Quite often in old horror movies, the heroine faints from fright at the sight of the monster. Does any one know if this ever happens in real life – someone passing out after seeing something frightening?
I have.
I’m a certified fainter. I’ve fainted from stress, discomfort, and emotional excitement. Mine is caused by a medical condition-- mitral valve prolapse. Basically, if my heart starts pumping wildly, one of the valves gets stuck, causing blood to pool in my heart and causing me to faint.
The last time I fainted from fear was when someone wearing a costume jumped out unexpectedly, intending to frighten me. (He was the one who ended up terrified when I went pale and hit the floor.)
Most women aren’t this way. I think the fainting heroine was a hold-over from gothic Victorian fiction. Fainting was a ladylike reaction to anything upsetting, and I’m sure many women faked a swoon or two to get the social approval that went along with being a “delicate” lady.
IANAD but I thought fainting from shock was due to first, you experience something frightening/shocking, the heart pumps faster, blood pressure spikes up, then the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in to try to regulate BP and heartrate. Sometimes it overreacts causing the blood pressure to temporarily drop a little to low. Not enough blood to the brain, and voi’la! you pass out.
Hopefully someone a little more (lot more) qualified can be more specific.
I think being trussed up in Victorian corsets also contributed to the fainting.
To some extent, but not every woman was a “tight-lacer.” Many women wore corsets that merely provided “support.” (People at the time thought the feminine figure needed shaping to turn out straight and normal.) Those corsets have tight rows of tucks and pleats which make up the boning instead of metal or whalebone. (I work in a museum and we have quite a few examples of these types in our collection.) They wore these ones snugly, but not laced tightly to crush down the figure.
Also, ladies back then often periodically bled themselves to enhance the then-fashionable fairskinned pallor. :eek: Such low blood pressure would surely promote fainting spells.
In any case, perhaps its also an adrenaline response: during the fight-or-flight response, adrenaline closes down blood vessels to the skin, decreasing blood loss during an injury. Perhaps shutting down blood to the brain would cause a faint?
I always tell this story. In high school, we had blood drives. The football team had volunteered to assist at the event.
Well, I had one of the big hurly 180 pound + boys go over flat on his back after seeing the needle stuck into someone, and watching the blood pump out. Just WHOOSH BAM!
It was pretty funny when we dragged him over to the couch for people who felt faint.
I saw this twice in Vietnam, sort of. Happened to the same man. He didn’t faint so much as go into some kind of trance. The first time he dropped to his knees pulled a bible out and froze that way when the shooting started. He was right out in the open, made no effort to hide or protect himself. They called a medivac for him and when he got loaded on it he was still pretty much frozen that way. About a week later we got into another, bigger, firefight. I didn’t see him until later. Two guys were carrying him down a slope, one had his feet and the other his head. He was stiff as a board, absolutly no sag in his body. There was a Corpsman trying to give him CPR. He told me later that his heart stopped twice. He got sent home after that.