The late Dr. Luys, physician to La Charite Hospital, Paris, and a well-known physiologist, recently introduced a novel kind of treatment of which he expected great things, and which, as he told me, he thought would supersede hypnotism. In company with Dr. Kingsbury, I took several opportunities in 1890 of visiting his clinique and seeing his method.

* I thought that this treatment was as dead as poor Dr. Luys, but the late Dr. Forbes Winslow seems to have revived it, and he claims great success (see Practitioner, May, 1913).

Dr. Luys and his assistants were most kind, and readily showed us the curious experiments described in the Fortnightly Review for August, 1890. Several patients were undergoing the new treatment, and we had the opportunity of watching their progress for three or four days, and of questioning them as to their feelings and symptoms. Many of them spoke with enthusiasm of the progress they were making, and in a few cases it was possible to note an improvement from day to day. The process was simple enough. The patient was directed to sit down and grasp the hands of a profoundly hypnotized subject, and Dr. Luys passed a heavy magnetized bar of steel up and down both sitters' bodies, especially pressing on the cardiac and epigastric areas. A shiver was seen to pass through the hypnotized subject's frame, and he began to complain of suffering from the same symptoms as the patient had experienced. The doctor questioned him as to the symptoms, and then assured him that they would be cured and not return - much in the same way as the hypnotizer deals with his patients. In the meantime the patient looked on and saw the transferee writhing in his pains, and imitating his voice, gait, gestures, and demeanour generally.

If he were an imaginative person, it is quite likely that he felt better from witnessing this vicarious suffering. When the doctor thought it was enough, he told the subject to wake up and to feel no more pain; and as a matter of fact he did not remember on waking what he had gone through in the somnambulic state, but went away feeling apparently none the worse, and gratified by a gratuity from the patient whose disease he had shared. Luys contended that the subject not only shares the disease, but partakes of the personality of the patient, and demonstrated this by showing how a female sitter will assume a masculine voice and carriage when sitting for a male patient, and will complain of the beard being pulled if one approaches the face too closely. It is not a little surprising in this age of science to find a man of Dr. Luys' undoubted honesty and attainments seriously upholding practice of this kind. One is taken back to the time of Perkins and his metallic tractors to find a parallel for what so recently took place in Paris; and be it remembered that remarkable cures did follow the application of Perkins' instruments and of the wooden imitations which the physicians of Bath tested in their hospital practice.

What, then, is the explanation of the results which follow such methods of treatment? It is summed up in the word 'suggestion.' The imagination is profoundly affected by the hope and expectation of cure, and this in itself is sufficient to bring about a healthy change in the hypochondriacal, hysterical, and maladies imaginaires. But among the patients we questioned were some who suffered from well-defined organic disease; one gentleman, affected with aortic insufficiency, assured me that since his visits to Dr. Luys he had recovered his appetite, had slept well, and been able to walk uphill and upstairs, whereas previously he had been sleepless, without appetite, and almost bedridden. A man suffering from paralysis agitans declared he felt a different being, but as far as we could see there was no lessening of his tremor, though the young woman who acted as his transfer reproduced his disordered movements most faithfully. It is evident that in nearly all diseases there exist symptoms - often the most painful part of the malady - of functional nervous origin, and it is these symptoms which are largely met by hypnotic suggestion and other treatments which appeal to the imagination or the subconscious mind.

I consider that it is the duty of a physician to relieve suffering in any way, as long as it is not immoral or hurtful; but no one visiting La Charite Hospital can say that the treatment by transfer, as practised there, was free from terrible abuses. It was a sad sight to see to what a deplorable condition of mental instability and inanity the unfortunate subjects had been reduced by continual hypno-tization and experiments. Of course, the experiments carried out on such subjects, and under such hysterical conditions as existed in Luys' clinique, are valueless from a scientific point of view; and the phenomena he obtained from the action of the magnet, different coloured balls, and with medicines at a distance, have been sought for in vain by other investigators. I have found my subjects perfectly insusceptible to the magnet, until I have told two or three of them that contact with it will always produce pain in the part touched; henceforth they have always realized my suggestion, and complain bitterly when touched by it, or by any cold metallic substance.

When one considers that the personality of a subject in the profounder hypnotic states is in complete abeyance, and that his mind is a blank page, to be written on at the dictation of the hypnotizer, we see how absolutely necessary it is to guard against conscious and unconscious simulation, and how utterly Luys' experiments are wanting in the only conditions which could render them of any value.

* ' Influence of the Imagination in Health and Disease,' by Dr. Hack Tukc.

As bearing upon the above remarks, I may state that I purposely asked Dr. Luys if the magnet influenced all somnambulists in the same way, and he answered that it did. If he had been more cautious, and had replied that only some subjects were sensitive, one would have been more inclined to believe in the genuineness of his results. The only way of testing the so-called magnetic sense described by Reichenbach is by the electro-magnet, which can be 'made' or 'unmade' instantaneously in a manner impossible for the subject to guess by ordinary sensuous impressions. The inquirer will find in the first volume of The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research a report of some experiments made to determine the existence of this sense. The experiments were carried out under rigorous scientific conditions, and proved that certain persons do possess the faculty of perceiving certain effects from the poles of an electro-magnet when in action.

But from this to the propositions laid down by Luys is a very long step.

The use of the magnet in medical practice is nothing new. Hippocrates believed in its virtues, and recommended its employment in painful diseases (Laycock). Throughout the Middle Ages its efficacy was a matter of general belief, and Mesmer and his followers saw an analogy between animal and telluric magnetism. It has been left for Charcot and his school to claim physical reactions from the use of the magnet in our own time. Whether such reactions depend upon pure suggestion, as asserted by Bernheim, or do really proceed from some magnetic influence, is a question which can only be decided by very careful experiments. In my own experience I have seen nothing to warrant the supposition that there is any special quality in the magnet. Krafft-Ebing found that Ilma Szandor was affected by the approach of any metal which she believed to be a magnet, exactly as she had been by the real magnet. However, Charcot got transference of paralysis and other functional troubles in hysterical subjects from one side to the other, by passing the magnet over the parts - a proceeding which causes Sir W. Gowers to write: ' The phenomena of transfer (of the genuineness of which, in spite of its rarity out of France, there can be no doubt) show that there must exist an intimate connection between the sensory centres of the two hemispheres, so that the restoration of functional action in a part of the inhibited centre is accompanied by an arrest of action in the corresponding part of the centre on the opposite side.

The validity of this inference is independent of the mode by which the phenomena are effected, or of the exact functional change in which they consist' (op. cit., p. 934).

I don't know whether Luys ever applied his treatment to the correction of moral ills. Historians tell us how in the Middle Ages young princes were provided with ' whipping-boys,' whose office it was to bear the penalty incurred by the prince's fault, but from which his august rank was held to shield him. We are told that Edward VI. was of so sensitive a nature that in his case this punishment by deputy was most efficacious.