ARTIFICIAL SOMNAMBULISM. 181 



effects, b*Jt only a very profound sleep or torpor, during 

 which all sensibility seemed to be annihilated, while the 

 ideas retained all their clearness. He proposed to M. 

 Cloquet to operate upon her while she was in this state of 

 torpor, and, the latter, considering the operation the only 

 means of saving her life, consented. The two doctors do 

 not appear to have been troubled by any scruples as to 

 their right thus to conduct an operation to which, when in 

 her normal condition, the patient strenuously objected. It 

 sufficed for them that when they had put her to sleep arti- 

 ficially, she could be persuaded to submit to it. On the 

 appointed day M. Cloquet found the patient ready * dressed 

 and seated in an elbow-chair, in the attitude of a person 

 enjoying a quiet natural sleep.' In reality, however, she was 

 in the somnambulistic state, and talked calmly of the opera- 

 tion. During the whole time that the operation lasted 

 from ten to twelve minutes she continued to converse 

 quietly with M. Cloquet, * and did not exhibit the slightest 

 sign of sensibility. There wa^ no motion of the limbs or 

 of the features, no change in the respiration nor in the 

 voice; no motions even in the pulse. The patient con- 

 tinued in the same state of automatic indifference and im- 

 passibility in which she had been some minutes before 

 the operation/ For forty- eight hours after this, the patient 

 remained in the somnambulistic state, showing no sign of 

 pain during the subsequent dressing of the wound. When 

 awakened from this prolonged sleep she had no recollection 

 of what had passed in the interval ; ' but on being informed 

 of the operation, and seeing her children around her, she 

 experienced a very lively emotion which the " magnetiser " 

 checked by immediately setting her asleep.' Certainly none 

 of the hypnotised 'subjects' of Mr. Braid's experiments 

 showed more complete abstraction from their normal condi- 

 tion than this lady; and other cases cited in Bertrand's 

 work, 'Le Magne'tisme Animal en France' (1826), are 

 almost equally remarkable. As it does not appear that in 

 any of these cases Braid's method of producing hypnotism 



