Various popular novelists, such as George Du Maurier in Trilby, and E.F. Benson in The Image in the Sand, have taken advantage of the possibilities which hypnotic marvels offer to the sensational writer, and have put into circulation a variety of exaggerated ideas. This is regrettable. Of course the novelist can choose his subject, and can treat it as he likes; it is the public’s fault if it takes fiction for fact, or allows its notions of fact to be coloured or in any way influenced by what is avowedly no more than fiction.

But it is certain that it is thus influenced. It is therefore desirable that the public should be told from time to time exactly what the scientific position is—what the conclusions are, of those who are studying the subject in a proper scientific spirit, with no aim save the finding of truth. This will at least enable the public to discriminate between fact and fiction, if it wants to.

No doubt the phenomena in question have been often discovered, forgotten, and rediscovered; but in modern times the movement dates from Mesmer. Friedrich Anton Mesmer was born about 1733 or 1734. In 1766 he took his doctor’s degree at Vienna, but did not come into public notice until 1773. In that year he employed in the treatment of patients certain magnetic plates, the invention of Father Hell, a Jesuit, professor of astronomy at Vienna.

Further experiments led him to believe that the human body is a kind of magnet; and that its effluent forces could be employed, like those of the metal plates, in the cure of disease. Between 1773 and 1778 he travelled extensively in Europe, with a view to making his discoveries better known. Also he sent an account of his system to the principal learned bodies of Europe, including the Royal Society of London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and the Academy at Berlin.

The last alone deigned to reply; they told him his discovery was an illusion. Apparently they knew all about it, without investigating. There is no dogmatism so unqualified, no certainty so cocksure, as that of complete ignorance.

The method at first was probably a system of magnetic passes or strokings of the diseased part by the hand of the doctor. But, as the patients increased in number, a more wholesale method had to be devised. Consequently Mesmer invented the famous “baquet”. This was a large tub, filled with bottles of water previously “magnetised” by Mesmer.

The bottles were arranged to radiate from the centre, some of them with necks pointing away from it and some pointing towards it. They rested on powdered glass and iron filings, and the tub itself was filled with water. In short, it was a sort of glorified travesty of a galvanic battery. From it, long iron rods, jointed and movable, protruded through holes in the lid. These the patients held, or applied to the region of their disease, as they sat in a circle round the baquet. Mesmer and his assistants walked about, supplementing the treatment by pointing with the fingers, or with iron rods, at the diseased parts.

All this may seem, at first sight, very absurd. But the fact remains that Mesmer certainly wrought cures. And apparently he frequently succeeded in curing or greatly alleviating, where other doctors had completely failed. It is no longer possible for any instructed person to regard Mesmer as a charlatan who knowingly deluded the public for his own profit. His theories may have been partly mistaken, but his practical results were indubitable.

It is also worth noting that he treated rich and poor alike, charging the latter no fee. He was a man of great tenderness and kindness of heart, devoted to the cause of the sick and suffering; and the accounts of his patients show the unbounded gratitude which they felt towards him, and the respect in which he was held.

The orthodox doctors, of course, felt otherwise. They were envious and jealous of the foreign innovator and his success. And his fame was too great to allow of his being ignored. Consequently the Royal Society of Medicine (Paris) appointed a commission to inquire into the new treatment. The finding, of course, was adverse. The investigators could not deny the cures, but they fell back on the recuperative force of nature (vis medicatrix naturÆ) and denied that Mesmer’s treatment caused the cure.

Obviously, Mesmer, having treated his patients, could not prove that they would not have recovered if he had not treated them; so his critics had a strong position. But, on the other hand, neither can an orthodox doctor prove that his cures are due to his treatment. If it is vis medicatrix naturÆ in one case, it may be the same in the other.

Modern medicine is more and more coming to this conclusion—is abandoning drugging as it abandoned bleeding and cautery, and is leaving the patient to nature. This is a significant fact.

