694 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CONSCIOUSNESS UNDER CHLOEOFOEM. 



By HEEBEET SPENCEE. 



A UNIVERSITY graduate, whose studies in psychology and phi- 

 losophy have made him an observer able to see the meanings of 

 his experiences, has furnished me with the following account of the 

 feelings and ideas that arose in him during loss of consciousness and 

 during return to consciousness. My correspondent, describing himself 

 as extremely susceptible to female beauty, explains that " the girl " 

 named in the course of the description was an unknown young lady in 

 the railway-carriage which brought him up to town to the dentist's. 

 He says his system resisted the influence of chloroform to such a de- 

 gree that it took twenty minutes to produce insensibility : the result 

 being that for a much longer time than usual he underwent partial 

 hyperesthesia instead of anaesthesia. After specifying some dreadful 

 sensations which soon arose he goes on to say :".... I began to be 

 terrified to such a wonderful extent as I would never before have 

 guessed possible. I made an involuntary effort to get out of the chair, 

 and then suddenly became aware that I was looking at nothing: 

 while taken up by the confusion in my lungs, the outward things in 

 the room had gone, and I was ' alone in the dark.' I felt a force on 

 my arm (which did not strike me as the surgeon's ' hand,' but merely 

 as an external restraint) keeping me down, and this was the last straw 

 which made me give in, the last definite thing (smell, sound, sight, or 

 touch) I remembered outside my own body. Instantly I was seized 

 and overwhelmed by the panic inside. I could feel every air-cell strug- 

 gling spasmodically against an awful pressure. In their struggle they 

 seemed to tear away from one another in all directions, and there was 

 universal racking torture, while meantime the common foe, in the shape 

 of this iron pressure, kept settling down with more and more irresisti- 

 ble might into every nook and crevice of the scene. My consciousness 

 was now about this : I was not aware of anything but an isolated 

 scene of torture, pervaded by a hitherto unknown sense of terror (and 

 by what I have since learned is called ' the unity of consciousness : ' 

 this never deserted the scene, even down to the very last inaudible 

 heart-beat). Yet I call it a ' scene,' because I recognized some differ- 

 ent parts of my body, and felt that the pain in one part was not the 

 same as that in another. Meanwhile, along with the increased inten- 

 sity of convulsion in my lungs, an element of noise had sprung up. A 

 chaotic roaring ran through my brain, innumerable drums began to 

 beat far inside my ear, till the confusion presently came to a monstrous 

 thudding, every thud of which wounded me like a club falling repeat- 

 edly on the same spot. . . . 



" From this stage my lungs ceased to occupy me, and I forget how 



