The Brothers Karamazov
then I heard from country neighbours and from my town
teachers that the whole illness was simulated to avoid work,
and that it could always be cured by suitable severity; vari-
ous anecdotes were told to confirm this. But later on I learnt
with astonishment from medical specialists that there is no
pretence about it, that it is a terrible illness to which women
are subject, especially prevalent among us in Russia, and
that it is due to the hard lot of the peasant women. It is a
disease, I was told, arising from exhausting toil too soon
after hard, abnormal and unassisted labour in childbirth,
and from the hopeless misery, from beatings, and so on,
which some women were not able to endure like others. The
strange and instant healing of the frantic and struggling
woman as soon as she was led up to the holy sacrament,
which had been explained to me as due to malingering and
the trickery of the ‘clericals,’ arose probably in the most
natural manner. Both the women who supported her and
the invalid herself fully believed as a truth beyond question
that the evil spirit in possession of her could not hold if the
sick woman were brought to the sacrament and made to
bow down before it. And so, with a nervous and psychically
deranged woman, a sort of convulsion of the whole organ-
ism always took place, and was bound to take place, at the
moment of bowing down to the sacrament, aroused by the
expectation of the miracle of healing and the implicit belief
that it would come to pass; and it did come to pass, though
only for a moment. It was exactly the same now as soon as
the elder touched the sick woman with the stole.
Many of the women in the crowd were moved to tears of