In general, diseases are internal or external. It is clear that no individual can know positively the nature of any internal disease that he has. The diagnosis of the most skilful physicians may be in error. Post-mortems in celebrated cases have often shown that there had been an entire misunderstanding of the malady. Hysteria can simulate every known complaint: paralysis, heart-disease, and the worst forms of fever and ague. Hypochondria, to which intelligent and highly educated persons of sedentary habits brooding over their sensations are liable, especially if they are accustomed to read medical works and accounts of diseases and of their treatment, will do the same. Dyspepsia has various forms, and indigestion can produce symptoms of organic heart-disease, while diseases of the liver have often been mistaken by eminent physicians for pulmonary consumption. Especially in women do the troubles to which they are most subject give rise to hysteria, in which condition they may firmly believe that they are afflicted with disease of the spine, of the heart, or indeed of all the organs. I heard an intelligent woman "testify" that she had "heart-disease, irritation of the spinal cord, and Bright's disease of the kidneys, and had suffered from them all for ten years." She certainly had some symptoms of all of them. Within eight years a "regular" physician died, the cause, as he supposed on the authority of several examinations, being consumption. A post-mortem showed his lungs sound, and his death to have been caused by diseases the result of the enormous quantities of food and stimulants he had taken to "fight off consumption." The object of these observations is simply to show that testimony that a person has been cured reflects no light upon the problem as to what he or she was cured of, if it was claimed to be an internal disease. The
