman attempt to give the alarm, a single bound would carry the adventurer across it in full flight for the ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... will ask science, and science will yield hope. Science says, take a hundred men and a hundred women, and let them live on a fruitful island and multiply, and in four generations you will have an improved stock—a stock freer from atavism, hysteria, anomalies, and insanities. Science holds out hope; you don't. You say God's will and decrees are eternal, and what they were a thousand ages since they will be a thousand ages to come. Science does eventually point to a new heaven and new earth, but Calvinism throws no light ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... they came on; the Zouaves heard them, the gray infantry regiment gave way, turned, filed off, retreating toward the bridge at a slow trot like some baffled but dangerous animal; and after it ran the Zouaves, firing, screaming, maddened to hysteria by their first engagement, until their panting officers and their bugles together barely managed to halt them short of the edges of utter annihilation just as a full Confederate brigade rose grimly from the wood's edge across the stream, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... broke into the shrill laugh of hysteria. Jane led her to the couch and sat beside her. Kitty leaned forward, staring at the floor. Now and then she pressed her handkerchief to her mouth, stifling. Suddenly she looked up ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair

... on me. It is as useless to be constantly digging up a person's symptoms to see if they are better, and still greater folly to preach long sermons of advice to such as are under the despotism of ungoverned emotion, or whirled on the wayward currents of hysteria. To read the riot act to a mob of emotions is valueless, and he who is wise will choose a more wholesome hour for his exhortations. Before and after are the preacher's hopeful occasions, not the moment when excitement is at its highest, and the self-control ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell

... is very like opium poisoning; and hydrophobia, lock-jaw, and even some cases of hysteria, closely resemble ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various

... conscientious regard for Rachel and all her sense of duty were not enough to make her do it. So that Rachel, unsuspectingly, had been spared a tremendous emotional crisis. By this time she had grown nearly accustomed to the fact of the disappearance of the money. She had completely recovered from the hysteria caused by old Batchgrew's attack, and was, indeed, in the supervening calm, very much ashamed ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... for they walked abreast, waded ankle-deep in the water. From the little city below them they could hear the hum of a myriad of tiny voices—thin, shrill and faint. Suddenly the Big Business Man laughed. There was no hysteria in his voice now—just ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings

... of her hands against Narcissus' back and pushed him toward the bedroom door, now almost at the end of her reserves of self- control. Her mouth trembled. She was fighting against hysteria. ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... in despair. Could he say, A ship has landed here? Could he say, Check that bunker? Even if Montano was a would-be murderer, he was human, and Bart could not betray him to the Lhari. There had been too much betrayal. His voice rose in sudden hysteria. ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... crucifixion question, but on the opposite side of the fence regarding the gold question. Of course I knew little about finance, and could not answer the Nebraskan. But had he advocated the free and unlimited coinage of pig-iron I could have talked him into a gasping hysteria. For, we mill fellows figured that this was exactly what Bryan's money theory amounted to. His farmer friends had borrowed gold money from the bankers, spent it in drought years plowing land that produced nothing, ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... to avert summary divorce, locked its claws, now guaranteed to hold to death and beyond it—to destruction. Astounded—indeed, petrified—by the high antics of the boy, none of the spectators could venture to his aid. They were fully engaged with unrestrained and joyful hysteria. The more the boy yelled and cavorted, the more frantic the fun. Blood trickled down the chocolate-coloured skin, but the valiant crab held on. It was there for a definite purpose. The hour and the crab had arrived. Vengeance for centuries of wrongs to the race and heroic self-sacrifice ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... would be difficult to tell; but out of the confusion of his technicalities Abe caught the words, "nerves" and "hysteria." ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund

