Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/722

650 directed to a multitude of different objects, with a rapidity and a lucidity which are truly marvelous. Fear becomes terror; courage is developed into rashness which nothing checks; the most unfounded doubt or suspicion becomes a certainty. The mind has a tendency to exaggerate everything." So, also, De Quincey, of the effects of opium: "Whatsoever I happened to call up and trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness, was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams. Whatsoever things I did but think of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the eye; and, by a process apparently no less inevitable, when once thus traced in faint and visionary colors, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn out, by the fierce chemistry of my dreams, into insufferable splendor that fretted my heart." In the delirium of fever and in the coma of ether and nitrous oxide suggestibility is sometimes noted, but it is not a common phenomenon, and more information is much needed.

Idiopathic suggestibility has been reported by many observers, but I shall limit myself to the description of one case which has fallen within my own ken. Florrie is a little girl aged twelve. Her father is a blacksmith in good health but not robust. Her mother is a work-worn woman, slow of speech and slower of wit, and is easily hypnotized. Florrie is a quiet child, has suffered from frequent and violent headaches, and is very forgetful. In all other respects she is quite normal. She was hypnotized some time ago by a traveling showman. Of her condition before that time there is no record, but since then she has been markedly suggestible. A command forcibly uttered, once, twice, or thrice, is sufficient to displace her upper consciousness and throw her into a dreamlike state in which she executes nearly all suggestions. A typical experience with her will serve as an illustration. I had been lecturing in an amphitheater crowded with students, and she had been waiting outside. The patients I had already shown aroused a great deal of laughter, and when I went for her I found her panic-stricken, sobbing bitterly: she would not go, no, she would not go before all those men—she was afraid. I said to her in a low tone: "Florrie, of whom are you afraid? Are you afraid of me?" "No." "Of your mother?" "No." "Well, there is no one else here." After much persuasion I got her to look out. "There," said I, triumphantly, pointing to a crowd of physicians and nurses, "don't you see that bare wall? There is no one here but us three." Her tears were dried at once. I led her into the amphitheater and said, pointing to the rows upon rows of men, "Don't you see, Florrie, there is nothing here but empty benches and ourselves?" She saw nothing save what I told her to see, was perfectly cheerful and happy, entirely at her ease, and absolutely subject to my commands. She seemed to be quite normal.