Stigmatization is a rare incident of ecstasy. Not many well authenticated cases have been reported by competent medical authorities, and yet there can be no doubt of its occasional occurrence. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, article on Stigmatization by Dr. Macalister, and references therein cited; also the work on Nervous and Mental Diseases by Dr. Landon Carter Gray, page 511. That it may occur in men of a high order of ability is instanced by the case of St. Francis of Assisi.
It ought not to be necessary to point out that the entire third scene in the second act of this play is a dramatic transcript from the diseased consciousness of Mr. Dimsdell, that the Satan of the play is an hallucination, and that the impress of the stigma upon Dimsdell's breast is merely the culmination of his auto-hypnotic ecstasy, or trance.
樂天KOBO
