THE REAL WONDER IN THE NEW MESMERISM, W E have no
doubt that the doctors,—who, like the Times' correspondent and Dr. Kingsbury, whose letters appeared in last Monday's Times, refer the greater number of the phenomena of "the New Mesmerism " to expectation on the part of the hysteric patient,—are on the right track ; but what surprises us is that they should talk of this as "a perfectly rational explanation" without appearing to see that as yet nothing at all has been explained. A child who reads a fairy-tale often expects very eagerly, even sanguinely, that if he recites some sort of magical couplet, he will summon to his aid a beneficent goblin with a wishing cap, or a fairy.. godmother with power to transform a pumpkin and four mice into a fairy-chariot with four noble horses; but he recites the couplet in vain. No beneficent goblin appears ; no fairy- godmother brings about the delightful transformation scene, And if either of these wonders did happen, no one would venture to tell us that the child's expectation of the event had afforded "a perfectly rational explanation of its hap- pening." But in the case of these hysterical patients, we are told that their expectation that the paralysis is to change from one side to the other, that an arm is to become rigid and absolutely insensible to the prick of a pin, that they are to start whenever some inanimate doll is pinched, that they are to cease to feel any wish or craving for alcohol, having previously been helpless victims of that craving, or even (as Dr. Tuckey tells us) that the temperature of their blood is to rise or fall by a degree or two,—is to be followed by these events just as if it were a law of Nature that expectation should tend to fulfil itself. Now, that these expectations are fulfilled in certain cases and with- in certain rather wide constitutional limits, we do not at all doubt. But we not only doubt whether the connection of the expectation with the event has received any "perfectly rational explanation," we absolutely deny that any explanation of it, —except, of course, in the case of mere impostors, who can easily be detected, as Mr. Ernest Hart shows us in Tuesday's Times,--bas been given at all. Hitherto, medical men have been accustomed to regard both the body and the mind of man as a region in which a certain natural ordir pre. vails,—an order which can, indeed, be modified by sub- mitting the one and the other to the action of new physical and new moral causes, like the action of drugs and change of air and a new regimen in the one ease, or different companionship and new moral influences in the other, but which cannot be altered materially at all merely by in- spiring an unfounded expectation that the change is to take place. Now, we are assured that a condition of the body so apparently independent of the patient's desires as paralysis, dipsomania, or sensitiveness to pain, undergoes a complete transformation under what seem, to most men at least, per- fectly unfounded, perfectly capricious, expectations. No doubt, as a matter of fact, it seems to be so. But as for any explana- tion why it is so, not the smallest approximation to an ex- planation has been offered. All we are told is that it only happens with hysteric patients, in which case a great many of us would be apt to think that it would sometimes:be a great privilege to be a hysteric patient, instead of a great:calamity. So far as we know, the laws of habit, the laws of our physical and physiological condition, the laws of our nervous temperament, the laws of our blood temperature, the laws of our habitual appetites, are not only not under our control, but show them- selves often most obstinately in resistance to our will. The drunkard struggles fiercely, and yet often vainly, against his irresistible craving for stimulants, and is worsted in the struggle. The smoker is as weak as a baby to resist the:craving for tobacco. The mere notion that the temperature of the blood would go up or down with the expectation of the patient, would have been derided as contemptuously ten years ago as the notion that by inducing anybody to expect a fine day, the fine day could be secured. You might as well have told the physiologists of the last generation that you could make it safe for a man to roll over the edge of a cliff by persuading him to expect that he would not be hurt by his fall, as that you could still the thirst for spirits in a drunkard, or produce a sweet sleep in a ease of persistent insomnia, by exciting in the mind of the patient an unfounded expectation that such was to be the outcome of some pretence at mesmerising him. Yet now we are serenely told not only that the secret of producing these desirable events is to make the patient believe very earnestly (without any good reason for so believing) that this change is coming, but we are even told that if we can prove that the expectation has been inspired, we have got "a perfectly rational explanation" of the event itself. Now, this is just what we absolutely deny. That there is some real connection between the expectation and the event, we do not deny at all. But what that connection is,—and this is, we take it, the gist of what is meant by an explanation,—has not been in the smallest degree hinted or suggested, much less explained. What are the limits within which alone expectation affects the physical system? Nobody knows; except that it is said not to affect what is called "organic disease" on the one hand,—i.e., not to touch a disease like cancer,—and, on the other hand, that it only operates beneficially even in the case of disease which is not organic, on what is called the hysteric temperament, though what true hysteria is no one can say. Indeed, physicians are very apt to think of hysteria as the temperament on which a credulous expectation can work wonders, and then to think of expectancy as a valuable therapeutic agent in the case,— though only in the case,—of hysteria.
