He still insists that he remembers nothing of how the two almost fatal incidents in his life came about. All his family are convinced that it was not a responsible state of mind that led him to attempt either of the crimes. It seems not improbable that this is one of those fortunately rare cases in which an attack of psychic epilepsy sometimes obliterates for a moment the individuality of a patient. At times these attacks last much longer, and the change to a secondary personality may represent a rather long interval. A number of cases of what are called ambulatory epilepsy have been brought to the attention of the general public of late years because of certain interesting features of the cases that have been exploited in the daily press.
Patients suffering from this form of nervous disease may wander from their homes, and while performing automatically a number of actions, such as buying tickets, travelling on cars and railroad trains, or even arranging the details of their journey for a long distance, may yet be in a state of mind that is not their ordinary consciousness. Men may leave home under the circumstances and find themselves after months in a strange town where they have established themselves in some quite different occupation from that to which they were formerly accustomed, or for which their early training fitted them. There seems to be an absolute division between the { 262} states of consciousness that rule the individual during the intervals of ordinary and extraordinary personality. There are, of course, many reasons for thinking that at times such a change of personality might be feigned; but many of the cases have been followed with too much care to allow this thought to serve as an explanation for all of them.
A case which serves to bring home very clearly the possibility of such a state of mind giving rise to serious complications is the following: The patient was a young man in attendance at the medical school of a university in a foreign city. He had been very careless in money matters, and had aroused family suspicion that even the money sent him for tuition was being used extravagantly. A friend of the family came to see him unexpectedly in order to assure himself how the boy was actually getting along. The boy's accounts were in a very disordered condition; he had not bought the books for which he pretended to want money; he had not paid his tuition. He realised that all this would come out as soon as the university authorities were consulted. Very naturally he was in an extremely perturbed state of mind.