PEOPLE POSSESSING TWO LIVES.

Timaru Herald, Volume XXVII, Issue 1898, 29 November 1877, Page 4

PEOPLE POSSESSING TWO LIVES.

(From the Scientific American.) The record books of the medical profession contain not a few reports of patients living double lives ; cases m which there is a periodical loss of one phase of mental life, and the assumption or resumption of another very different one. For example, an hysterical subject will have a fit, and on coming out of it will be found to have lost all memory of the past. The mental faculties remain unimpaired, but so far as knowledge goes the patient's mind is that of an infant. With more or leas delay she will learn to talk, and to read and work, practically beginning life again at the beginning, and sometimes developing a character quite unlike her first one. The physical basis appears to be the same ; but the personality is entirely different, with different temperament, different habits, different tastes, and so on. Matters will continue after this fashion for an indefinite period ; and then the patient will go into another fit, emerging just as she' was originally. All the life she had lived since the first fit is suddenly wiped out. ' She can recall none of it ; for the time her second life, and it may have lasted years, is annihilated, and the current of her original life flows on as serenely and naturally as if it had never been broken— until another fit sets her back to the end of her second life, which she takes up again m utter unconsciousness of a. break m it. And so her existence alternates between two lives entirely distinct and independent of each other, save that the same body serves for both. ' Formerly such alternations of consciousness were explained by spiritual or demoniac possession. The body was supposed to be tenanted by two independent spirits ; or the patient's soul was from time to time ousted by some other malignant' or benevolent soul, as the tempter might indicate. In our more scientific and materialistic days, the spiritual hypothesis has few retainers ; the phenomena m. question being much more satisfactorily explained by supposing that .the. patient's mental life has been carried on, wholly; or chiefly by one side of her double brain, and that, when the action of that side is arrested by disease, the unused side takes up the intellectual function, and continues until another paroxysm shifts the responsibility to the first used side. So the two lives alternate with the alternating functional activity of the two brains ; the reason that such such lives- are always double and never triple or manifold lying m the fact that we have only two independent brain lobes and no more. ' , '...'. i The.'' 1 latest, case reported of this sort is exceedingly interesting, and peculiar m that there is a loss of. continuity m the life only when the state recurs m which the patient's life began. . The case is re ported at length m the Beuve Scientifiqiie, by Professor Azaiii, of Bordeaux, where the patient lives. The patient is a married woman, now about 43 years old, and has been living a double life since she was 14 years old. For brevity, we will call her first state of 'consciousness and its repetitions, A, and the second state arid repetitions, B, ■ , ... . : At first B came on at intervals of days, arid lasted for a few hours only. Twice it wiis absent for three years at a time, from the age, of lf£ to 2(% and : again from 24 to 27. Latterlyshe has lived the life of B most of the time. A recurring at intervals of two or three months; and remaining but for a few hours. Formerly the transition occurred during some minutes of unconscious sleep following' violent pain m the temples; now it is almost instantaneous. In A, the patient has'always been quiescent and somewhat morose m disposition; m B, sho has always been bright, gay, and affectionate. In A, she has no memory of events which happen m B ; but iriß, she has a full recollection of her life m both, states —a remarkable peculiarity m her case, aa already observed. In 8,. her distress on discovering that there have been blanks ■ m her' conscious experience .is extreme, but.the practical inconvenience of such loss of memory, formerly gteat, has ; become less with- the predominance of ■ B. On rare ocensiocs on passing ontof B, the patient suffers a brief period of agitation and extreme terror, during which her knowledge is somewhat disordered ; . at other times there is' no apparent derangement except such* as commonly appears m hysterical patients^ . : .. ■ In her passage from B' to A (Professor Azain remarks), she does • not emerge, from a dream, for a dream, however -in-, coherent,' is always something. . She '

emerges from nothing. The time elapsed may be an hour, or it may be months, it is all the same to her : an entire section of her conscious life has dropped out. "To compare her existence to a book from which Borne pages have been torn is not enough. An intelligent reader might fill the blank, but she can have absolutely no notion of anything that happened m her secondary state." A world of curious problems and complications, social, theological, and other, are suggested by such a case as this. Fancy a person on trial for a crime committed m a previous state of which no recollection remains, with no one aware of the criminal's peculiarity : or a woman to find herself suddenly (to her) surrounded by a family of children, owning her as a mother, yet utterly unknown to her ! There is a splendid chance for a sensational novelist. And we should like to hear a convention of clergymen discuss this proposition : Suppose a victim of double consciousness to be a saint m A, and a wretched sinner m B. Her earthly existence terminates m B. Will the two states of consciousness be united by the destruction of the conflicting organs of consciousness ? Or will two souls remain, to go to their diverse ways ? Again, if there is one, and only one, soul to survive, will it be damned for the sins of B, or saved by the faith that illuminated A 1