Now, we are not so unreasonable as to ask that those who investigate what is now called hypnotism, shall explain in any true sense how mind acts on the physical organism, or how the physical organism acts on mind. No one has ever even attempted such an explanation : and to ask for an explanation in the case of hypnotism would be just as unreasonable as to ask for it in the ordinary case of the will moving the arm, or of fever producing delirium which misleads the will. When the Times' correspondent speaks of "a perfectly rational explana- tion," of course he uses the words only in the same sense in which we should speak of a perfectly rational explanation of one of the phenomena of gravitation,—that is, of an explana- tion which refers the event to a well-definedclass of phenomena, the antecedents, consequents, and approximate significance of which are fairly well understood. But can we say as much as this, or anything like it, of the effect of expectancy on morbid conditions of the body P In consumption, for instance, nothing is commoner than that the patient is always ex- pecting to recover, though he daily gets worse. Expectancy produces no effect at all on his case. On the other hand, in dipsomania,—one of the most hopeless of diseases in ordinary cases,—we are told that nothing produces more wonderful and even magical results than this expectancy as it is produced by the hypnotist,—a hypnotist apparently meaning one who has the gift, if it be a gift, or the knack, if it be only a knack, of producing a so-called trance in which the patient becomes more or less subservient to the orders of the person inducing that state. The expectancy is not greater,— consciously, indeed, it is much less,—in the hypnotised patient than the expectancy of recovery is in the consumptive patient; but in the one case it is curative, and in the other it is not. Hence, it is clearly not expectancy only which wields the magic. It is expectancy produced under special conditions, and no one seems in the least degree able to define what these conditions are. I have an agonising toothache. The hypnotist tries tolput:me into the hypnotic trance in order that he may induce me to believe that the pain is gone. He totally fails, and the pain is as bad as ever. But he gets hold of another sufferer from the same agonising pain whom he can get into:the hypnotic trance,—whatever that may be,—and with him:he perfectly succeeds in dissipating this agonising pain altogether. What is the condition of success in the latter ease which:failed in the former P No one has the slightest idea. Well, then, we submit that there is absolutely no "perfectly rational explanation" of the success. It is not mere expectancy, for we have seen how often that fails. Nor is it a certaidinumber of "passes," as they are called, for these fail too, and quite as completely. Moreover, the hypno- tist can produce morbid phenomena in an apparently healthy subject, as well as remove them in an unhealthy subject. There are plenty of cases in which, as we are told, all the effects of a blister have been produced in a patient on par- ticular points of his skin, without any irritant whatever being applied. The physiologists maintain that the stigmata which have made their appearance on various saints and &stations, have been the mere natural physiological consequences of en- thusiastic expectation and contemplation. Now, what can be more strictly astounding than this? It might perhaps be vaguely imagined that in cases of morbid nervous conditions, the mere sedative to the nerves caused by expecting re- storation to health would induce restoration to health. And so, too, it might be said that the disturbance to the nerves, caused by dwelling too intensely on the torture and laceration of a divine:Saviour, might produce very serious nervous mis- chief on those who do too passionately dwell upon it. But it is a totally different thing to produce (without having the least notion of the mode and means of producing) an exact dupli- cate on your own flesh of wounds artificially produced on another. No one knows what it is that causes an extra- vasation of the blood-vessels in any particular spot. We have no more notion how to set about producing it from within t'ian we have how to raise or depress the temperature of the blood. Yet, according to the belief of the new mesmerists or hypnotists, the mere enthusiastic expectancy of wounds in particular portions of the hands, feet, side, and forehead, will produce such wounds without any manner of external applica- tion. Surely nothing more amazing can be imagined. Nothing less like a "perfectly rational explanation" than the mere statement of the fad that there was a visionary expectation of this result, can be conceived. We do not in the least know what interior agents are fitted to produce such con- sequences. Most of us might just as well try by hard thinking to make a pair of wings grow out of our shoulders, as to make, a series of symmetrically arranged wounds appear. The whole physiological process is as much hidden from, us as the process by which the tissues are formed. Oar bodies are wholly beyond the sphere of our conscious life. We know quite as little of how our bodies are formed as we do of how the trees grow. And yet it is believed that by ima- gining an artificial and symmetrical series of changes in their structure, we have explained, and explained perfectly rationally, that series of changes. Surely we might quite as well assert that we had "explained" the chrysalis's transformation into a butterfly if we could hear a chrysalis confess that it had eagerly and enthusiastically desired to become a butterfly. It seems to us that the new school of mesmerists, however right they may be in their facts, have not made even a beginning of any rational explanation. They have not dis- entangled these phenomena. They have not discriminated between expectancy which has no healing effect at all, and expectancy which has such an effect. They have not explained the generally complete oblivion into which the patient appears to fall as to the state in which he is open to these powerful hyp- notic impressions ; or why orders given to them in that state, which they forget directly they are awake again, are much better observed than orders given them in their ordinary state, which they perfectly remember, and remember only to disregard. In a word, the whole subject, if the facts may be assumed as well• established, is a mere labyrinth of the most astounding pro- blems and riddles.
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