It is the opinion of most of the European observers that all of the results attributable to treatment by magnets, charms, magnetized and electric belts, etc., are primarily the result of suggestion.

Drs. Liebault and Bernheim have proved that most, if not all, of the results obtained through these various articles, are not due to anything inherent in them, but to the faith of the patient. Dr. Bernheim does not wholly subscribe to this.

Therapeutic suggestion is not in any way a discovery of our present age. What is new is its scientific mode of application and its recognition and adoption by general medicine.

Dr. Hack Tuke, in speaking of the effect of imagination during sleep, reports a case. He says, "The daughter of a consul at Hanover, aged sixteen, intended to use rhubarb (for which she had a particular dislike). On the day following she dreamed that she had taken the abhorred dose. Influenced by this imaginary rhubarb, she waked up and had five or six easy evacuations."

A similar result is reported in- another case. A monk intended to purge himself on a certain morning. On the night previous he dreamed that he had taken the medicine, and consequently waked up to yield to nature's demands. He had eight movements.

The following is a case illustrative of the power of prayer. The Princess of Schwartzenburg had suffered for eight years from paraplegia, for which the most celebrated doctors in Germany and France had been consulted. In 1821 the Prince of Hohenlohe, who had been a priest since 1815, brought to the princess a peasant who had convinced the young prince of the power of prayer in curing disease. The mechanical apparatus which had been used by Dr. Heine for several months to overcome the contracture of the limbs was removed. The prince asked the paralytic to join her faith to both his and the peasant's. "Do you believe you are already helped? "Oh, yes, I believe so most sincerely." "Well, rise and walk."

At these words the princess rose and walked around the room several times, and tried going up and downstairs. The next day she went to church, and from that time on she had the use of her limbs.

In the first case quoted it does not seem reasonable to me to attribute the movement of the bowels to the dream. I think it more likely that the intestinal disorder provoked the dream, and that the purging was the result of a disease and not the effect of a dream.

Dr. Bernheira says, "Hypnotism, like natural sleep, exalts the imagination, and makes the brain more susceptible to suggestion. The strongest minds cannot escape from the hallucinatory suggestions of their dreams. It is a physiological law that sleep puts the brain into such a psychical condition that the imagination accepts and recognizes as real the impressions transmitted to it. To provoke this special psychical condition by means of hypnotism, and to cultivate the suggestibility thus artificially increased with the aim of cure or relief, this is the role of psycho-therapeutics."

A case of probably hysterical paralysis is quoted by Dr. Bernheim as follows:

"Marie Lanou-Domeuge, twenty-four years of age, had been troubled for three years with incomplete paralysis of the whole left side. She could not take a step without help.

"Hearing Massabielle spring spoken of, the peasant sent some one to Lourdes one day to bring a little of the healing water from the source itself. She was helped to get up and dress. Two people lifted her and she stood, both of them supporting her by the shoulders. Then she stretched out her trembling hand and plunged her fingers into the glass of water, made a large sign of the cross, put the glass to her lips and drank the contents slowly. Then she straightened herself up, shook herself and cried in triumphant joy, ' Let me go, let me go quickly! I am cured!' And she began to walk as if she had never been paralyzed."

The following Dr. Bernheim reports, which demonstrates the power of hypnotism over muscular rheumatism.

"Achild was brought to me with a pain, which pain dated back four or five days, like muscular rheumatism in the right arm; the arm was painful to pressure. The child could not lift it to its head. I said to him, 'Shut your eyes and go to sleep.' I held his eyelids closed and went on talking to him. "You are asleep and you will keep on sleeping until I wake you up. You are sleeping very well as if you were in bed. You are perfectly well, and comfortable. Your arms and legs and whole body are asleep and you cannot move." I took my fingers off his eyelids and they remained closed. I put his arms up and they remained so. Then touching the painful arm I said: 'The pain has gone away. You will have no more pain; and when you wake up you will not feel any more pain. It will not come back any more.' In order to increase the force of suggestion by embodying it, so to speak, in a material sensation, I suggested a feeling of warmth - loco dolenti. The heat took the place of the pain. I said to the child, 'You feel that your arm is warm; the warmth increases, and you have no pain.' I woke the child in a few minutes; he remembered nothing. The sleep had been profound. The pain had almost completely disappeared. The child lifted the arm easily to his head.

I saw the father on the days following and he told me that the pain had disappeared completely, and that there was no return of it."

The next case, which is of profound interest, is that of a working-man. He was fifty years old, and had been in the hospital several times.

The observations referring to his case will be given later on. For several days he had an ulnar neuritis characterized by contraction in flexion of the three last fingers of the hand, a complete ana?sthesia in the entire ulnar region, twinges of pain along the path of the nerve, and pain along the olecranon groove. I hypnotized him. In a few seconds he fell into a complete relaxation. Suggestive catalepsy and somnambulism were present. At different times I suggested the relaxation of his hand, the return of sensibility, the cessation of pains. I ran a needle into his forearm saying, "You are going to feel." In a few minutes the feeling came back again, and the fingers unbent. When he awoke all the phenomena of the neuritis had vanished.