Through an elaborate and exhaustive investigation of the lies
told by five patients over a period of years, he came to the
conclusion that the form of falsifying in these cases deserves a
new and separate name. It was not ordinary lying, or delusion,
or false memory, these words express only part of the conception;
hence he coined the new term, pseudologia phantastica, to cover
the species of lying with which he was concerned. Later German
writers have also adopted his terminology.

To emphasize the method by which he arrived at this conclusion
and to gain at the same time some knowledge of the problems he
dealt with, we may review in bare outline his case-studies.

The first patient presented by Delbruck was an Austrian
maid-servant who in her wanderings through Austria and
Switzerland had played at various times the roles of Roumanian
princess, Spaniard of royal lineage, a poor medical student, and
the rich friend of a bishop. Her lying revealed a mixture of
imagination, boastfulness, deception, delusion, and
dissimulation. She romanced wonderfully about her royal birth
and wrote letters purporting to be from a cardinal to herself.
She fled disguised as a man from an educational institution to
Switzerland where her sex was discovered. It appeared that she
was subject to contrary sex feelings and thought of herself as a
man. She was under the observation of Krafft-Ebing at one time.
He considered it at least as a case of paranoia. Others had
determined the girl to be a psychopath who indulged in