Functional disturbances affect practically every organ in the human body, including the esophagus. They may manifest themselves in various forms, such as globus hystericus, and the symptoms may be multitudinous, but there is one type that stands separate from the other, to which H. S. Plummer, in 1914, gave the name of hysterical dysphagia. Hysterical dysphagia is characterized by a sense of obstruction at or about the esophageal introitus, is practically always associated with pallor and secondary anemia, and frequently with enlargement of the spleen. It must be remembered, however, that the line of demarcation between hysterical dysphagia and other types of functional dysphagia is not always clear or definite, although as a whole it represents a very definite clinical entity.
Vinson,1 in 1922, published the first paper on the diagnosis and treatment of this disease. Since that time many more cases of dysphagia of a functional