Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/866

866 on topics that are of current interest. Mr. Uart frankly states that he hopes the volume will serve a useful purpose in dissipating some popular errors and a good deal of pseudo-scientific superstition, superimposed on a slender basis of physiological and pathological phenomena.

His first chapter has the suggestive title of Hypnotism and Humbug, and in it he refers to the fact that hypnotism has come down to us through the ages, the lineal descendant of many ancient beliefs. He very truly says that the term "animal magnetism" applied to any of the phenomena of induced sleep, human automatism, hypnotic suggestions, or faith cures is a pure misnomer, being an example of that tendency satirized by Voltaire when he speaks of the custom of "mystics and charlatans to consecrate their ignorance and to impress its conclusions upon others by giving a name that has no meaning to phenomena that they do not understand." Briefly and lucidly the physiological explanation of that more or less complete suspension of the will, known as induced sleep, is portrayed; and reference is made to the various phenomena that may be displayed by an individual under the influence of suggestion. But Mr. Hart emphasizes the fact that the allegation that an individual under the influence of suggestion has powers of clairvoyance, can predict future events, has insight into hidden things, or, in a few words, has developed new powers, is, under any and all circumstances, imposture.

The second chapter briefly refers to the ancient employment of the magnet in medicine, to Mesmer and his methods, to the "possessed" and the "demoniacs," and Mr. Hart shows that all these influences are the result of a condition of disturbed equilibrium of the nervous system and brain apparatus of the person operated on or affected therewith. A number of illustrations of postures and facial expressions of patients in the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris arc inserted and lend force to the author's thesis that most of the phenomena characteristic of the extreme degrees of hypnotization and suggestibility may occur in that condition of disturbed equilibrium of the patient, male or female, known as hysteria. In the latter condition there is often an auto-suggestion that, like the hetero-suggestion inducing hypnotism, abolishes the power of the will; and the brain losing its restraining and controlling powers, emotions may be excited, feelings induced, and intellectual operations set in motion, independently of the will of the individual as well as without individual consciousness being alive to what is going on. As to the treatment of disease by means of what has been termed "suggestive therapeutics," Mr. Hart cites Charcot, Ricker, Babinski, and Dèjerine, who agree that for curative purposes hypnotism is very rarely useful, generally entirely useless, and often injurious.

The third chapter is one of the most interesting in the volume, dealing as it does with Luys's experiments at La Charité Hospital in Paris, that have been given wide publicity in general literature and that have served to originate many misconceptions regarding the phenomena of hypnotism.

Dr. Luys defines hypnotism as an extraphysiological experimental state of the nervous system, or a pseudo-sleep which is imposed and during which the subject under experiment loses the notion of his or her own existence and of the external world. He professes to create experimentally many of the disorders of mental pathology in certain stages of hypnotism, and thus to give a factitious representation of some of the disorders of madness. He presented for Mr. Hart's observation five patients that were, Mr. Hart states, profoundly neuropathic. These patients were extremely sensitive, when hypnotized, to feeble magnetic currents, to residual magnetic impressions, to magnetic effluvia, to the perception of colored luminous atmospheres radiating from and playing around the poles of a magnet or of a faradaic machine, and to flames and effluvia of like character proceeding from the features, the fingers, and the hands of the human subject. These subjects would caress with various manifestations of delight the "north pole" of the magnet, about which they saw blue flames playing, while dread and terror were produced by presenting the "south pole," about which red flames played. Even photograph paper having an impression of the "north" or "south" pole produced similar phenomena in these persons. Around the head of one of the hypnotized persons a