555 A. The question of "hypnotic crimes" was thoroughly discussed by Dr. Liébeault in his book, Du Sommeil et des Etats Analogues (1866). Later, Dr. Liégeois, whose speciality is medical jurisprudence, made many experiments with Dr. Liébeault's patients to test the practicability of criminal suggestion. He suggested to them fictitious crimes, such as murder, theft, perjury, etc, and made them give him receipts for money which he had never really lent them. One subject was induced to fire a revolver, which she was told was loaded, at a magistrate; another at her own mother; the latter subject was also made to accuse herself before a magistrate of having committed a murder. A young man dissolved in water a powder which he was told was arsenic, and gave it to his aunt to drink; afterwards he completely forgot this act. These experiments were published in 1884 in a memoir entitled La Suggestion Hypnotique dans ses Rapports avec le Droit Civil et le Droit Criminel, which was expanded in 1889 into a book, De la Suggestion et du Somnambulisme dans leurs Rapports avec la Jurisprudence et la Médecine Legale.

Dr. von Schrenck-Notzing, in Die gerichtlich medicinische Bedeutung der Suggestion (published in the Archiv fur Kriminal-Anthropologic und Krimi-nalistik, Leipzig, 1900), distinguishes three classes of crimes which might be aided by suggestion: (1) crimes against a hypnotised person, of which a few instances have been known to occur; (2) crimes committed by means of hypnotised persons; and (3) crimes incited by suggestion in the waking state. About the possibility of the second class, there is much difference of opinion; some authors, as Fuchs and Benedikt, denying it completely, while others, as Liébeault and Liégeois, think it sufficiently important to be taken account of in the administration of justice; Bernheim and Forel, again, take an intermediate view. Liébeault, as quoted by Schrenck-Notzing, instances a boy who had often been made to commit small thefts by way of experiment, and who afterwards developed kleptomania.

Under the head of crimes caused by suggestion in the waking state, Schrenck-Notzing quotes the Sauter case (1899), in which a woman was accused of attempts to commit several murders by unlawful means (black magic). The evidence showed that she had been incited to these attempts by a fortune-teller playing on her superstitious and hysterical temperament. Falsification of evidence by suggestion comes under the same head, e.g. in the trial of Berchtold for murder at Munich in 1896, newspaper reports of the case excited the public mind, and produced a crop of false witnesses, who made on oath a number of contradictory statements, all apparently in good faith.

Bernheim, in "Les Hallucinations rétroactives suggérées dans le som-meil naturel ou artificiel" (Revue de l'Hypnotisme, December 1889, p. 168), describes how he made a roomful of eleven patients believe that they had witnessed an assault on one of the hospital attendants, the supposed culprit himself sharing in the delusion.

It must be observed, however, that most of the subjects used in the "laboratory" experiments of Liébeault, Liégeois, and Bernheim seem to have been in a feeble state of body or mind, with little power of moral resistance - sometimes, perhaps, with positive criminal tendencies; and the false witnesses in the Berchtold trial were obviously ill-balanced and hysterical. Such cases, therefore, afford no evidence of the possibility of undermining settled moral principles by hypnotic suggestion. Further, it has been pointed out that Liégeois' subjects probably knew, in spite of his precautions, that the crimes suggested to them were fictitious, and would have refused to commit real crimes.

Other investigators, such as Delboeuf, have found that their subjects resist improper or immoral suggestions, and the ability of the subject to resist anything opposed to his waking conscience is also maintained by Dr. J. M. Creed, of Sydney (see "My Experience of Hypnotic Suggestion as a Therapeutic Agent," in The Australian Medical Gazette of January 20th, 1899). These views are strongly supported by the experience of Dr. Bramwell, quoted below.

On the subject of hypnotic crimes, see also Gilles de la Tourette, L'Hypnotistne et les Etats Analogues au point de vue medico-légal, and V. Bentivegni, Die Hypnose und ihre civilrechtliche Bedeutung (Leipzig, 1890). A useful general discussion of the subject, with numerous references to authorities, is given in the chapter on "The Legal Aspects of Hypnotism" in Moll's Hypnotism.