I felt some one touch my arm, and saw the little lady of the anti-vivisection tracts peering past me.
"They Call Me Carpenter"
Upton Sinclair
There exists a diary of his, written in 1777, which is an almost unique example of the seemingly cold, but really excited and hysterical kind of self-vivisection of which I have spoken.
"The Countess of Albany"
Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
He had, moreover, at this moment, when all the energies of his nature suddenly burst out, a power of deliberate, complacent, and pitiless moral self-vivisection, a power of performing upon his character such cutting and ripping-open operations as he thought beneficial to himself, which makes one think of the abnormal faculty of enduring pain, the abnormal and almost cruel satisfaction in examining the mechanism of one's own suffering, occasionally displayed by hysterical women; and which brings back the impression already conveyed by the morbid sensitiveness, the frenzied violence, the moody torpor of his youth, that there was something abnormal in Alfieri's whole nature.
"The Countess of Albany"
Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)