When we take the foregoing considerations into account, hypnotism acquires great significance in its bearing on the history of medical culture. For there have at all times been just such miraculous places as Lourdes is to-day. Ancient medicine, which was so much in the hands of the priests, is full of records of miraculous mental influence of this nature. The temple sleep of the old Greeks and Egyptians had much in common with hypnotism. In Greece it was in the temple of Æsculapius that the sick lay down to sleep and were told in their dreams by the god of the remedy that would cure them. It is easy to understand the auto-suggestive influence of this temple sleep. And at other times certain human beings have had the same renown for curing the sick as was here ascribed to the Deity. I may here mention the well-known Greatrakes,1 whose cures astonished all England in the seventeenth century. He healed by laying on of hands, but seems also to have used verbal suggestion. I may mention, also, Gassner, the celebrated exorcist, at the end of the last century. The reports make it clear that Gassner used suggestion, for though he spoke Latin it is evident he made his patients understand him; nobody misunderstood his famous "Cesset"; they knew that the malady or the pain was to stop.

I find in Sierke that Gassner occasionally sent a patient to sleep by command. He told her to walk when she was asleep, when to wake up, and in fact produced what we should at present call a regular hypnosis. Lichtenberg reports that during the eighties and nineties of the eighteenth century a certain Frau Starke in Osterode created some excitement by performing cures through stroking and touching the patient's body and by so-called charming. I may further mention Prince Hohen-lohe, a Catholic priest, who aroused much attention by his cures in Bavaria, after 1821. The mesmerists reckoned him a magnetizer, but others ascribed his cures to religious faith. One school of mesmerists, that of Barbarin of Ostend, took up a peculiar middle position. Barbarin maintained that the influence was purely a spiritual one, and that the right way to induce sleep was to pray at the patient's bedside (Perty). Many modern adherents of magnetism hold the same views; Timmler, for instance, thinks religious faith valuable and necessary for obtaining the result. This tendency of animal magnetism brings us to one of the recent forms of epidemic mental disorder that hail from America, viz. - faith-healing or Christian Science. A Mrs. Eddy passes as the foundress of this creed.

The male, or female, patient is told to sit in a chair and think that his, or her, illness is due to sin, that God is averse to sin and will heal those who believe in Him. The faith-healer sits on another chair, and is supposed to concentrate her mind on similar thoughts. Faith-healing is also used in distant treatment. There are many analogies for the latter. Weil mentions the case of a doctor who lived in a large town in Saxony, and who cured many patients by strictly ordering them to go to bed at a certain hour, at the same time telling them that they would perspire profusely and that this would cure them.

1 Lichtenberg writes the name "Greatraks," as does his authority Robert Boyle. Others write it "Greatrix."

Numerous other cases that belong here could be mentioned, and they would show that many a phenomenon observed in the domain of medicine has first had true light thrown on it by hypnotism. With every one of the workers of miracles of whom we hear from time to time - Pastor Kneipp's is a recent case - mental action plays an extraordinarily great part. Science, doctors, and the sick have long enough suffered from the mental factors in disease being underrated.