Having secured a decent conveyance and a respectable driver, he gives himself up to rest in the confident expectation of arriving safely at his destination. If, instead of sitting still and trusting to the coachman, he shouts out contradictory orders, and, in the fear of being taken out of his way, even pulls at the reins, it is probable that his journey will be somewhat prolonged. Many persons can never be hypnotized, because they lack the power of composing their minds and fixing their attention for two minutes at a time.

* In a hundred cases Wetterstrand finds the following proportions:

5.43 per cent, are uninfluenced.

7.24 per cent. feel drowsy. 52.49 per cent. are unable to open the eyes. 34.84 per cent. are somnambulic.

During 1890 I treated 118 patients by hypnotic suggestion, of whom fifty-nine were men, fifty were women, and nine were children between six and fourteen.

Of the men, I found ten were uninfluenced after repeated trials; and of the women, twelve were insusceptible. Only one of the children proved insusceptible. As regards degree of influence: seven became deeply somnambulic - three women, two men, and two children. Thirty-three exhibited the cataleptic phenomena. The remaining fifty-five patients were influenced to a degree short of catalepsy, and many of them experienced only a slight torpor or heaviness of the eyes. They all, however, felt the glow of reflex warmth in response to suggestion, which is so important a characteristic of the hypnotic state.

Of the thirty-three patients on whom I tried the process in vain, five were absolutely insane and four were suffering from hypochondriasis almost amounting to insanity.

Of the remainder, some were scatter-brained, and I could not get them to fix their attention, some were contradictious and would not remain passive, while some seemed to be over-anxious and too analytical. Two or three were so dull and heavy that they fell into natural sleep of a profound lethargic character, in which they were insusceptible to suggestion.

But in a few cases there seemed to be no reason whatever why the patient should not be a good subject, and it is quite possible that on another occasion, or under a different operator, * they could be hypnotized.

The accompanying table will explain the ailments for which these ninety-five hypnotized patients were treated and the results of the treatment:

I have not included in the foregoing list a considerable number of cases where I have used hypnotism simply as a palliative in ordinary general practice and in the course of acute disease; e.g., in tickling laryngeal cough occurring in a course of pneumonia, colicky pain in typhoid, restlessness in endocarditis. Neither have I included cases in which I was only consulted once. Hypnotic treatment being comparatively novel, a number of persons come to the hypnotist more out of curiosity than for any wish to be cured, and others come with most exaggerated expectations. As an example of the latter class I may cite the case of an elderly gentleman who sent for me and asked me to hypnotize him in order that I might disperse an abscess, and so cheat the surgeon's knife. On examination I found a large abscess in the perinaeum almost ripe for lancing. I succeeded, with some difficulty, in inducing a gentle and pleasant langour, in which I left him, after suggesting diminution of pain and a good night's sleep. These suggestions were fairly well realized, but the patient was sadly disappointed because the surgeon had to open the abscess on the following day. A medical man once called upon me with even greater expectations.

He was on his way to his dentist to have a troublesome molar extracted, and he looked in to see if I could not anaesthetize by hypnotism, and thus render gas unnecessary. Needless to say, I did not succeed in gratifying him. and I am afraid he left me thinking very poorly of an agent which could not be evoked in its most advanced degree at will. * I have several times been asked to hypnotize girls, and induce them by suggestion to break off undesirable engagements. In one such case the evil was so apparent that I felt justified in acting the part of Providence, and suggested to the young lady that she would exercise judgment and caution, and be advised by her best friends. She shortly afterwards dismissed her lover, and I believe saved herself a life of misery.

* I have sometimes succeeded in hypnotizing patients after other medical men of experience had failed, and, on the other hand, two or three persons whom I could not influence have been hypnotized by other operators. But, as a rule, I have found that the person who cannot be hypnotized by one physician is not likely to prove more susceptible with another - the conditions being similar in both cases.

† The attacks are rarer and less severe.

‡ There was a temporary improvement in all these cases, followed by relapse.

§ One relapsed after twelve months.

* Some years ago the country was inundated with circulars from various institutions in America with high-sounding names. They offered to teach pupils by correspondence the art of hypnotism and suggestion, so that if tradesmen they would be enabled to sell their goods, and if clergymen to move their congregations by their eloquence. A good many people wrote to me on the subject, and some of the letters were very amusing. I had to reply that I did not think genius could be so easily manufactured, and that a five-dollar course would not make either a Whiteley or a Spurgeon. Some people's belief in the power of hypnotism seems unlimited, and this has been taken advantage of by some of our astute cousins.

Two or three ladies have called upon me and told me that their husbands were in the habit of drinking too much wine, and have asked me to treat them without their knowing anything about it. They expressed much disappointment when I had to tell them that the patient's wish to be cured was an essential preliminary in such cases.

In my own practice, during the years 1888-89, I found the following results:

All classes of society are represented in this table, which does not profess to be anything but a record of a somewhat limited personal experience. The English unedu-cated classes have an invincible distrust to novelty in treatment, and to this I attribute my almost complete want of success hitherto in public institutions. On most occasions, when I have talked to the patient and got him to come to my house, he has been easily hypnotized, and I have no doubt but that, when hypnotism becomes a recognized treatment in hospitals, English experience will not differ widely from that of Nancy. One of the somnambulists is a doctor in large general practice. My oldest patient was a gentleman of eighty-two, who fell into the second stage, and was cured in a few days of an attack of gouty sciatica, which had always previously lasted for weeks. He had been my patient for seven or eight years, so perhaps the therapeutic test is admissible here. My youngest patient was a child of five, who fell into profound sleep at once. Most of the somnambulists are women of neuropathic predisposition, but very few of them had ever had any attack of ordinary hysteria, and many of them are hard-working clerks or good household managers.

Five of these, however, are boys of ordinary types apparently, and three are adult men of perhaps more than average ability and intelligence. The profound sleepers were generally epileptics or persons of phlegmatic temperament. I have never seen any untoward symptoms arise from medical hypnotism, nor can I conceive such a thing possible with ordinary care and gentleness.

* Over twenty years' further personal experience of hypnotism proves to me that these figures are fairly representative. In 1894-95 a committee was appointed by the Society for Psychical Research to make some experiments in thought-transference and other phenomena in the hypnotic state, and we advertised in a newspaper for subjects. Twenty-six youths were selected from a large number of applicants, and all these stated that they had never been hypnotized before. Eighteen proved hypnotizable, or 70 per cent, but of these only about one-third were influenced to the extent of somnambulism.