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superior, since the nervous pains which had troubled her from childhood have disappeared; and morally superior, inasmuch as her morose, self-centred disposition is exchanged for a cheerful activity which enables her to attend to her children and her shop much more effectively than when she was in the 'état bête,' as she now calls what was once the only personality that she knew. In this case, then, which is now of nearly thirty years' standing, the spontaneous readjustment of nervous activities-the second state, no memory of which remains in the first state-has resulted in an improvement profounder than could have been anticipated from any moral or medical treatment that we know. The case shows us how often the word 'normal' means nothing more than what happens to exist.' For Félida's normal state was in fact her morbid state; and the new condition, which seemed at first a mere hysterical abnormality, has brought her to a life of bodily and mental sanity which makes her fully the equal of average women of her class.

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Now, before we go further, let us ask ourselves whether this result, which sounds so odd and paradoxical, ought in reality to surprise us. Had we any reason for supposing that changes as profound as Félida's need always be for the worse, that the phase of personality in which we happen to find ourselves is the phase in which, given our innate capacities, it is always best for us to be?

To make this question more intelligible, I must have recourse to a metaphor. Let us picture the human brain as a vast manufactory, in which thousands of looms, of complex and differing patterns, are habitually at work. These looms are used in varying combinations; but the main driving-bands, which connect them severally or collectively with the motive power, remain for the most part unaltered.

Now, how do I come to have my looms and driving-gear arranged in this particular way? Not, certainly, through any deliberate choice of my own. My ancestor the ascidian, in fact, inherited the business when it consisted of little more than a single spindle. Since his day my nearer ancestors have added loom after loom. Some of their looms have fallen to pieces unheeded; others have been kept in repair because they suited the style of order which the firm had at that time to meet. But the class of orders received has changed very rapidly during the last few hundred years. I have now to try to turn out altruistic emotions and intelligent reasoning with machinery adapted to self-preserving fierceness or manual toil. And in my efforts to readjust and reorganise I am hindered not only by the old-fashioned type of the looms, but by the inconvenient disposition of the driving gear. I cannot start one useful loom without starting a dozen others that are merely in the way. And I cannot shift the driving gear to suit myself, for I cannot get at much of it without stopping the engines, and if I stopped my engines I should not know how to set them going again. In this perplexity I

watch what happens in certain factories-Félida's, for instancewhere the hidden part of the machinery is subject to certain dangerous jerks or dislocations, after which the gearings shift of themselves and whole groups of looms are connected and disconnected in a novel manner. From hence I get at least a hint as to the concealed attachments; and if I see that new arrangement working well I have an object to aim at; I can try to produce a similar change, though a smaller one, among my own looms and by my own manipulation.

For even if these profoundest spontaneous changes are beyond the reach of imitation, there are smaller changes, long familiar to us, which we now see in a new light, as imitable in a manner which shall reproduce their advantages without their drawbacks. There is the painless trance which sometimes surpervenes in hysteria; there is the action of alcohol; there is especially the action of opium, which from the first commended itself by its psychical effect, by the emotional tranquillity which it induces. Such at least seems to be the inference from the well-known passage where the wifely Helen determines to give her husband and his friends the chance of talking comfortably, without interrupting themselves by perpetual tears and lamentations,

Then heaven-born Helen in their cups would throw
Nepenthes, woeless banisher of woe:

This whoso drank daylong no tear should shed

No, though he gazed on sire and mother dead;
No, though his own son on that dreamy day
Before his own eyes raging foes should slay.'

The successive discoveries of intoxicants, narcotics proper, and anæsthetics formed three important stages in our growing control over the nervous system. Mesmer's discovery, or rather his rediscovery of a process probably at least as old as Solon, marked an epoch of quite equal significance. And the refinements on Mesmer's process which this century has seen, the discoveries linked with the names of Puységur, Esdaile, Braid, Charcot, &c., though often set forth with an air of controversy rather than of co-operation, will gradually be recognised as mutually concordant elements in a new branch of moral as well as physical therapeutics. Nay, it is a nascent art of self-modification; a system of pulleys (to return to our previous metaphor), by which we can disjoin and reconnect portions of our machinery which admit of no directer access.

