From an Easy Chair

A more interesting result followed from an experiment made in the same spirit twenty-five years later. I was in Paris, and went with a medical friend to visit the celebrated physician Charcot, to whom at that time I was a stranger, at the Salpêtrière Hospital. He and his assistants were making very interesting experiments on hypnotism. Charcot allowed great latitude to the young doctors who worked with him. They initiated and carried through very wild “exploratory” experiments on this difficult subject. Charcot did not discourage them, but did not accept their results unless established by unassailable evidence, although his views were absurdly misrepresented by the newspapers and wondermongers of the day.

At this time there had been a revival of the ancient and fanciful doctrine of “metallic sympathies,” which flourished a hundred years ago, and was even then but a revival of the strange fancies as to “sympathetic powders,” which were brought before the Royal Society by Sir Kenelm Digby at one of its first meetings, in 1660. In the journal-book of the Royal Society of June 5 of that year, we read, “Magnetical cures were then discoursed of. Sir Gilbert Talbot promised to bring in what he knew of sympatheticall cures. Those that had any powder of sympathy were desired to bring some of it at the next meeting. Sir Kenelm Digby related that the calcined powder of toades reverberated, applyed in bagges upon the stomach of a pestiferate body, cures it by several applications.” The belief in sympathetic powders and metals was a last survival of the mediæval doctrine of “signatures,” itself a form of the fetish still practised by African witch-doctors, and directly connected with the universal system of magic and witchcraft of European as well as of more remote populations. To this day, such beliefs lie close beneath the thin crust of modern knowledge and civilisation, even in England, treasured in obscure tradition and ready to burst forth in grotesque revivals in all classes of society. The Royal Society put many of these reputed mechanisms of witchcraft and magic to the test, and by showing their failure to produce the effects attributed to them, helped greatly to cause witches, wizards, and their followers to draw in their horns and disappear. The germ, however, remained, and reappears in various forms to-day.

Thirty years ago some of the doctors in Paris believed that a small disc of gold, or copper, or of silver, laid flat on the arm could produce an absence of sensation in the arm, and that whilst one person could be thus affected by one metal another person would respond only to another metal, according to a supposed “sympathy” or special affinity of the nervous system for this or that metal. This astonishing doctrine was thought to be proved by certain experiments made with the curiously “nervous” (hysterical) women who frequent the Salpêtrière Hospital as out-patients. That the loss of sensation, which was real enough, was due to what is called “suggestion”—that is to say, a belief on the part of the patient that such would be the case, because the doctor said it would—and had nothing to do with one metal or another, was subsequently proved by making use of wooden discs in place of metallic ones, the patient being led to suppose that a disc of metal of the kind with which she believed herself “sympathetic” was being applied. Sensation disappeared just as readily as when a special metallic disc was used.

The old hypothesis of the influence of a magnet on the human body was at this time revived, and Charcot’s pupils found that when a susceptible female patient held in the hand a bar of iron surrounded by a coil of copper wire leading to a chemical electric cell or battery nothing happened so long as the connection was broken. But as soon as the wire was connected so as to set up an electric current and to make the bar of iron into a magnet, the hand and arm (up to the shoulder) of the young woman holding the bar, lost all sensation. She was not allowed to see her hand and arm, and was apparently quite unconscious of the thrusting of large carpet-needles into, and even through, them, though as long as the bar of iron was not magnetised she shrunk from a pin-prick applied to the same part. I saw this experiment with Charcot and some others present, and I noticed that the order to an assistant to “make contact,” that is to say, to convert the bar of iron into a magnet, was given very emphatically by Charcot, and that there was an attitude of expectation on the part of all present—which was followed by the demonstration by means of needle-pricking that the young woman’s arm had lost sensation, or, as they say, “was in a state of anæsthesia.”

Charcot went away saying he should repeat the experiment before some medical friends in an hour or two. In the meantime, being left alone in the laboratory with my companion as witness, I emptied the chemical fluid (potassium bichromate) from the electric battery and substituted pure water. It was now incapable of setting up an electric current and converting the bar into a magnet. When Charcot returned with his visitors, the patient was brought in, and the whole ritual repeated. There was no effect on sensation when the bar was held in the hand so long as the order to set the current going, and so magnetise the bar, had not been given. At last the word was given, “Make!” and at once the patient’s arm became anæsthetised, as earlier in the day. We ran large carpet-needles into the hand without the smallest evidence of the patient’s knowledge. The order was given to break the current (that is, to cease magnetising the bar), and at once the young woman exhibited signs of discomfort, and remonstrated with Charcot for allowing such big needles to be thrust into her hand when she was devoid of sensation! My experiment had succeeded perfectly.

It would not have done to let Charcot, or anyone else (except my witness) know that when the order “Make” was given, there was no “making,” but that the bar remained as before un-magnetised. The conviction of everyone, including Charcot himself, that the bar became a magnet, and that loss of sensation would follow, was a necessary condition of the “suggestion” or control of the patient. It was thus demonstrated that the state of the iron bar as magnet or not magnet had nothing to do with the result, but that the important thing was that the patient should believe that the bar became a magnet, and that she should be influenced by her expectation, and that of all those around her, that the bar, being now a magnet, sensation would disappear from her arm. With appropriate apologies I explained to Charcot that the electric battery had been emptied by me, and that no current had been produced. The assistants rushed to verify the fact, and I was expecting that I should be frigidly requested to take my leave, when my hand was grasped, and my shoulder held by the great physician, who said, “Mais que vous avez bien fait, mon cher Monsieur!” I had many delightful hours with him in after years, both at the Salpêtrière and in his beautiful old house and garden in the Boulevard St. Germain.

There are few “subjects” in this country for the student of hypnotism to equal the patients of the Salpêtrière and other hospitals in France—and very few amongst those who read, and even write, about “occultism” and “super-normal phenomena” know the leading facts which have been established in regard to this important branch of psychology. The study of the natural history of the mind, its modes of activity, and its defects and diseases is of fundamental importance—but its results are often either unknown or greatly misunderstood by those who have most need of such knowledge, namely those who, mistaking the attitude of an ignorant child for that of “a candid inquirer,” try to form a judgment as to the truth or untruth of stories of ghosts, thought-transference, spirit-controls, crystal-gazing, divining-rods, amulets, and the evil eye.