THE SENSIBILITY OF THE NIPPLE AREA WITH REFERENCE TO MENTAL DISEASE

Abstract

In the observation of those nervous and mental affections of whose bodily nature we know little, we sometimes find motor and sensory symptoms, contradictory in character, and apparently obeying no known law. Of the disturbances, pain is the most frequent. Small isolated zones, painful to the slightest touch, exist fairly constantly, at times associated with areas of lessened or increased sense of touch. Oppenheim finds cutaneous and mucous anesthesias often associated with hyperesthesias, and areas on which painful stimuli are not normally perceived as painful. These areas may be hypersensitive to the slightest touch, which in itself may elicit acute pain. These areas have been called hysterogenic zones, but they are probably not entirely found in hysterical conditions. Of these so-called hysterogenic zones-supposedly indicators of higher functional derangements-perhaps the most significant are those in connection with the sexual sphere. Graves,1 in his investigation of sensory disturbances involved in cases of hysteria of both sexes, found a peculiar abnormality of sensation, namely, an anesthesia associated with hyperalgesia sharply confined to the areola-nipple area. The dividing line between the anesthetic and hyperalgesic area and the area of normal sensibility was very sharp, the change from the normal sensation being found wholly within the pigmented area. As this peculiarity was more or less constant in 30 cases of typical hysteria, the conclusion was drawn that “areola-nipple anesthesia associated with hyperalgesia is a pathognomonic and fairly constant stigma in hysteria.” He also notes experiments on the normal individual, in which, as a