One or two brief instances may indicate the moral and the physical benefits which hypnotisation is bringing within the range of practical medicine. And first I will cite one of the cases-rare as yet— where an insane person has been hypnotised with permanent benefit.

Od. iv. 219.

• Annales Médico-Psychologiques, 1884, vol. ii. p. 289 877. The case was relis

In the summer of 1884 there was at the Salpêtrière a young woman of a deplorable type. Jeanne Sch was a criminal lunatic, filthy in habits, violent in demeanour, and with a lifelong history of impurity and theft. M. Auguste Voisin, one of the physicians on the staff, undertook to hypnotise her on May 31, at a time when she could only be kept quiet by the strait jacket and bonnet d'irrigation,' or perpetual cold douche to the head. She would not-indeed, she could not-look steadily at the operator, but raved and spat at him. M. Voisin kept his face close to hers, and followed her eyes wherever she moved them. In about ten minutes a stertorous sleep ensued; and in five minutes more she passed into a sleep-waking state and began to talk incoherently. The process was repeated on many days, and gradually she became sane when in the trance, though she still raved when awake. Gradually too she became able to obey in waking hours commands impressed on her in the trance--first trivial orders (to sweep the room and so forth), then orders involving a marked change of behaviour. Nay, more; in the hypnotic state she voluntarily expressed repentance for her past life, made a confession which involved more evil than the police were cognisant of (though it agreed with facts otherwise known), and finally of her own impulse made good resolves for the future. Two years have now elapsed, and M. Voisin writes to me (July 31, 1886) that she is now a nurse in a Paris hospital and that her conduct is irreproachable. In this case, and in some recent cases of M. Voisin's, there may, of course, be matter for controversy as to the precise nature and the prognosis, apart from hypnotism, of the insanity which was cured. But my point is amply made out by the fact that this poor woman, whose history since the age of 13 had been one of reckless folly and vice, is now capable of the steady, self-controlled work of a nurse at a hospital, the reformed character having first manifested itself in the hypnotic state, partly in obedience to suggestion and partly as the natural result of the tranquillisation of morbid passions.

M. Voisin has followed up this case with others equally striking, into some of which a committee of the Société Médico-Psychologique is now enquiring. And M. Dufour, the medical head of another asylum, has adopted hypnotic suggestion as a regular element in his treatment. Dès à présent,' he says, 'notre opinion est faite: sans crainte de nous tromper, nous affirmons que l'hypnotisme peut rendre service dans le traitement des maladies mentales.' As was to be expected, he finds that only a small proportion of lunatics are hypnotisable; but the effect produced on these, whether by entrancement or suggestion, is uniformly good. His best subject is a

cussed at the last meeting of the French Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. E. Dufour, médecin en chef de l'asile Saint-Robert (Isère). See Annales Médico-Psychologiques, Sept. 1886, p. 238.

VOL. XX.-No. 117.

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depraved young man, who after many convictions for crimes (including attempted murder) has become a violent lunatic. T.,' says Dr. Dufour, 'a été un assez mauvais sujet. Nous n'avons plus à parler au présent, tellement ses sentiments moraux ont été améliorés par l'hypnotisme.' This change and amelioration of character (over and above the simple recovery of sanity) has been a marked feature in some of Dr. Voisin's cases as well.

There is, indeed, in the sleep-waking state even of sane persons, a characteristic change of character, more easily recognised than described. Without generalising too confidently I may say that there seems usually to be an absence of self-conciousness and anxiety, a diminution of mere animal instincts, and a sense of expansion and freedom which shows itself either in gaiety or in a sort of beatific calm. In Madame B. (a subject whose susceptibility to hypnotisation by Dr. Gibert and Prof. Janet from a distance has recently attracted much notice) there was something-as it seemed to me-indescribably absurd in the contrast between the peasant woman's humble, stolid, resigned cast of countenance and the childish glee with which she joked and babbled during the 'phase somnambulique' of her complex trance. On the other hand M. Richet says of a recent subject of his own,8 She seems when in the somnambulic state to be normal in all respects except that her character has changed. When awake she is gay and lively; when entranced, grave, serious, almost solemn. . . . Her intelligence seems to have increased.'

