The Blind Spot, page 140 by Austin Hall
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d a single searching glance into my eyes, wherein he must have read something more than I had said, he regretfully replied:
"This is a case for a specialist, Fenton. Everything considered, I should say that she is suffering from a purely mental condition; but whether it had a physical or a psychic origin, I can't say."
In short, he did not feel safe about going ahead with any really heroic measures until a brain specialist was called in.
I had a good deal of confidence in Hansen. And what he said sounded reasonable. So we agreed to his calling in a Dr. Higgins-- the same man, in fact, who was too late in reaching the house to save Chick on that memorable night a year before.
His examination was swift and convincingly competent. He went over the same ground that Hansen had covered, took the blood pressure and other instrumental data, and asked us several questions regarding Ariadne's mentality as we knew it. Scarcely stopping to think it over, Higgins decided:
"The young woman is suffering from a temporary dissociation of brain centres. Her cerebrum does not co-act with her cerebellum. In other words, her conscious mind, for lack of means to express itself, is for the time being dormant as in sleep.
"But it is not like ordinary sleep. Such is induced by fatigue of the nerve channels. This young woman's condition is produced by shock; and since there was no physical violence, we must conclude that the shock was psychic.
"In that case, the condition will last until one of two things occurs; either she must be similarly shocked back into sensibility--and I can't see how this can happen, Fenton, unless you can secure the co-operation of the man to whom you attribute the matter--or she must lie that way indefinitely."
"Indefinitely!" I exclaimed, sensing something ominous. "You mean- -"
"That there is no known method of reviving a patient in such a condition. It might be called psychic catalepsy. To speak plainly, Fenton, unless this man revives her, she wi