Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/618

600 except by waking the patient up, or making her pass into lethargy. The hypnotized patient therefore is much in the state of the frog, which when thrown into a pond, even after its brain has been removed, begins to swim on touching the water, aimlessly, automatically.

Sometimes a movement repeatedly executed by the operator in front of the patient will be imitated and carried out by the patient until stopped: this is a case of suggestion through the organ of sight. Or more complicated trains of movement may be initiated by presenting to the patient objects suggestive of certain actions, such as a plate and spoon, a brush and comb, and the like. The sight of a boot will start an endless repetition of putting it on, lacing and unlacing, taking it off, putting it on again, and so forth indefinitely.

The field of suggestions through the ear by means of language is boundless. Such words as "rats," "bird," "flower," wake up a train of imagery in the patient's brain which is immediately projected outward in an expressive display of appropriate gestures of aversion or desire, and corresponding movements of avoidance or capture. If in deep hypnotism, the subject is immediately wrapped up in those creations of the imagination; if slightly hypnotized only, repetition of the suggestive words is needed to neutralize the controlling influence of the senses. The ordinary phenomenon of hypnotism, the impossibility which the subject feels of escaping the prohibiting influence of a suggestion, belongs to this category. You assure him that he can not move his arm, for instance; he feels that he can, and yet he can not. The volitional current from his higher brain-centers is neutralized, as it were, by the current from other centers in which the suggestion has created a fixed idea of his own incapacity. As hypnosis becomes deeper, every trace of resistance disappears, and the fixed idea reigns supreme.

Such are the leading phenomena of hypnotism as observed in those highly sensitive subjects, the sufferers from the graver form of hysteria, or hystero-epilepsy. It would take us too far to describe the various symptoms of this form of nervous derangement, which, though comparatively common in France and among certain other nations, seems to be very rare, at least in its full development, among the Germanic races. In Dr. Richer's work, already mentioned, a full account is given of the appalling violence of the convulsive seizures and of the delirium that characterize the disease. Epidemics of hystero-epilepsy were rife in the middle ages, especially among the members of religious bodies; and even now it seems to be closely related to superstitions or mystical beliefs and practices.

Though essentially a disease of the female nervous organization, many instances are found of men suffering from more or less modified forms of hystero-epilepsy. The less striking symptoms of it, such as various forms of paralysis, loss of sensation, loss of speech (aphasia),