... see that that's enough to excuse profanity," said Mrs. Richards witheringly. "Persis Dale is a coarse scheming creature." Then as her husband burst into astonished protests, she showed signs of hysteria. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... starved beast who has found a carcass. Let but earnest women found a movement and crowd it forward to the day when it smacks of success and gives promise of the fine emotion of achievement, and they fall upon it with a cry, having hysteria rather than reason as their guiding impulse. In them is all of femininity—and none of it. For the most part they live and die unseen, unknown, eating rank food, sleeping overmuch, and sitting through summer afternoons rocking in chairs and looking at people passing in the ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... Lord Nick and Donnegan earlier that day had wrought up the nerves of The Corner to the point of hysteria; if the singular end of that meeting had piled mystery upon excitement; if the appearance of Donnegan, sitting calmly at the table of the girl who was known to be engaged to Nick, had further stimulated public curiosity, ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... had got the letter inside the pages. For a minute I persuaded Jack steadfastly to take my ticket and he refused with determination. If it had not been that Nina was upset very easily, and Mrs. Faulkner had been known to have hysteria without giving any one a moment's notice, I would have brandished the note in their faces instead of standing first on one leg and then on the other and ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... inwardly commented; "These obscure forms of hysteria often possess the cunning, the dissimulation of madness. Poor girl! She is beginning to realize her predicament, and is preparing us for disappointment," and a return of his ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... things in this world there are two that I loathe and despise: hysteria in a woman; fear and cowardice in a man. The first turns me to ice. I cannot sympathize with hysteria. The second turns my stomach. Cowardice in a man is to me positively nauseous. And this fear-smitten mass of human ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... and he "could moan for woes which others hear not." He, too, "could ... with the poor and trampled sit and weep."[5] There is in nearly all anarchists this supersensitiveness, this hyperaesthesia that leads to ecstasy, to hysteria, and to fanaticism. It is a neuropathy that has led certain scientists, like Lombroso and Krafft-Ebbing, to suggest that some anarchist crimes can only be looked upon as a means to indirect suicide. They ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... enough of the folly of it all, but he did not see what else he could do. She had chosen to punish him through herself in a way that was impossible. It was a childish thing to do, born of some touch of hysteria her experience had induced, and he could only treat her as a child till she was ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine

... smaller boy in the background talked into a telephone. Both were giggling. On seeing me the slightly larger of the two advanced with a half-hearted attempt at solemnity, though unable to resist a Parthian shaft at his companion, who was seized on the instant with a paroxysm of suppressed hysteria. ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... girl tore off her headphones. "Roger Snedden," she cried with a hysteria that would have dumfounded her underlings, "you've brought the name of Puffyloaf in front of the whole world, all right! Now do something ...
— Bread Overhead • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... hard day's work he was urgently summoned to a place 120 miles from London. It was a very wet night. There was no carriage to meet him; no fly to be had. After walking a mile or two he arrived at a small farm, and found the daughter suffering from an attack of hysteria. Sir Andrew, with his usual kindness, did what he could and evidently gave satisfaction, for when he left the mother said: "Well, Sir Andrew, you have been so kind we must make it double," and handed him two guineas. He thanked them and ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... who was on the verge of hysteria, dragged Joan from under the table, and the two carried him ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... letter; and if I had better ask his aid in finding it. But he is going away so soon. Now that I reflect, soberly, what motive could Doctor Heath possibly have for taking that letter? I think I must have been mad, or in hysteria. The man may be an imposter, a man of mystery, and all that; but why must I accuse him of taking a letter that could be of no possible use to him. I had worked myself into a rage. Well, it's done; I can't recall it. Doctor Heath ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... overstrained self-command snapped like a bow-string and his breast shook with sudden hysteria. "Will I take it?" he cried with a gasping laugh that was rather more like a sob. "Will I take the Court of St. James? Will I take money from home? Oh, my God, ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... Many of us were walking up and down in agitation. Nevertheless, there was no hysteria and no ignominious expression of fear as there had been on the ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt

... or fifth time since Lizzie had known him, and he was in imminent danger of getting into jail, or into a coat of tar and feathers. As the controversy grew hotter and the peril greater, Lizzie came to a condition which might have been diagnosed as chronic impending hysteria. Her eyes were red from secret weeping, and at the slightest provocation she would burst into floods of tears and throw herself into her husband's arms. This would start off Jimmie Junior and the little ones, who always took their cue from him. And Jimmie Senior ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... SMOCK. The Leaves. L. E. D.—Long ago it was employed as a diuretic; and, of late, it has been introduced in nervous diseases, as epilepsy, hysteria, choraea, asthma, &c. A dram or two of the powder is given twice or thrice a-day. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... that "extreme ugliness" and "male hysteria" are admitted as "adequate disqualifications" for the French Army. If the same rule only applied to the English House of Commons, what a deal of noise and nonsense ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various

