told to do so, and at a given time. In the hypnotic state on the other hand they remember what happened to them when awake, unless they are told to forget. The memory, like the senses, seems to be altogether in a more active state under hypnotism. Not only do subjects remember events of the waking condition, but remember them with far greater vividness and accuracy than they otherwise would. A patient of Dr. Luys once repeated a lecture of his that she had heard several months before, not only with the utmost accuracy but reproducing the very tones of his voice, using every gesture and adapting in a remarkable way her words to her subject. A year afterwards she had still the same capacity and could always perform the feat on being hypnotized, but in the waking state she could never repeat a single word and remembered almost nothing about it.

Rapport.-Professor Beaunis bears out the opinions of the older mesmerizers and the popular belief, that there exists a peculiar relation between the operator and his subject. The latter hears his hypnotizer speak and only him, taking no notice of others; he can recognize him by the touch only, as well as by the other senses, and obeys movements thus indicated by him. For instance if the operator (unseen) raises the subject's arm, the latter keeps it raised; but if another person does the same, it falls again. The operator can, however, at pleasure place the subject en rapport with another person. According to Beaunis, this rapport consists in the subject having his mind concentrated on the operator, as a mother's is on her child, enabling her to hear its least cry, and divine its needs to the exclusion of everything else, and even when asleep. Thus a mother will awake at the smallest cry of her child, though she will sleep soundly through any other noise. But how the hypnotized subject's mind comes to be concentrated to this remarkable degree upon the hypnotizer is another and a most obscure question.

Intellectual power.-No very great attention has been paid to this point, but apparently modern experiment corroborates the older belief in the quickening of the intellect. The mind is inactive during artificial sleep, says Beaunis, but only conditionally; it becomes active at suggestion and works rapidly and with great precision. Indeed the instances given above under the head of hallucinations show that the intelligence, the imagination, and the emotions are, like the senses and the memory, heightened to an extraordinary degree. Hospital patients, drawn from inferior classes, throw themselves into characters suggested and present them in action with a

power

power and truthfulness beyond not only their own waking capacity, but that of the most intelligent and cultivated persons.

The influence of magnets.—We have briefly referred to the action of magnets on the muscles in speaking of the physiological phenomena, but they possess other properties which hardly come under that head. They have the power of attracting hypnotized subjects. Thus, if a good-sized magnet is placed at some little distance from the subject and behind a screen so that he cannot see it, after a time he will get up and go towards it. If now another magnet be placed at an equal distance behind him, he will stop and remain as it were balanced between the two. By withdrawing one or other he can be drawn backwards or forwards. Further, he can be charged with magnetism by placing near him a large magnet with five ends. If it be suddenly removed and hidden in another room, he is impelled to follow it with such force that he will fling aside all obstacles in his way and tracking it step by step will walk straight up to it. Once he sights it, he either remains in dumb contemplation of it in front of its two poles, or else lays his hands on both of the poles with a kind of profound satisfaction.' These experiments with magnets are very exhausting.

It will be seen from the above summary of the leading points dealt with by modern hypnotizers, that they have multiplied, enlarged, and systematized previous knowledge, but have discovered almost nothing absolutely new. Any claim to the contrary is founded on imperfect acquaintance with the work of the older mesmerizers. That claim is generally made to rest upon 'suggestion' which is supposed to be a new discovery, but we have seen that the existence of this power was already recognized by Mesmer and De Puységur, and that Braid went thoroughly into it-not in his Neurypnology,' but in a somewhat rare pamphlet published in 1853. Another proof of his acquaintance with suggestion is contained in a letter written to him by Professor Gregory in 1852 on the subject of his paper read before the Edinburgh Medical Society. In that letter Gregory avows his full belief in the extraordinary or incredible effects of suggestion on persons in the somnambulistic state.' Further Teste, writing before Braid, says, 'A somnambulist no longer sees, no longer hears, no longer acts, but through his magnetizer. I have succeeded in rendering a somnambulist alternately vain, lying, a gourmand, and a sensualist. We may modify at pleasure the intellectual disposition, extinguishing this thought and substituting another.'

Even posthypnotic suggestion, the darling triumph of Nancy, was known. The following occurs in Dr. Radclyffe Hall's papers on Mesmerism in the Lancet' of 1845::

'It is undoubtedly true that the mesmerizer has the power of impressing some things upon the memory of his patient in such a manner as that the latter shall retain them on awaking. He can also fix the exact time of remembrance, and not until the very moment fixed upon arrives shall the patient remember the circumstance in question.' 'A mesmerizer can always so strengthen the virtuous tendencies developed by his patient in sleep-walking, as to prolong them into the waking state.'

