Dr. Madden left her,
telling her that she was not pregnant, and when she reappeared at
his office in a few days, he reassured her of the nonexistence of
pregnancy; she became very indignant, triumphantly squeezed
lactescent fluid from her breasts, and, insisting that she could
feel fetal movements, left to seek a more sympathetic accoucheur.
Underhill, in the words of Hamilton, describes a woman as "having
acquired the most accurate description of the breeding symptoms,
and with wonderful facility imagined that she had felt every one
of them." He found the woman on a bed complaining of great
labor-pains, biting a handkerchief, and pulling on a cloth
attached to her bed. The finger on the abdomen or vulva elicited
symptoms of great sensitiveness. He told her she was not
pregnant, and the next day she was sitting up, though the
discharge continued, but the simulated throes of labor, which she
had so graphically pictured, had ceased.
Haultain gives three examples of pseudocyesis, the first with no
apparent cause, the second due to carcinoma of the uterus, while
in the third there was a small fibroid in the anterior wall of
the uterus. Some cases are of purely nervous origin, associated
with a purely muscular distention of the abdomen.
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