... Tilly and Heloise made her sit down, while each held forcibly a hand to prevent an access of hysteria. Mere Ste. Vierge rose and hastily left the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... them! What an extraordinary sensation that ray sent through me! How the new feeling bore me up! It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit. I mastered the rising hysteria, lifted up my head, and took a firm stand on the stool. Helen Burns asked some slight question about her work of Miss Smith, was chidden for the triviality of the inquiry, returned to her place, and smiled at me as she again went by. What a smile! I remember it now, and I know that ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... up unblemished. The only warning is the electric skin-tension (I feel as though I were a lace-maker's pillow) and an irritability which the gibbering of the General Communicator increases almost to hysteria. ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... unrestrainedly, much to Martie's half-comprehending embarrassment. The men, far from seeming to be shocked by her hysteria, laughed violently themselves. ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... hands him one folded sheet of yellow paper. Ed says, what's the matter—couldn't he get to copy the report? Charlie says the report is all there on that sheet, every word of it. One sheet! And Ed had been expecting at least forty pages of able narrative, even without hysteria. Even before he looks at it Ed says there is crooked ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... me, and asked if I were the doctor from the old Grange. I said I was, and she begged me to come in and see her daughter-in-law. She was very ill, and the local doctor is gone. I found a young, very pretty girl, with a tiny baby, in as bad a state of hysteria as I ever saw. But that is not the story. That I heard by degrees. It seems the father-in-law, a veteran of 1870, now old, and nearly helpless, is of good family, but married, in his middle age, a woman ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... private opinion of the war was that it would end without a military decision—he regarded the German system as unsmashable—and then, with France deleted and England swamped in internal politics, he saw an alliance of common sense between Germany and the United States. The present hysteria, the sentimentality he condemned, could not continue to stand before the pressure of mercantile necessity. After all, the entire country was ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... preliminary challenge went on. Already in the voice of each there had begun to show itself that faint note of hysteria that culminates presently in a scream of anger and a torrent of spits, leading again in their turn to an ominous silence and the first fierce clawing blows at eyes and ears. In another instant the watcher above would recoil for a moment as the swift ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... the huge, thick fingers reached up and around his throat, fumbling to get at the windpipe. Pete Reeve made his last effort; it was like striving to free himself from a ton's weight. Hysteria of fear and horror seized him, and his voice gave utterance to his terror. As he screamed, the big fingers joined around his throat. Any further ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... emotional conflicts, memories associated with established motor dispositions, inevitably tend to find some sort of direct or symbolic expression. In this way they give rise to the symptoms which we meet in hysteria and psychasthenia—fears, phobias, obsessions, and tics, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... from a bloodless campaign—one that neither required nor brought forth any generalship—but it was a victory and had been personally conducted by Meneptah, so Memphis was preparing to fall into paroxysms of delight, little short of hysteria. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... was still very weak. Although her periods of unconsciousness had not returned, she was still subject to paroxysms of hysteria. At times she sank into forgetfulness, then started nervously, sometimes trembling in every limb. The thought of the blow of her daughter's flight never left ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... the remembrance of that imposing and expensive funeral with its mournful following of tearful faces; the hushed reading of the will with its accompaniment of rustling approval; the picture of the admirably sympathetic clergyman consoling with white hands Mrs. Stillwood, inclined to hysteria, but anxious concerning her two hundred pounds' worth of crape which by no possibility of means could now be paid for—recurred to me the obituary notice in "The Chelsea Weekly Chronicle": the humour of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... her small hand five infant Chaters had been nourished; the massive bosom was advertisement that they had done well. Beneath the mingled gusts of hysteria and of wrath it violently contracted and dilated; but the heart, terrificly though Mrs. Chater said it throbbed, lay ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... Imperialist versus Imperialist. One of the outstanding lessons of the last decade is the fact that the world's natural enemies haven't yet had a chance at each other, being too busy murdering among themselves. It's coming, though. Another tableau. All this hysteria and uncertainty will gradually simmer down into another right-and-wrong issue—with life boiling away as always under a black ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... the hunter's extraordinarily keen ear, Courtlandt recognized the quality; and the weight of a thousand worlds lightened its pressure upon his heart. And the Barone laughed, too. So there they were, the three of them. But Nora's ineffectual battle for repression had driven her near to hysteria. To escape this dire calamity, she flung open a casement window and stood within it, breathing in the heavy fragrance ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... less and less. Was not this clearly a moment when the strong mind of a man should assert itself over foolish feminine hysteria? ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... of Rutherford, but was not sure until they reached Newark, when the news was spread throughout the train by passengers who boarded it there. She worried and cried over the loss of our little home and had worked herself into a state of extreme nervousness and near-hysteria by the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... poor hair. These alterations of the familiar person, the blood-red flush, the wet, clinging beard, the pointed hair, stirred in her a rising hysteria ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... beside Sheba on the little plateau. She had quite recovered from the touch of hysteria that had attacked her courage. The wind and the rain had whipped the color into her soft cheeks, had disarranged a little the crinkly, blue-black hair, wet tendrils of which nestled against her temples. The health and buoyancy of the girl were in the live ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... mine, and because you have learned to trust me. But who else would credit it? I have only my word against his—an unknown nurse's against the great Professor's. Everybody would say I was malicious or hysterical. Hysteria is always an easy stone to fling at an injured woman who asks for justice. They would declare I had trumped up the case to forestall my dismissal. They would set it down to spite. We can do nothing against ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... her patience to the utmost. Presently she heard the banging of a trunk-lid. He was there. And now that he was there, she, who had always taken pride in her lack of feminine nerves, found herself in the grip of a panic that verged on hysteria. Her heart fluttered and missed a beat. It had been so easy to plan! She was afraid. Perhaps the tension of waiting all these hours was the cause. With an angry gesture she strove to dismiss the feeling of trepidation by walking resolutely to ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath

