Freudian slip Freud's inevitable disillusionment started around the same time, with the treatment of a young woman by the name of Emma Eckstein. Emma suffered from hysteria, and Freud figured that there was no-one better to cure her disease than his good friend and "magical healer" Fleiss. So he summoned him to Vienna to take a look at the hapless young woman.
Fleiss immediately diagnosed the source of the problem - a bump on the inside of her nose. So he operated and split the cavity. A month later, Emma came to see Freud again - she was in considerable pain and had clearly developed a serious infection. Other surgeons were consulted, and discovered, stuffed into her nasal cavity, a length of gauze, which Fleiss had negligently, if unwittingly, left behind. In Freud's words:
There was still moderate bleeding from the nose and mouth; the fetid odour was very bad. [The doctor] suddenly pulled at something like a thread, kept on pulling. Before either of us had time to think, at least half a meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse...At the moment the foreign body came out and everything became clear to me...I felt sick. After she had been packed, I fled to the next room, drank a bottle of water, and felt miserable... http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/cocaine/