164 Inquiries into Human Faculty
effect it. Both have hallucinations of hearing. They are both ‘of them melancholy and morose; they never address a word to anybody, and will hardly answer the questions that others address to them. They always keep apart, and never communicate with one another. An extremely curious fact which ‘has been frequently noted by the superintendents of their section of the hospital, and by myself, is this: From. time to time, at ‘very irregular intervals of two, three, and many months, without appreciable cause, and by the purely spontaneous effect of their illness, a. very marked change takes place in the condition of the two brothers. Both of them, at’ the same time, and often on ‘the same day, rouse themselves from their habitual stupor and prostration; they make the same complaints, and they come of their own accord to the physician, with an urgent request to be liberated. I have seen this strange thing occur, even when they were some miles apart, the one being at Bicetre, and the other living at Saint-Anne.”
I sent a copy of this passage to the principal authorities among the physicians to the insane in England, asking if they had ever witnessed any similar case. In reply, I have ‘received three noteworthy instances, but none to be coin-pared in their exact parallelism with that just given. The details of these three cases are painful, and it is not necessary to my general purpose that I should further allude to them.
There is another curious French case of insanity in twins, ‘which was pointed out to me by Sir James Paget, described by Dr. Baume in the Annales Medico-Psychologiques, 4 serie, vol. 1., 1863, p. 312, of which the following is an abstract. The original contains a few more details, but is too long to quote: Francois and Martin, fifty years of age, worked as railroad contractors between Quimper and Chateaulin. Martin had twice slight attacks of insanity. On January 15 a box was robbed in which the twins had deposited their savings. On the night of. January 23—24 both Francois ‘(who lodged at Quimper) and Martin (who lived with his wife and children at St. Lorette, two leagues from Quimper) had the same dream at the same hour, three a.m., and both awoke with a violent start, calling out, “I have caught the thief! I have caught the thief! they are doing mischief to my brother !" They were both of them extremely agitated, and gave way to similar extravagances, dancing and leaping.
