Women and Jews in a private nervous clinic in late nineteenth-century Vienna.

On 29 October 1889, Mathilde S., an unmarried artist of twenty-seven, was admitted to Wilhelm Svetlin's private nervous clinic in Vienna. A young Jewish woman, she had always been "very impressionable" and had a history ofheadaches. In 1886 she had become engaged to a man of "weak character", and even though the relationship had ostensibly remained platonic, she found herself in a highly excitable sexual state. Six months after the engagement began, however, she fell into something of a depression, "with hysterical facial changes". As a result of this her fiance abandoned the engagement. Three months later she learned that he had become engaged to someone else. She thereupon flipped into maniacal excitement, began planning a "brilliant career" and engaged in "risky business contracts", rejecting the advice of relatives. Whatever later generations of women might say about this behaviour, it was considered at the time evidence of "mania", and it was for the mania that her father placed her in Svetlin's clinic.' The admitting physician was listed as "Herr Dr. Freud". Mathilde is a previously unknown case of Freud's, and it is of interest that, in the words ofthe clinic's staff, "she had made a whole cult out of worshipping her doctor, who had treated her with hypnosis during her depressed phase." In admitting Mathilde S. for "mania gravis" to