But there is good reason to believe that Mesmer’s treatment was a real factor in his cures, for in many cases the patient had been treated by orthodox methods for years without effect. Perhaps, as the doctors said, it was “only the recuperative force of Nature”, but if the doctors could not set that force to work, and Mesmer somehow could, he is just as much entitled to the credit of the cure as if he had done it by bleeding or drugging. However, by one sort of persecution or another, he was driven out of Paris, and more or less discredited. After a visit to England, he retired to Switzerland, where he lived in obscurity until his death in 1815.

The method was kept alive by various disciples, such as the Marquis de PuysÉgur, Dupotet, Deleuze, and many more, but in an amateurish sort of way. The first-named found that in one of his patients he could induce a trance state which showed peculiar features. In trance, the man knew all that he knew when awake, but when awake he knew nothing of what had happened in trance. This second condition thus seemed to be equivalent to an enlargement of personality.

Both in England and France the medical side came to the front again, in the hands of Braid (a Manchester surgeon who first used the term “hypnotism”, from Greek hypnos, sleep, and whose book Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep was published in 1843), LiÉbeault, Bernheim, Elliotson, and Esdaile.

Elliotson and Esdaile still believed in a magnetic effluence, but the idea was given up by Braid and the “Nancy school” (the investigators who followed the lines of LiÉbeault of Nancy), for it was found that patients could be hypnotised without passes or strokings or any manipulation. Braid told his patients to gaze fixedly at a bright object, e.g., his lancet. LiÉbeault produced sleep by talking soothingly or commandingly filling the patient’s mind with the idea of sleep. In some cases it was found that patients could hypnotise themselves by an effort of will (this was confirmed more recently by Dr Wingfield’s experiments with athletic undergraduates at Cambridge), and this disposed of the hitherto supposedly necessary “magnetic effluence” from the operator.

The most modern opinion is pretty much the same. Dr Tuckey, who learnt his method from LiÉbeault himself, and who practised for twenty years in the West End of London, is convinced that the whole thing is suggestion. So is Dr Bramwell, who shares with Dr Tuckey the leading position among hypnotic practitioners in England. The latter, it may be remarked, was the first qualified medical man to write an important book on the subject in English, after Braid.

The tendency now is to give suggestions without attempting to induce actual trance. It is found with many patients that if they will make their minds passive and receptive, listening to the doctor’s suggestions in an absent-minded sort of way, those suggestions—that the health shall improve and the specified symptoms disappear—are carried out. The explanation of this is “wrapped in mystery”. No one knows exactly how it comes about. But it seems to be somewhat thus:

The complicated happenings within our bodies, such as the chemical phenomena known as digestion and the physical phenomena such as blood circulation and contraction of involuntary muscles, seem to imply intelligence, though that intelligence is not part of the conscious mind, for we do not consciously direct the processes. They go on all the same—for example—when we are asleep. Presumably, then, there is a mental Something in us, which never sleeps, and which runs the organic machinery. If we could get at this Something, and give it instructions, a part of the machinery which is working wrongly might get attended to and put right. Unfortunately, the ordinary consciousness is in the way. We cannot get at the mechanic in the mill, because we have to go through the office, and the managing director keeps us talking.

Well, in hypnotic trance, or even in the preoccupied “absent-minded” state, we get past the managing director—who is asleep or attending to something else—into the mill. We get at the man who really attends to the machinery. We get past the normal consciousness, and can give our orders to the “subconscious” or “subliminal”—which means “below the threshold”. In Myers’ phrase, suggestion is a “successful appeal to the subliminal self”, but exactly how it comes about, and why the patient usually cannot do it for himself but has to have the suggestion administered by a doctor, we do not know.

Of course the word “suggestion” does not really explain anything. It is a word employed to cover our ignorance. Suggestive methods are as empirical as Mesmer’s. In each case a successful appeal is made to the recuperative forces of nature, vis medicatrix naturÆ; but exactly how or why suggestion does it, we know no more—or hardly any more—than we know how and why Mesmer’s baquet did it. The fact remains, however, that the thing is done. What we lack is only a satisfactory theory.

