< An Experimental research (continued from page 11-293) >
patient got rapidly worse and nearly fell off the chair from weakness: he asked for a drink of water as ho felt ready to faint.
It was plain to me that I had no right to continue the proceeding, but it occurred to me to make upward in place of downward passes with the view of undoing what I had already done. The result was to me simply marvellous. The man got speedily better and in a very short time expressed himself as feeling much relieved, in fact quite well. I admitted him to hospital and every time he felt the inclination to a return of the fever I afforded him relief by the upward or reverse passes. He was discharged from the hospital without having been given a single grain of quinine.
That the case was one of ague I have no doubt, as the patient in question, a gunner of the Royal Artillery, had been stationed at one of the low-lying forts at the mouth of the Thames, where ague was common, and from whence I had received cases of ague in men of the same battery.
It is a matter of regret that I had no records of temperature belonging to the above case, but my experience of fever in India renders it impossible to suppose that I had made any mistake as to its nature.
The above affords an instance of what mesmerists call “reverse polarity,” the existence of which, strange to say, was only brought to my. notice half-an-hour before the above case appeared demanding treatment. I had been reading Dr. Ashburner’s translation of Reichenbach’s Experiments, and in a foot-note I had seen that Dr. Ashburner, with his large experience of so-called mesmeric sensitives had met with only two cases of what he called reverse polarity in his extensive practice, and which occurred in men with dark skins, of the bilious temperament, a description which also covered the young soldier above mentioned. The coincidence was, to say the least, remarkable.
Granting the truth of the above description, and ignoring any ridiculous supposition as to the influence of expectant attention in an ignorant young lout with a temperature of 103° to 104° F., which would be that to which his blood had risen, as well as I can remember, it is necessary to allow the instrument or agent brought to bear upon his vasomotor nervous system to have opposite effects with regard to certain designed motions in space made by me. This is the most general expression for the acknowledgement of polar properties in the physical instrument—oppositely acting forces,
so to say, which in the ease of the man suffering from ague were in a state of active neutralisation, somewhat like two magnetic needles in an astatic combination, whereby the normal constriction of the blood vessels was interfered with, though not to such an extent as might result through the assistance of the preponderating influence of the downward passes which, in this singular instance, favoured, I presume, the vaso-dilator action in place of the vaso-constrictor, which is the rule—the opposite influence being exerted when the upward passes reduced the fever by constricting the blood vessels, replacing the downward passes through physiological peculiarity on the part of the subject operated upon.
This physiological peculiarity I regard as of great value in the consideration of the case, for it cuts the ground from under any statement on the part of an objector that the man knew, or was led to believe, he would get well, and did get well accordingly. The feet was he got worse, and I was disappointed; hence, any obscure unconscious cerebration that might be brought forward to upset the validity of the hypothesis of an interacting machinery in space should be supposed to account for reverse polarity in me, since it is freely allowed that subjective influences can induce nervous changes, and that such reverse polarity having been induced in me through suggestion, though unknown to myself, from the story I had read half-an-hour before, was the physical antecedent to an apparent reverse polarity in the case of my patient. In any case the fact of downward passes producing an ill effect while upward passes produced a good effect—a circumstance though falling within the experience of mesmerisers yet very rare, the contrary holding in almost all instances, when any appreciable effect is produced—can be advanced as a strong argument from probabilities in favour of a true physical interaction between nerve centres in different individuals.
The simplest supposition is that my patient was, in relation to the general run of men, as regards his vaso-motor system, temporarily in a state analogous to that vertiginous condition in which a man often mistakes his left hand for his right; or if the pecularity be regarded as permanent, in a condition analogous to that of a left-handed man, or rarer still in a condition analogous to those subjects whose organs are right and left in place of being left and right.
I mention the possibility of my having been thrown into a condition of reverse polarity simply because it comes within the general scope of the theories advanced by others as well as that of my own.