Dr. Luys further writes: - 'The practice of hypnotism as applied to the art of midwifery has not yet yielded very satisfactory results. You may read on this subject a very interesting work written by Dr. Auvard, who sums up in a very conscientious way all that is known about this question. I have only had one single fact of this kind to record, and it does not seem of a nature to encourage hypnotic experiments in this special province. Last year I had in my wards a young hypnotic woman whom I had kept till the last day of her pregnancy in order to give her the benefit of lethargic anaesthesia at the time of her confinement. When the pains came on she was hypnotised and placed in a condition of lethargy; but this procedure proved perfectly useless, for the intensity of the labour pains was such that they brought about the natural awakening of the patient, and we were obliged to have recourse to chloroform to finish the delivery.'

To sum up, I may venture to quote my own conclusions as stated recently in the 'Nineteenth Century': To me the so-called cures by hypnotism seem to rank in precisely the same class as those of the firith-curer.

The hypnotic endormeur is very well able to explain the miracles of faith-cure by the light of his own experience. They result, as he explains accurately, from the reaction of mind on body, the effects of imagination, of self-suggestion, or of suggestion from without. Those who benefit by them are especially the fervent and the enthusiastic, the vividly imaginative, the mentally dependent, and, above all, the hysterical - male or female. But clearly the faith-carer may retort upon the hypnotiser that they are brothers in their therapeutic results, if not in their faith and philosophy. The one can work about the same percentage of cures as the other, and no more; and the intervening apparatus, whether of magnets, mirrors or grottos, only serve to affect the imagination, and to supply the necessary ' external stimulus.'

To this category also belong the long series of thousands of asserted cures of people who now wear what they are pleased to call magnetic belts, or who used to wear magnetic rings and believed they were cured by the Perkins tractors of wood or iron - people who are the prey of quacks of all ages and in all countries.

One essential fact is, it appears to me, that no new faculty has ever yet been developed in any of these hypnotics. The frauds of clairvoyance, spirit perceptions, gifts of language, slate-writing, spirit-writing, far-sight, 'communication across space,' 'transfer of mental impressions,' of the development of any new sense or the ghost of a new sense, remain, now as ever, for the most part demonstrable frauds, or perhaps, in a few cases, self-deceptions. At the Salpdtriere, at Nancy and wherever the facts have been impartially and critically examined, this has been the result. A similar outcome is obtained by my recent tests of the subjects of the Charite and the Ecole Polytechnique. It will, I suppose, be too much to expect that we shall hear no more of the ' New Mesmerism,' but it will be easy for anyone to reduce it to its true dimensions by similar experiments.

Finally: as to the practical question, which has Perhaps a greater interest for the sociologist and the physician than any which have suggested themselves up to this point. Since the hypnotist faith-curer of the hospital ward and the priestly faith-curer of the grotto are in truth utilising the same human elements and employing cognate resources, although masked by a different outward garb, we may ask ourselves which of them can claim the greater successes and which does the least harm?

So far as I can see, the balance is in favour of the faith-curer of the chapel and the grotto. The results at least are proportionately as numerous, and they are more rapid. Numerically there are, I incline to believe, more faith-cures at Lourdes than there are ' suggestion-cures' in the Salpetriere or the Charite. So far as hypnotism is good for anything as a curative agent, its sphere is, as we have seen, limited by Charcot, Fere, Babinski and all the most trustworthy medical observers in Paris, to the relief of functional disorders and symptoms in hysterical patients. The Nancy school put their pretensions higher; but anyone who will analyse for himself the Nancy reputed cases of cure, or who will study Babinski's able analysis of them, will easily satisfy himself that such claims are not valid As to the use of 'suggestion' as an anaesthetic substitute of chloroform for operation purposes, that 'suggestion ' dates back beyond the times of Esdaile and of Elliotson. It has been given up and fallen into disuse because of its unreliability and limited application. , It is now seriously proposed to use hypnotism for 'tooth-drawing/ for the treatment of drunkards, and of school children.

The proposition is self-condemned. To enable a dentist to draw a tooth painlessly, the average man or woman is, by a series of sittings, to be reduced to the state of a trained automaton; which happily is only possible in the case of a very small proportion. The criminal courts have seen enough of hypnotic dentists. As to the 'suggestion' cure of drunkards or the 'suggestion' treatment of backward or naughty children, systematic and intelligent suggestion is what every clergyman, every doctor, and every schoolmaster tries to carry out in such cases and often effects successfully and in a better form than the degrading one of hypnotism. Moreover, for drunkenness it is, so far as my inquiries go, a disappointing failure.

If a striking effect is to be produced by an apparatus calculated to affect the imagination powerfully, the faith-curer of the grotto has this advantage over the endormeutr of the platform or the hospital. He does not intrude his own personality and train his patient to subject his mental ego to that of his 'operator.' The ' mesmeriser' seeks to dominate his subject; he weakens the will power, which it is desirable to strengthen, and aims at becoming the master of a slave. I do not need further to emphasise the dangers of this practice.