There is a still more painful social and moral side to this matter to which I can here only distantly allude, but which confirms me in the belief that the question is at least as much one of police as of science, and from that point of view deserves the attention of the lay authorities of the Paris hospitals and of the correctional tribunals.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

Ernest Hart.

'British Medical Journal,' 429 Strand, W.C, January 9,1893. DR. LUYS'S REPLY TO MR. HART.

To The Editor Of The 'Times.'

Sir, - Mr. Hart, in a former article which appeared a few weeks ago, attacked me most violently on the subject of some hypnotical experiments which I made in his presence at the Hopital de la Charite.

As Mr. Hart had shown me he was perfectly incompetent as judge of the matter, that he was even ignorant of the primary elements of the problem, such as the different states undergone by hypnotised patients, I concluded it was useless to waste my time by discussion with a mere amateur, and thus did not reply to assertions which I considered of no value whatever.

He has returned to the subject in a fresh article, full of malevolent insinuations and intended inaccuracy; further, he incriminates my honour as a man of science, coupling my name with epithets which I am surprised to find traced by his pen. I consider myself, therefore, obliged to break silence, so that the public may not remain under the influence of this extra-scientific attack.

Mr. Hart has simply mixed up, in his wrath, my personal experiments and those undertaken by my fellow-worker and friend, Colonel de Rochas, and that because they took place at the hospital in my consulting room.

In his presence I merely gave a few simple experiments and demonstrations - showing him, for instance, that when persons are hypnotised their usual faculties are raised to an extra-physiological pitch, and that the patients see things that we cannot in our normal state distinguish; thus they behold the waves which are developed from a polarised bar and from a magnetic needle with their different colouring. In order to demonstrate the physical fact, I told him that the examination of the back of the eye, before the hypnotic state, and also during that state, by the aid of the ophthalmoscope, showed to any observer that the retina, which is pale before the operation, became instantaneously red, there being a violent determination of blood to it during the somnambulistic state, and that at the same time the possibilities of accommodation of the eye are destroyed. This is an indisputable criterion which explains the increase of the visual power, and I am not aware that this purely objective phenomenon could be caused in a fraudulent manner.

I also went through (in presence of Mr. Hart) some experiments relative to the psychical action, either attractive or repulsive, of the different poles of a magnetic bar on hypnotised patients. I also showed him that glass tubes, containing either brandy or tincture of valerian, applied to the same patients, could determine on them effects peculiar to those substances.

Such were the personal experiments, accomplished in presence of Mr. Hart, and which he seemed to accept with approval And I ask all people of good faith - Is there in this anything contrary to scientific morality and which represents, as Mr. Hart emphatically states, a lamentable page of human folly, calling for the intervention of the police magistrate f Risum teneatis, amici?

Pursuing the campaign, Mr. Hart has deemed it necessary to make a few personal experiments on his own account (I am persuaded he knew nothing of the scientific direction of these experiments) and in a private residence, so as to be able to make these fantastic investigations quite at his ease, and under the pretext of controlling what he had seen at La Charite. He was unlucky enough to apply to patients whom I have long ceased to have recourse to, being unable to depend on their veracity. He questioned them privately, he believed solemnly in their declarations, without having a notion that these patients are so passive that the questioner can make them say anything he chooses, the most unlikely things - even, for instance, that Mr. Hart's labours in hypnotism are of the very first order. His inexperience here made him fall into the very grossest snare.

All the other .experiments belonging to the exteriorisa-tion of sensitiveness, so vehemently criticised by Mr. Hart, by means of extra-scientific processes, do not belong to me. They are real and, I confess, extraordinary discoveries made by my fellow-labourer and friend. Colonel de Rochas, whose patient researches have been most justly appreciated by most competent men.

Briefly, all these simple things are really not worth so much rhetoric

I am, Sir, your most obedient servant,

Dr. J. Luys,

Member of the Academie de Medicine (French College of Surgeons), Doctor of the Hospital of La Charite.

Paris, 20 roe de Grenelle, January 24,1893.

Dr. Luys And His Patients

To The Editor Of The 'Times.'

