We repeated the experiment in Jtme, 1891, but I previously hypnotized her daily for three days, and each time suggested that on no account was she to allow herself to be hypnotized by anyone else, and 1 got her to promise that this should be so. I again left Dr. Wood with her alone, and told her that he wished to hypnotize her. She did not remember having promised that she would not allow herself to be hypnotized, but she expressed disinclination for the operation. However, a little persuasion made her give her consent, and Dr. Wood again sought to influence her by fascination. When I returned I found her very hysterical, and complaining of feeling faint and ill; but she was not hypnotized, though the process had lasted twenty minutes. I hypnotized her at once by stroking the forehead, and the disturbance of breathing and circulation disappeared in a few-moments. She awoke feeling quite herself, but told me she would never allow anyone else to try to hypnotize her, as the suffering she experienced was acute, and she would have given anything to have escaped it by closing her eyes and going to sleep, but felt constrained to. keep awake.

This patient had been hypnotized by me the first time I tried in less than two minutes, and there is no doubt but that any competent operator would have been equally successful. Her yielding to Dr. Wood's first attempt only after a long struggle, and her not yielding at all the second time, seems to offer conclusive evidence that, so far from previous hypnotization necessarily increasing a person's subsequent susceptibility, it may be used so as to very greatly diminish it.

influence them without their previous consent in writing, and I find this plan acts admirably. In fact, the more susceptible the patient, the greater the effect of this deterrent suggestion, so that I have seen practised operators experiment on such subjects without producing any other effect but restlessness and discomfort. In one case, that of a young girl, who is one of my best subjects, I asked her to allow a lady doctor to hypnotize her, and she gave her consent. Nevertheless, she proved quite insusceptible to the lady's persevering attempts. The patient told me afterwards that she had a very strong objection to being hypnotized by a stranger, and that her consent was only assumed.

Disregard of this simple precaution was to my mind one of the most regrettable features of the late Dr. Luys's clinique. Some of the young women there seemed to be at the mercy of anyone who cared to exert an influence over them.

One is sometimes asked, even by medical men, if the fact of having hypnotized a patient does not enable the practitioner to exercise more than the proper amount of influence over him in future. Nothing of this kind is at all likely to happen, and the doctor who uses hypnotism will find neither more nor less gratitude from his patients than if he employed more material remedies. The importation of hypnotism into a recent case, however, shows the danger the medical attendant may incur by running counter to popular prejudice, and how necessary it is for him to safeguard himself (vide p. 419).

I may fitly bring this chapter to a close with a quotation from Professor Bernheim's oft-referred-to work: 'It is the duty of the physician to select what is useful in suggestion, and to apply it for the benefit of his patients When, in the presence of sickness, I think that therapeutic suggestion has a chance of success, I should consider myself to blame as a physician if I did not propose it to my patient, and if I did not even make a point of getting his consent to its employment' (op. cit., p. 580).