At one time it was thought that only functional disorders could be relieved. But it is now recognised that the line between functional and organic is an arbitrary one. If we cannot find definite organic change in tissue, we call the ailment functional; but nevertheless some change there must be, though microscopic or unreachable. Consequently even functional disorders are at bottom organic; and, though of course grave lesions produce the gravest disorders, there is no À priori impossibility in a hypnotic cure of even the most radical tissue-degeneration.

However, as a matter of practical fact, the “mechanic” has his limitations, like the normal consciousness. He is not omnipotent. Consequently we cannot be sure of being able to stimulate him to the extent of a cure. It depends on his knowledge and power. But he can always do something, if we can get at him. The chief difficulty is that in many people he is inaccessible.

For instance, I have many times submitted myself to the treatment of Dr Tuckey and another medical friend, without effect. I have each time tried my best to help, making my mind as passive as I could; for I was sure that if a suggestible stage could be reached, some troublesome heart symptoms and insomnia could be alleviated. But I was never able to reach a state even approaching hypnosis. I suppose my normal consciousness could not put itself sufficiently to sleep. Being interested in the scientific aspect of the subject, my consciousness watched the process and analysed its own sensations, instead of “letting go” and subsiding out of the way.

As to the proportion of susceptible persons, observers differ. Wetterstrand and Vogt hold that all sane and healthy people are hypnotisable, and Dr Bramwell’s results among strong farm labourers at Goole support that view. Patients with nervous ailments are difficult to hypnotise; out of one hundred such cases in his London practice, Dr Bramwell only influenced eighty. This is the percentage of susceptibles found by Drs Tuckey and Bernheim also.

The insane are usually unhypnotisable, probably because of their inability to concentrate their attention. Out of the 80 per cent. of sane susceptibles, only a small proportion go off into hypnotic sleep; ten according to Tuckey, rather more according to the experience of Bramwell, Forel, and Vogt. Most of the susceptible, however, though retaining consciousness, may be deprived of muscular control. For example, if told that they cannot open their eyes, they find that it is so.

The various “stages” of hypnosis shade gradually into each other, and classifications are not much good. Charcot’s three stages of lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism are now discredited as true stages. In good subjects they are producible at will, and as observed at the SalpÊtriÈre they were almost certainly due to training.

I have no space for the quoting of detailed medical cases, but it is desirable to emphasise the practical facts and to make the subject as concrete as possible to the reader, so I will quote just one, as illustration, from Dr Bramwell’s contribution to Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol.xiv, page 99.

“Neurasthenia; suicidal tendencies. Mr D——, aged 34, 1890; barrister. Formerly strong and athletic. Health began to fail in 1877, after typhoid fever. Abandoned work in 1882, and for eight years was a chronic invalid. AnÆmic, dyspeptic, sleepless, depressed. Unable to walk a hundred yards without severe suffering. Constant medical treatment, including six months’ rest in bed, without benefit. He was hypnotised from June 2 to September 20, 1890. By the end of July all morbid symptoms disappeared, and he amused himself by working on a farm. He can now walk forty miles a day without undue fatigue.” Similar cases are now being recorded in the military hospitals. Soldiers make excellent “subjects”.

It has been much debated whether a hypnotised person could be made to commit a crime. Probably not; it is difficult to be quite sure, but the evidence is on the negative side. True, a hypnotised subject will put sugar which he has been told is arsenic into his mother’s tea, but his inner self probably knows well enough that it is only sugar. On the other hand, it is certain that a hypnotiser may obtain a remarkable amount of control over specially sensitive subjects, particularly by repeated hypnotisations.

I have seen hypnotised subjects who seemed almost perfect automata, obeying orders as mechanically as if they had no will of their own left. Certainly no one, either man or woman, but particularly the latter, should submit himself or herself to hypnotic treatment except by a qualified person in whom full trust can be reposed. And, even then, in the case of a woman patient, it is well for a third person to be present.

