PUERPERAL HYSTERIA (INSANITY?).Read in the Section of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women, at the Forty-third Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association, held at Detroit, Mich., June, 1892.

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While the alienist, the surgeon and the gynecologist have long recognized the importance of hysteria in its counterfeit presentments of various morbid conditions of the human body, the obstetrician has been exceedingly backward in connecting neuromimetic phenomena with the disorders incident to pregnancy and the lying-in state.

Indeed, a careful review of obstetrical literature for the past few years, fails to discover more than a half dozen or so articles in which this important subject has been at all considered, while the textbooks on midwifery contain little or nothing upon this point, and nowhere have I been able to find a word written in regard to hysterical mental conditions developing during labor or the puerperium. Yet I am quite sure that manifestations of this nature cannot be so very infrequently met with, the fact probably being that they are not recognized as such, but are put down as simple cases