Show HYPNOTISM inthe if the attention be directed repeatedly peat edly by au an individual in conditions of bodily weakness to any part of his organism sensations of different kinds not existing be perceived in that part this is 18 a fact generally accepted accepts d by physicians and fatal disease has it is maintained resulted simply from the influence of the imagination intensified fied in its power by fear at the time of reception of some slight or even fancied injury As one of the highest mental faculties we must consider that of concentrating by an act of will the attention the eon converse of such power is 18 inability ability to concentrate the attention by an effort of the will and consequently the individuals ll s mind is atre a prey to all sorts of distraction arising i mm 14 m sensorial peripheral impressions or from mental reproduction of previous states or ideas these reproductions being due to hyper excitability of the cortical brain cell if now by any process the power of inhibiting mental impressions arising from occurrences curren ces without the body or within in it is put out of function the power of concentrating the attention is lost for the time bein gand gaDd imagination may run riot now lettie let the imagination be dirt acted into a definite channel oh annel so to say and there being no inhibitory check u upon pon it whatever power it may have in affecting vital processes odthe of the organism will be exercised to an unusual degree in the direction or channel to which its operations are thus limited in such condition the individual may be made to sleep or to enter abnormal states such as cata catalepsy leoy to become an aesthetic in different parts of tile the body to experience hallucinations luci nations of sight eight or taste etc to exhibit without any external real cause different disorders such as the appearance of a blister which goes through all the st stages of change seen in an ord ordinary 1 nary blister from a burn to be without memory of what occurs during the condition to become an automaton and follow the operator as a piece of soft iron follows follo s a magnet and finally fi to be so imbued with a command of the operator that at the hour directed by the latter it may be many hours or even some days afterward the subject then lis in his ordinary condition dots dot s precisely abdat the exact time and without knowing why just what be had been ordered to todo do more Moreth than anthis this diseases can be ordered away normal secretions and of the organism can their absence being disease be ordered to return and even the normal pains PADS in surgical operations can be corn coin banded to not appear and in suitable subjects these commands have been obeyed these are facts facto many of them repeated over and over again and the state or condition of body in which such phenomena are possible is called hypnosis or more commonly hypnotism the school of charcot hold that only hysterics by sterios are subject to hypnotic methods and that hypnosis itself is a disease a neurosis the final stage of development in the subject up to the present writing culminates in the observations of pr lir H bernheim professor prof emor in the medical school at nancy he has shown that the theory of charcot has clouded beclouded be the whole subject both from the purely experimental and the therapeutic points of view all the facts which for years have been observed in the f few drilled hysterical out subjects ejects in ml ere can cill be explained by the action of suggestion and all the phenomena of hypnotism are to be thus explained suggestion may be verbal or by gesture or by the unconscious play of the operators features from surprise or disappointment or satisfaction etc the expectation that some special line of phenomena will appear acts in cases such as chariots Char cots subjects as a I 1 isug suggestion ap the influence of different metals applied to differ different eDt parts of the body is proven to have been from within the subject subie ct but aroused by suggestion autosuggestion auto suggestion as in the case of applied plates of gold from the old notion that e g the metal gold possesses a specially noble quality for this metal refused to act when the subject ec was made to believe it was copper 0 per and copper when believed by the subject to be gold brought out the same symptoms as gold did in the earlier experiments peri ments so 80 in luys experiments with medicines in closed and sealed glass tubes held in the hand or applied to different parts of the subjects body the possibility and even the likelihood of auto tion cannot be excluded the ille writer believes with dr frie frideen aeu rejeb that an individual who has bas been frequently hypnotized is thereby rendered abnormal and even if other abnormalities cannot be shown to exist he is still easily hypnotizable and readily subjected to th influence or of another per soAi at the sometime same time it must fiefe remembered be that this is probably true only odly of frequency of the higher grades of hypnotism and that BerD bernheim helm distinctly states that the higher grades are not necessary for therapeutic purposes suggestion accepted without resistance and often unconsciously ly by tile the subject act accounts for all that hypnotism really does the mode of if action within tile the body is unknown out but it is according to natural laws of the organism I 1 have yet to learn tha th t a tumor has been removed by hypnotism ti am or that the results resu I 1 ts of a destructive d lesion in tile the nervous system have been undone or that an ulcer has been healed suddenly suu denly the power of posthypnotic post hypnotic suggestion to cause crime through an innocent agent carrying out at a time hours or days after emerging from the hy hypnotic state the action suggested while in that state ham haa aroused the serious attention of physicians and jurists alike while the danger of produce g a widespread condition of nervous disease as a result of public demonstrations of masmer ism is emphasized by all writers upon the subject in different european countries medical and legal societies have petitioned the authorities to prohibit all public exhibitions of I 1 mesmerism by any person whatsoever and to forbid the employment of hypnosis by any person not dot a physician with special knowledge of nervous diseases the use of hypnosis by physicians sh all uld tie be limited to therapeutic purposes or for the instruction of medical students and as for these ends the lower grades of hypnotism are according to Beria bernheim heim sufficient ent not injurious consequences need follow for his own protection the physician should not dot use the method except in the presence of a third reputable person as a witness joseph T oconnor X M D Z in the catholin world for february |