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the benefit of those entrusted to my care. In the above case, I at first thought that the paralysis was due to an organic change in the grey matter of the nervous system. I do not think so now. I believe the disturbance of function was one relating to nutrition, and that the local seat of derangement was in the spinal cord. This explanation is the very simplest that can be offered, and falls in with all my recent experience.
I do not believe in the cure of organic disease, as such, by means of hypnotism or mesmerism, but I am strongly convinced that, where a regulative process of a conservative character can be induced by the agency of the hypnotic or mesmeric state, it is possible to avert the developement of organic disease.
I believe in the above-mentioned regulative agency because it is the simplest physiological way out of an otherwise tremendous difficulty, i.e. to account for the frequent relief afforded to functional derangements by hypnotism or mesmerism, when recognised plans of treatment fail. It is no explanation to get out of the difficulty by saying that no actual disease is present in these cases. Such an expression is as meaningless as it is misleading, for functional disturbances are too often the precursors of organic disease.
The fourth case calling for record is that of a man sent to my hospital on account of epilepsy. I first saw him lying on his bed with half-a-dozen men holding him. I told them to let him go, and I told him to keep himself quiet, which he accordingly did.
I made a careful examination of this case according to my lights at the time, and I found that his nervous complaint was intimately related to an intermittent and irritable heart. He did not suffer from any organic disease of the heart, but the accommodation of the heart for his ordinary low-tension work-image (to use a new and I think expressive nomenclature) was imperfect.
Whenever the patient decreased his rate of doing work the heart behaved in a disorderly manner, though, when taxed above the ordinary rate, the heart responded bravely to the call made upon it. The fact was, the heart was not diseased, as a machine, but its central innervation was imperfect.
This man was easily thrown into the hypnotic state, and when so acted upon he would write like an automaton, repeating the same word over with his pencil a hundred times if not stopped. As my object was to do as much good for the man and learn as much as I could myself without indulging in needless tomfoolery, I commenced to teach him the nature of his own weaknesses.
When, after walking him up and down the room for some time with a weight in his hand, the heart working all right, I quietly cut the string which held the weight, I explained to him the nature of the change he experienced as well as I could. And when after making him behave like a machine by stopping any motion at word of command, I explained to him the nature of the dominant idea, expectant attention, &c, and his tacit acknowledgement of the influence I possessed over him, it was very satisfactory to find that I quite lost the control which was before a matter of certainty when I openly expressed a wish to exert it, for he would go on moving the arm which before stopped instantly at my order, and he would step across the line which was before a fixed barrier to bis advance.
It was, however, a matter of congratulation that I never lost the power of preventing a “fit’’ during the two months he resided at Sundown hospital.
On one occasion I brought him into the dark room where I was carrying on some experiments with, if I remember tightly, protoxide of nitrogen, but I was compelled to have him removed at once on account of the dangerous state of collapse into which he fell.
The last two cases are such as would be claimed by the hypnotists as falling within the ordinary province of self-cure, without the intervention of anything passing between the operating physician and the patient This assumption I am not prepared to deny, but then the hypnotists would be obliged to call upon a kind of corporeal Demiurge which is in relation with the will, though possessing a coercive force of its own, which makes it stiff to obey the messages delivered to it on ordinary occasions, though amenable enough when certain physiological changes are produced or induced by influences acting from without or within.
I am quite aware that the explanation of the action of one living being upon another, by the intervention of organised motions or strains transmitted through a medium, is only a superficial one and does not touch the reed difficulty involved, namely, the manner in which I myself or my will acts upon the body, which is all that I have given through the sense avenues to consciousness. If I be permitted to postulate a supersensuous condition of subjectivity <... continues on page 11-297 >