False Laugher

Eighteen-year-old Teresa Hawkins was overjoyed when the business school of Fairmont, W. Va. gave her a 100% grade in shorthand fortnight ago. To celebrate, she and two school chums went to the cinema. There Teresa, for no funny reason on the screen, started to laugh. Her friends, unable to stop her, took her home. Her father, unable to stop her, drove her to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The doctors, unable to stop her, sent her to West Virginia's State Hospital at Weston, where last week she lay shaking every 30 minutes with newsmaking paroxysms of laughter.

Up to less than a century ago all good doctors believed that female hysterics were directly caused by a violent disturbance of the womb or hystera. This belief was an outgrowth of an ancient notion that the womb was a free-moving organ--"like an animal within an animal"--which at times roamed the body and tickled a woman to immoderate and uncontrollable laughter. This theory died only when it was clinically established that men could have hysterics no less than women. Best modern thought is that sex tension is only one of many causes of hysterics.

At Weston State Hospital last week Dr. John Edward Offner, the wise superintend ent, quickly abandoned the theory that sexual stirrings in adolescent Teresa Hawkins caused her hysteria. He well knew that a lesion in the brain or a lesion in the abdomen could produce the same kind of false laughter. Upon examining Teresa Hawkins, Dr. Offner found that an appendectomy had resulted in abdominal adhesions. These affected both her diaphragm and womb, put a strain upon her constitution which she withstood until her shorthand studies exhausted her. Then she lost all emotional control. Soon as Dr. Offner performed a second laparotomy and freed diaphragm and womb from their unnatural bindings, Teresa Hawkins ceased her nine days laughing.

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