What else did the boy do to ensure he ended up in hell? Hall wrote of him: “Decided to go to hell when he died rubbed brimstone on him to get used to it, etc.” A world of possibilities is opened up in that “etc”. A boy of ten was more resourceful and decided to meet his fears head on. There is, for example, the English lady who claimed she had been “robbed of the joy of childhood by religious fears” and had decided instead to turn to the devil “who she found kinder”. The answers make fascinating reading, although Hall, infuriatingly, only gives us snippets. Many of the answers were from school children. Hall’s research on phobias stretches back to the 1890s, when he sent out hundreds of questionnaires for people to fill in about the forms of their fears. There was also, of course, ailurophobia: the fear of cats. These stretched from the more general categories of agoraphobia and claustrophobia or haptophobia (fear of touch), to very specific forms such as amakaphobia (fear of carriages), pteronophobia (fear of feathers), and what appears a very Victorian, moral category, hypegiaphobia (fear of responsibility). When the American psychologist G Stanley Hall published his Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear in the American Journal of Psychology in 1914 he identified no less than 136 different forms of pathological fear, all with their own Greek or Latinate names. The idea that individuals who were otherwise sane and rational could nonetheless be afflicted with forms of inexplicable fear was quickly taken up, both in the medical and popular culture of the era. All were aware of the irrationality of their fears, but were powerless to overcome them.
Westphal had been puzzled why three of his patients, all professional men leading otherwise full lives, became struck with fear when having to cross an open city space. Yet it was not until the end of the 19th century that medicine turned its attention to forms of irrational fear, following the initial medical diagnosis of agoraphobia – fear of open, public spaces – by the German physician Carl Westphal in 1871. The language of phobia is so common today that we scarcely give it a second thought.