Sir, - M. Luys rushes on his own sword. 1 was careful to avoid saying anything which should impugn his scientific honour. He now raises that perilous issue, and stands self-impeached in your columns by his own words and by no will of mine. When did Dr. Luys become convinced of ' the want of veracity' of the patients whom I have detected and denounced as impostors f He says it is long since; but the persons on whom I operated, and whose futile frauds I exposed, were the very persons on whom he showed, on several occasions between December 28 and January 6, to me and others what he speaks of as the ' simple phenomena' of magnetic attraction and repulsion; of visual perception of coloured flames from the magnet, from photo-graphs and prints, and from the human face; the storage of thought in a head circlet; the cat performance, the tipsy scene, the transference of drunkenness by contact, and those on whom Colonel de Rochas showed at the Charite what Dr. Luys describes as real' facts,' the transference of sensibility to the air, to a glass of water, and to a wax doll.

The whole performance has turned out to be a pure comedy. But if Dr. Luys has long been conscious of the unveracity of the subjects who play these antics, I am at a loss to explain the fact that up to January 5 he was presenting them to myself, to his students and to journalists and visitors as sincere subjects. Their names are Marguerite, Jeanne, Clarice, and Mervel. It is Dr. Luys himself who now comes forward to proclaim that his performances were on 'untrustworthy subjects.' It is a very serious position which he thus creates for himself.

As to the completeness and convincing nature of ray control demonstrations, anyone may form a judgment who is sufficiently interested by reading the details in the current number of the 'Nineteenth Century' or in the series of illustrated reports in course of publication in the 'British Medical Journal.'

From the evidence of the eye-witnesses of my experiments I select the letters of two eminent scientists - Dr. de Cyon, one of the most eminent of physiologists, and Dr. L. Olivier, D.Sc., Directeur of the 'Revue Generate des Sciences.'

Dr. De Cyon Writes, Under Date Of January 28,1893

'I can testify that the experiments at which I was present took place exactly as you have described them in your letter to the "Times.' The methods which you employed to demonstrate the trickery on the part of the subjects - notably the changing of the dolls and the substitution of the glass of water and of the magnet - are of such simplicity that one finds a difficulty in believing that the physicians who have made themselves the apostles of this new superstition are acting in good faith. I have myself made numerous experiments on Dr. Luys's subjects and on those of many other physicians, and I have always succeeded with the greatest facility in unmasking their frauds, which really can only deceive those who wish to be deceived. Either dupes or accomplices - there is no other alternative for the adepts of the doctrines which are now tending to discredit medicine and to throw it back many centuries. I am entirely in agreement with you on what you have said as to the morality of the subjects who lend themselves to these grotesque experiments.

All this concerns much more the police des mceurs rather than clinical medicine.'

Dr. Louis Olivier Writes, Under Date January 19, 1893

'I am quite ready to relate what I saw at the sittings which took place in your room in the Hotel Continental. There was no agreement between the phenomena manifested by the hypnotised subjects and the production of the current of magnetisation, Ac. You repeated the experiments, of Dr. Luys and those of M. de Rochas, avoiding all suggestion, either involuntary or unconscious, which might vitiate the results. You took care to hide from the subjects the nature of the drugs tested, to which M. Luys attributes an action at a distance, the moment of the closure or opening of the current of your electro-magnet. Under these conditions there was no longer any relation between the nature of the medicinal agent and the symptoms manifested; when the circuit was opened without their knowledge the subjects said they experienced the varied sensations which they ordinarily attribute to the passage of the current. They were unable to distinguish the open from the closed state of the current. You repeated M. de Rochas's experiment of envoutement, employing without the knowledge of the hypnotised woman two dolls, one of which remained carefully separated from the sleeping woman. The latter uttered shrieks when I pulled the hair of the doll which she had not touched, etc.

These facts appear to me decisive for the settlement of a question which I ought to say has been decided by the vast majority of the French scientific public in a sense absolutely opposed to the results proclaimed by MM. Luys and de Bochas. It is well that it should be known in England that the opinion of these two experimenters finds no support in the French scientific world.'

I invited Dr. Luys and Colonel de Rochas to be present at a final repetition of my experiments. Colonel de Rochas came; Dr. Luys excused himself from being present.

I am, Sir, yours faithfully,

Ernest Hart.

735lO -2

'British Medical Journal,' 429 Strand, February 1,1893.