Professor Krafft-Ebing, in his remarkable monograph on the case of Ilma Szandor, a young Hungarian girl of extremely hysterical type, gives an account of many experiments he performed on her. He was able by simple suggestion to produce blisters and haemorrhages and to effect marked alteration in temperature and in the character of the pulse and respiration.*

The temperature experiments of Krafft-Ebing with Ilma Szandor seem to have been confined to causing decrease of temperature - no doubt as affording the most striking evidence of the power of suggestion. At a meeting of the Medical Union of Vienna in December, 1887, he hypnotized her by friction of the forehead, and suggested that her temperature should fall to 35.5° C. Immediately before the operation the temperature was 370 C, and immediately after it (at 8 p.m.) it was 37.1° C. At 9.30 p.m. it was 360 C. Next morning at 8 a.m. it registered 35'9° C.,and at noon it was 3570 C. It remained at this subnormal height until her next hystero-epileptic attack. The experiment was repeated on several occasions, and the fact was demonstrated that not only could the temperature be lowered by hypnotic suggestion, but that its height at a fixed hour could be arranged by suggestion. Truly an extraordinary phenomenon. Professor Preyer, commenting on it in his admirable work, says he can see no way to account for the extraordinary changes of temperature except by admitting that intense ideo-conception processes in the cortex can under certain conditions act upon certain heat centres.

He is disposed to doubt the continuance of the action, and supposes that the application of the thermometer revived the suggestion each time it was used, and that the effect being produced and the instrument withdrawn, the temperature would rise to its normal level, and would continue at it until a repetition of the operation led to a repetition of the suggestion and its realization (op. cit., p. 73). It must be remembered that Ilma Szandor was altogether an exceptional subject, and that Beaunis experimented over a considerable period of time without being able in any case to obtain more than a fractional rise. The fact, however, that an agent only produces its most extreme effects in persons of rare idiosyncrasy does not take from the importance of its action, and enables us to understand the slighter effects produced on ordinary mortals.

* Op. cit.

In Binet and Fere's 'Animal Magnetism' (Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., London, 1887) the above and several other similar experiments are related; for instance, how Dumontpallier succeeded in raising the local temperature several degrees, and how Bourru and Burot wrote his name with the blunt end of a probe on both arms of a hysterical male patient, suggesting to him, 'This afternoon, at four o'clock, you will go to sleep, and blood will then exude from your arms in the lines which have been traced.' The patient fell asleep at the appointed hour, and the letters appeared on his left arm, marked in relief, and of a bright red colour, with here and there minute drops of blood. But no such sign appeared on the right arm, which was paralyzed.

Charcot (the writers go on to say) and his pupils at the Salpetriere have often, by means of suggestion, produced the effects of burns upon the skin of hypnotized patients (pp. 198, 199). Fere adds that he has demonstrated that any part of the body of a hysterical patient may be made to change in volume by simple directed attention, thus showing what influence may be exerted by a simple phenomenon of ideation on the vaso-motor centres.

Binet and Fere cannot be accused of undue credulity. They refuse to accept as proof any phenomenon which has not been subjected to the most searching scientific tests; and they are so imbued with the theories of Professor Charcot, that they fail to see the therapeutic applicability of hypnotic suggestion, except in hysterical cases.*

* Dr. Gilbert Scott was kind enough last year to bring to see me one of his patients who had allowed him to make experiments upon I have made a few experiments to test the length of time during which a suggestion of sensory illusion continues to act, and I have generally found that a night's sleep puts an end to it. But this is not always the case, and Mrs. S------ has on several occasions remained under the suggested delusion for several days. For instance, I once hypnotized her and told her that her favourite cat, a tabby, had a black tail, and that it would continue so for three days. On awaking, she no sooner saw the animal than she described the change which she noticed had come over it, and she expressed a fear that it was ill; when at the end of three days it assumed its natural colour to her eyes, she expressed her relief at seeing it recovered. A gentleman, to whom I have sometimes suggested visual hallucinations, sticks to the assertion that a colour is what I have told him, but he does so in a somewhat shamefaced manner, as one conscious that there is something not right about it.

So one gets all grades of effect, from complete sensory hallucination to merely increased credulity.