But the stories of the novelists, about subjugated wills, hypnotising from a distance, and all the rest of it, are quite without adequate foundation in fact. There is very little evidence in support of hypnosis produced at a distance, and in the one case where it did seem to occur there had been repeated hypnotisations of the ordinary kind, by which a sort of telepathic rapport was perhaps established (Myers’ Human Personality, vol.i, page 524).

Hypnotism against the will is a myth; except perhaps in here and there a backboneless person who could be influenced any way, without hypnosis or anything of the kind. The Chicago pamphleteer who wants to teach us how to get on in business by developing a “hypnotic eye” is merely after dollars. It is all bunkum.

There is a sense, however, in which hypnotic treatment can be a help in education and in strengthening the character. Backward and lazy children could probably be improved, and I know cases in which sleep-walking and other bad habits have been cured by suggestion. From this it is but a step to dipsomania, which can often be cured. Dr Tuckey reports seventy cures out of two hundred cases.

F.W.H. Myers, to whose genius doctors as well as psychologists owe their first scientific conceptions in this domain, was extremely optimistic here. He held that though we cannot expect to manufacture saints, any more than we can manufacture geniuses, there is nevertheless enough evidence to show that great things could be done.

“If the subject is hypnotisable, and if hypnotic suggestion be applied with sufficient persistency and skill, no depth of previous baseness and foulness need prevent the man or woman whom we charge with ‘moral insanity’, or stamp as a ‘criminal-born’, from rising into a state where he or she can work steadily and render services useful to the community” (Human Personality, vol.i, page 199). Experiments on hypnotic lines ought certainly to be carried out in our prisons and reformatories. As to the formerly alleged dangers of such experimentation—dangers of hysteria, etc., alleged by the Charcot school which is now seen to have been quite on a wrong tack—they do not exist, if the operator knows his business.

Says Professor Forel: “LiÉbeault, Bernheim, Wetterstrand, Van Eeden, De Jong, Moll, I myself, and the other followers of the Nancy school, declare categorically that, although we have seen many thousands of hypnotised persons, we have never observed a single case of mental or bodily harm caused by hypnosis, but, on the contrary, have seen many cases of illness relieved or cured by it”. Dr Bramwell fully endorses this, saying emphatically that he has “never seen an unpleasant symptom, even of the most trivial nature, follow the skilled induction of hypnosis” (Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol.xii, page 209).

A proof that intellectual powers outside the normal consciousness may be tapped by appropriate methods is afforded by the remarkable experiments of Dr Bramwell, on the appreciation of time by somnambules. He ordered a hypnotised subject to carry out, after arousal, some trivial action, such as making a cross on a piece of paper, at the end of a specified period of time, reckoning from the moment of waking. In the waking state, the patient knew nothing of the order; but a subliminal mental stratum knew, and watched the time, making the subject carry out the order when it fell due.

The period varied from a few minutes to several months, and it was stated in various ways, e.g. on one occasion Dr Bramwell ordered the action to be carried out in “24 hours and 2880 minutes”. The order was given at 3.45 p.m. on December 18, and it was carried out correctly at 3.45 p.m. on December 21. In other experiments, the periods given were 4,417, 8,650, 8,680, 8,700, 10,070, 11,470 minutes.

All were correctly timed by the subliminal stratum, the action being promptly carried out at the due moment. In the waking state the patient was quite incapable—as most of us would be—of calculating mentally when the periods would elapse. But the hypnotic stratum could do it, and this shows that there are intellectual powers which lie outside the field of the normal consciousness. The argument could be further supported by the feats of “calculating boys”, who can sometimes solve the most complicated arithmetical problems, without knowing how they do it. They let the problem sink in, and the answer is shot up presently, like the cooked pudding in the geyser.

But these things are still in their infancy. Psychology is working at the subject, but we do not yet know enough to enable us to venture far in the direction of practical application of hypnotic methods in education. It seems likely, however, that further investigation will yield knowledge which may be of inestimable practical value in the training of minds, as well as in the curing of mental and bodily disease.