The Munchausen Syndrome

Most people prefer to stay away from hospitals, if possible. But Elsie loved operations. In April 1947, her abdomen already laced with post-operative scars, Elsie checked in at London's Croydon General Hospital giving a false name and complaining of mysterious pains. She said she had been vomiting blood. The doctors put her to bed for rest and observation; after two days she left without warning.

Six months after that, Elsie, under still another name, was in the Royal Sussex Hospital persuading doctors that she had a bleeding ulcer. An operation was performed to determine her trouble, but before the surgeons were satisfied Elsie left the hospital. Less than two months later, she was back at Croydon, "doubled up in agony" from abdominal pain.

From Croydon, Elsie took herself to Redhill County Hospital, from Redhill to Paddington Hospital where another operation was performed. A month later, she turned up at Fulham, where a staff surgeon recognized her. In the two years since then, almost always under a different name, Elsie has appeared at nine London hospitals. Dr. Richard Asher, who reports her case in the Lancet, is confident she will show up in another any day, if she is not under the knife right now.

Elsie (nobody knows her true name) is a typical sufferer from what Dr. Asher calls the "Munchausen syndrome," after the famed yarn-spinning baron. Her kind troops from hospital to hospital in psychopathic search of drama and attention. The Elsies, says Dr. Asher, often "seem to gain nothing except . . . discomfiture . . . Their initial tolerance to the more brutish hospital measures is remarkable, yet they commonly discharge themselves after a few days with operation wounds scarcely healed . . . Their effrontery is sometimes formidable, and they may appear many times at the same hospital. hoping to meet a new doctor on whom to practice their deception."

What makes the Elsies hard to spot is the fact that their pretended symptoms are generally rooted in some real lesion from the past. Two almost certain signs of the Munchausen syndrome: an abdomen full of scars and a handbag stuffed with hospital attendance records.

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