While on the way to the university with this friend they passed a corner pharmacy, and the young man asked to be allowed to step in for a moment for a remedy for headache. The friend waited on the sidewalk for him, and when, after some minutes, the young man did not come out he went in to inquire for him, and found that after purchasing a headache powder the young man had gone out by a side door. For three days nothing was heard from him. Then a telegram announced that he was in a hospital in a distant city and that he had been picked up on the street unconscious. When he came to in the hospital he had no idea where he was, and, according to his own story, no recollection of how he got to the distant city.
It might be very easy to think, under such circumstances, that this was all pretence. A number of these cases of ambulatory epilepsy have been under the observation of distinguished neurologists, however, and there seems no good reason to doubt that some of them, at least, were entirely without any fictitious element. In any given case the { 263} possibility of the occurrence of an attack of what is really the assumption of a secondary personality must be judged from the circumstances, from the previous history of the individual, from the family traits, and from certain stigmata as narrowing of the field of vision and the like, which go to show the existence of a highly neurotic constitution. In this case the family history showed marked neurotic tendencies on both sides, and a brother had displayed a tendency to regularly spaced attacks of alcoholism about every six weeks, and finally became absolutely uncontrollable. There seemed good reason to think that the case was a real example of ambulatory epilepsy, and that the lapse of memory claimed by the patient really existed.
In these cases it is usual for the so-called secondary personality to assert itself at moments of intense excitement, especially if they have been preceded by days of worry and fatigue and nights of disturbed rest. The secondary personality is not a complete personality, but is a manifestation of the original ego with the memory for past events as a _tabula rasa_. It is well known that the memory is one of the intellectual faculties most dependent on physical conditions. It is the lowest in the scale of mental qualities and is shared to a very large degree by the animals. Injuries to the head not infrequently produce lacunae in the memory. These lacunae often have very striking limitations. It is not an unusual thing to find that old people remember events of their very early childhood better than things that have happened within a few years. Still more interesting is the fact that languages learned in youth may continue to be easily used, when those that were learned later in life, though perhaps known better than the previously studied languages, are forgotten.