And I may remark that this phase of the somnambulic character, this tendency to absorption and ecstasy, is a fact of encouraging significance. It is an indication that we may get more work out of ourselves in certain modified states than we can at present. Ecstasy,' which in former ages was deemed the exalted prerogative of saints, is now described as a matter of course among the phases of a mere hysterical attack. The truth is, perhaps, more complex than either of these views would admit. Ecstasy (we may certainly say with the modern alienist) is for the most part at least a purely subjective affection, corresponding to no reality outside the patient and appearing along with other instabilities in the course of hysteria. True; but on the other hand ecstasy is to hysteria somewhat as genius is to insanity. The ecstasy, say, of Louise Lateau assuredly proves no dogma and communicates to us no revelation. Yet, taken strictly by itself, it is not altogether a retrograde or dissolutive nervous phenomenon. Rather it represents the extreme tension of the poor girl's spirit in the highest direction which her intellect allows; and the real drawback is that this degree of occasional concentration usually implies great habitual instability. The hysterical patient has an hour of ecstasy, during which her face, if we may trust Dr. Paul

8 Revue Philosophique, Sept. 1886, p. 327.

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Richer's drawings, often assumes a lofty purity of expression which the ordinary young person might try in vain to rival. But she pays for the transitory exaltation by days of incoherent scolding, of reckless caprice. And similarly, as I maintain, the power of exaltation, of concentration, which constitutes genius implies a profound modifiability of the nervous system, a tendency of the stream of mentation to pour with a rush into some special channels. In a Newton or a Shelley this modifiability is adequately under control; were it not so our Shelleys would lapse into incoherence, our Newtons into monomania.

And I maintain that the hypnotic trance, with its liberation from petty preoccupations, its concentration in favourite channels, has some analogy to genius as well as to hysteria. I maintain that for some uneducated subjects it has been the highest mental condition which they have ever entered; and that, when better understood and applied to subjects of higher type, it may dispose to flows of thought more undisturbed and steady than can be maintained by the waking effort of our tossed and fragmentary days.

I have dwelt at some length on the moral accompaniments of the hypnotic trance, because they are as yet much less generally known than the physical. It would, indeed, be a mere waste of space to dwell on the lulling of pain which can be procured by these methods, or even on the painless performance of surgical operations during the hypnotic trance; but I will cite a case 10 illustrating a point comparatively new-namely, that the insusceptibility to pain need not be confined to the entranced condition, but may be prolonged by hypnotic suggestion into subsequent waking hours.

An hysterical patient in the hospital of Bordeaux suffered recently from a malady which was certainly not imaginary. She had a ' phlegmon,' or inflamed abscess, as big as a hen's egg, on the thigh, with excessive tenderness and lancinating pain. It was necessary to open the swelling, but the screaming patient would not allow it to be touched. Judging this to be a good opportunity for testing the real validity of deferred hypnotic suggestion, Dr. Pitres hypnotised the woman by looking fixedly in her eyes, and then suggested to her that after she had been awakened she would allow the abscess to be opened, and would not feel the slightest pain. She was then awakened, and apparently resumed her normal state. M. A. Boursier proceeded to open and squeeze out the abscess in a deliberate way. The patient merely looked on and smiled. She had no recollection of the suggestion which had been made to her during her trance, and she was not a little astonished to see her formidable enemy thus disposed of without giving her the slightest pain.

La Grande Hystérie, 2nd edit. Paris, 1885.

10 First given in the Journal de Médecine de Bordeaux, and cited at length in Dr. Bérillon's Revue de l'Hypnotisme for Sept. 1886. Professor Pitres' name, I may add, carries great weight in the French medical world.

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