HYPNOTISM. 1 1 



He remarked that the attention of European scientific men had 

 besn within the last ten years attracted to t!ie phenomena of hypnot- 

 ism by the remarkable resnlts oljtained by two professional exhibitors, 

 Hansen, a Dane, and Donato, a Belgian. Physiologists, psycholo- 

 Sfists and physicians have been engaged in investigating these })heno- 

 mena from their respective standpoints with the result tliat many 

 facts had been established which a few years ago would have elicited 

 a smile of incredulity. French neurologists have especially m ide 

 progress in the study, because hysteria, and hystero-epilepsy (which 

 render subjects very susceptible to hypnotic influences) are extremely 

 common in France. Hypnotism has been found of great service in 

 the treatment of these diseases, and in the hands of men like Charcot 

 escapes the stigma of being ''unprofessional," which arrested the first 

 serious English investigations some 40 years ago. The phenomena 

 of hypnotism or somnambulism may either ( ccur witliout any obvious 

 inducing cause (auto-somnambulists who fall at once into the sleep- 

 walking or sleeii-wakirtg condition without passing through the 

 ordinary initial lower phases), or they may be induced by the subject 

 (as in the case of the Indian fakirs, who can render themselves 

 insensitive to i)ain), or finally they requii'e to be elicited by an 

 operator wh) uses physical n.eans such as " passes," or the fixation of 

 the eyes on a bright spot, or else physical means such as the impera- 

 tive " suggestion " to sleep. Such cases of induced hyjniotism may, if 

 they have been frequently hypnotised, fall like the somnambulists at 

 once into the higher sle^p-waking phases, but most subjects exhibit 

 initial phases of somnolence with succeeding deepei- sleep in which 

 either catalepsy with plasticity of the muscles (retaining any position 

 in which they are placed), or lethargy in which the muscles are easily 

 excited to contraction, are prominent symptoms. The use of a series 

 of magnets so arranged as to slip over the finger has been i-ecom- 

 mended to detect susceptibility to hypnotism, but Professor Delbceuf 

 believes that these " hypnoscopes " ai-e only useful as such because 

 they disclose a lively power of imagination in suitable subjects. 

 Various cases were cited, however, to show that the magnet appears 

 to produce remarkable results on subjects already hypnotized, causing 

 transfer of anaesthesia, e. g. from one side of the body to the other, and 

 reversing suggested ideas or sensations by calling into prominence their 

 correlative opposites. Prof. Wright called the attention of the philo- 