... sentimental as they used to be. As a woman's weapon hysteria has gone to the dust heap. Women are learning independence. You believe in women thinking for ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... medical authority, that the proportion of mothers who can suckle their children is decidedly diminishing among the upper and middle classes, that deaths from childbirth are eight times as great among these classes as among the peasantry, and that spinal distortion, hysteria, and painful disorders are on the increase. Nine-tenths of the evil he attributes to the long hours of school study, and to the neglect ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... skipper went through the ship and painstakingly confiscated every weapon. He locked them up. He, himself, already felt the nagging effect of jangling nerves. There was nothing to do. He didn't know when there would ever be anything to do. It was a condition to produce hysteria. ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... piece of business of some moment; and I understood ..." he paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria—"I understood, a drawer...." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... hear you call yourself such a name," said Garvington, ostentatiously dense to her true meaning. "It is hysteria that speaks, and not my dear sister. Very natural when you are so grieved. We ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume

... in a twinkling, and the instant she touched terra firma put her hand to her side, and began to sob and gasp and pant, as ladies will previous to an attack of what the doctors call "hysteria." She leant upon the cripple's shoulder, and I observed a strange, roguish sparkle in his unbandaged eye. Moreover, I remarked that his hands were white and clean, and his figure, if he hadn't been such a cripple, would have ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... disposed, where I was greeted, by way of revival, with the intelligence that my wife, after listening with great energy to Lady Maldon's description of the wedding festivities for two tremendous hours, had at last been relieved by copious hysteria, and that Mary and Kate were in a fair way—if the exploit could be accomplished by perseverance—of crying themselves to sleep. These were our bridal compliments; much more flattering, I imagine, if not quite so honey-accented, as the courtly phrases with which ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... "Thou art substituting hysteria for history," I went on. "I was not born yesterday, but I have only scored a few years more than a quarter of one century, and seeing that my own mother was a woman, I must refuse to be held accountable for the position of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... enough to know that it was most of it grief over her grandfather, and nerves and hysteria, and the fact that she was only eighteen years old and lonely, and that being a bride had a certain amount to do with it. She had told me that I was a beast, and made me feel like one; and I took the whole thing hard ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis



Words linked to "Hysteria" :   hysterical, mania, hysterocatalepsy, hysteric, epidemic hysertia, conversion hysteria, frenzy, fright, mass hysteria, mimesis, fearfulness, fear, fury, hysterical neurosis, neuroticism, anxiety hysteria, nympholepsy, manic disorder, delirium, neurosis, craze, psychoneurosis



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