The real advantage that the modern hypnotizer has lies in his point of view, an advantage gained by half a century's fruitful scientific research. He is able to catalogue the phenomena and to allot to each its true physiological significance as he never was able to before. The exact work, for instance, done in determining the changes in the muscles, the circulation, and secretions, forms a decidedly valuable addition to our knowledge of this mysterious subject, and investigations of this kind may eventually lead to a true theory of its nature; but sensational experiments in suggestion are neither new nor instructive. On the other hand, the most strange and inexplicable of all the alleged phenomena of mesmerism have not been touched at all, so far as we are aware, by modern investigators. These are clairvoyance, intuition, and pressensation, or the capacity on the part of a subject to pronounce upon the nature of his own illness and that of others and to foretell their course. With regard to clairvoyance we do not propose to trouble the reader with any of the numerous well-authenticated anecdotes on record relating to this faculty; but to those who are inclined to dismiss the question with a smile of superior knowledge we would offer one or two considerations. The learned and intelligent commission nominated in 1825 by the French Académie de Médecine, after an exhaustive investigation lasting six years, came to the conclusion that the existence of these faculties was proved. Professor Gregory again, in the letter to Braid already mentioned, enters into a long disquisition to prove that not only suggestion but clairvoyance and the other higher phenomena of the mesmerists are equally true and producible by hypnotic means.' This will show that at least there have not wanted acute and competent observers who have given in their adhesion on this point. Then since the other phenomena recorded by mesmerizers have now been proved to be literally true, there is à priori ground for supposing that they were not mistaken with regard to clairvoyance also.

Finally,

Finally, if the senses can be so heightened as in the cases already cited from Braid and the clinique of La Salpêtrière, it requires no great stretch of imagination to suppose them carried still further until they become comparable to those inexplicable faculties which we call instinct in animals, that for instance by which animals-cats, dogs, and sheep-can find their way home sometimes over hundreds of miles of unknown country.

Concerning the faculty of pressensation, it is worth while to say a little more. The early mesmerists made a great point of the power of some patients to diagnose the condition of another. Dr. Puységur's patient Joly, mentioned above, possessed the faculty to an unusual degree. He was an educated man, of good position, and could express himself intelligibly :

'C'est une sensation véritable que j'éprouve dans un endroit correspondant à la partie qui souffre chez celui que je touche: ma main va naturellement se porter à l'endroit de son mal, et je ne peux pas plus m'y tromper que je ne pourrois le faire en portant ma main où je souffrirois moi-même.'

Now, the following experiment has been carried out by Charcot at La Salpêtrière. A young girl suffering from hysterical hemiplegia (paralysis of one side) came up one day from the country. She was placed in a chair behind a screen and a hypnotic patient sent for from the wards. The latter was placed on the other side of the screen and hypnotized. Neither of the patients was aware of the other's presence. At the end of a minute the hypnotized patient was found to have acquired the other's hemiplegia. The experiment was repeated every day, and in four days the new comer was relieved of her trouble, which had lasted over a year. The same experiment was tried in many cases, and always succeeded, although in some of them the affections imitated were of a very complex character, such as paralysis of half the tongue. With these facts in view the alleged experiences of the older mesmerists appear by no means impossible.

Therapeutics. It cannot be truly said that the modern mesmerists have added much to the usefulness of the practice as applied to the relief of disease. Great difference of opinion seems to exist among them on this point. The Parisian practitioners hold that its applicability is limited to certain nervous disorders, and that beyond calming patients and staving off attacks of hysteria, it is of little use. They further consider that it may be decidedly harmful in developing or aggravating hysteria and in acting generally as an agitator of the nervous system. On the other hand, the Nancy physicians regularly use hypnotism in all their cases, even in those of acute fever.

It at least gives the patient the benefit of sleep, they say. In fact they claim a far more extended applicability than Mesmer himself; for they treat chronic organic disease where there is degeneration of tissue by hypnotism. Dr. Bernheim, indeed, whose medical horizon has since 1880 been gradually overspread by the word 'suggestion,' seems to think that all treatment is a form of the same thing. Certainly such measures as electricity, water-cure, massage, suspension, and metallotherapy, he believes to be nothing but suggestion in disguise. This is absurd. No doubt they act mainly in the same way as suggestion does; namely, by influencing the local bloodsupply, but not by any means through suggestion. It is not likely that the large promises now being freely made will be carried out. To speak of 'proceeding on rigidly scientific lines' is to talk solemn nonsense. No treatment is anything but empirical, and treatment by suggestion the most empirical of all. Previous manipulators, who were quite as skilful and as well acquainted with the power they wielded as Dr. Bernheim, failed nevertheless to make very much mark with actual results, except Esdaile and his anesthesia. In fact the weakness of mesmerism, that which has caused it to come to grief so often, is its therapeutic inutility, just as its strength, that which has caused it always to rise again, lies in the reality of its phenomena. There are obvious difficulties in the way of its medical application. There is the personal factor, a quite unknown quantity. Every patient is not susceptible, and every doctor does not possess the power. Then the results are very uncertain; nearly everything that can be done, can be done by other more certain means. Other effects are only temporary. The dipso-maniac or morphino-maniac, who is 'cured by suggestion,' does not remain permanently cured, but has to come again and again to be hypnotized. And is the state of the confirmed hypnotic very much better than that of the other? It is only exchanging one servitude for another. Lastly, the condition is not free from danger-the danger of a disorganized nervous system and of an abandoned self-control. Most thinking persons will hesitate before they run the risk of submitting themselves to an influence, which may end in the surrender of their free-will to another, the annihilation of their very identity.

There are two classes of cases, however, in which hypnotism may perhaps be found very beneficial. Those are the insane, and children who have become vicious, or who suffer from certain functional troubles. Mesmer himself suggested that the treatment is particularly suitable for the insane; but it has not Vol. 171.-No. 341.

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