HYPNOTISM. 1 1 



He remarked that the attention of European scientific men had 

 been within the last ten years atti'acted to the phenomena of hypnot- 

 ism by the remarkable results obtained by two professional exhibitors, 

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

 gists and physicians have been engaged in investigating these pheno- 

 mena from their respective standpoints with the result that many 

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

 a smile of incredulity. French neurologists have especially mude 

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

 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 c ccur without any obvious 

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

 walking or sleep-waking 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 pain), or finally they require to be elicited by an 

 operator who uses physical means 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 hypnotism may, if 

 they have been frequently hypnotised, fall like the somnambulists at 

 once into the higher sleep-waking phases, but most subjects exhibit 

 initial phases of somnolence with succeeding deeper 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 recom- 

 mended to detect susceptibility to hypnotism, but Professor Delbceuf 

 believes that these " hypnoscopes " are 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 remai'kable 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 Vjy calling into prominence their 

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



