509 A. The following criticism of the Salpêtrière School is taken from an article by Dr. J. Milne Bramwell on "What is Hypnotism ?" in the Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xii. pp. 205-209.

Charcot's Theory, or that of the Saipêtrière School.

According to this school, hypnosis is an artificially produced morbid condition, characterised by certain chemical changes in the secretions - a neurosis only to be found in the hysterical. Women are more easily hypnotised than men; children and old people are almost entirely insusceptible.

Hypnosis can be produced by purely physical means, such as pressure on certain regions of the body; and a person can be hypnotised, as it were, unknown to himself.

The hypnotic phenomena are divided into three different stages, which usually appear in regular sequence. These are induced and terminated by certain definite physical stimuli.

Hypnotism has so far not proved of much therapeutic value.

There is danger of provoking hysteria in trying to induce hypnosis.

There is a difference between suggestion in normal life and in hypnosis. The former is a physiological phenomenon, the latter a pathological one. Suggestibility does not constitute hypnosis, it is only one of its symptoms. There does not exist a single case in which a somnambule has acted criminally-under the influence of suggestion.

This theory has been strongly attacked, chiefly by the hypnotic observers who belong to what is termed the Nancy School. To commence with, they point out the insufficiency of the data upon which the theory has been founded, and cite the confession of its own supporters that only a dozen cases of true hypnosis have occurred in the Salpêtrière in ten years, and that a very large proportion of the experiments were conducted on one subject, who had long been an inmate of that hospital. On the other hand, they call attention to the extended nature of their own observations and to the fact that their conclusions are drawn from the study of many thousand cases.

Is Hypnosis a Morbid Condition which can only be Induced in the Hysterical?

This question must, I think, be answered in the negative. Moll, in reference to Charcot's argument that hypnotism and hysteria are identical, because the chemical character of certain secretions is similar in both, pointed out that Charcot's subjects all suffered from hysteria; and that, as the phenomena which characterise waking life are readily induced in hypnosis, Charcot easily created a complete type of hysteria by suggestion. It would be equally easy to suggest stammering in hypnosis, but one would not be justified, therefore, in characterising hypnosis as a condition of stammering.

Again, as the following statistics show, if the hysterical alone can be hypnotised, over 90 per cent, of mankind apparently suffer from hysteria. Some years ago Bernheim had already attempted to hypnotise 10,000 hospital patients with over 90 per cent, of successes, while Wetterstrand recently reported 6500 cases with 105 failures. Schrenck-Notzing in his First International Statistics, published in 1892, gave 8705 cases by 15 observers in different countries, with 6 per cent, of failures. Mr. Hugh Wingfield, when Demonstrator of Physiology at Cambridge, attempted to hypnotise over 170 men, all of whom, with the exception of 18, were undergraduates. In about 80 per cent, hypnosis was induced at the first attempt; but as no second trial was ever made with the unsuccessful cases, these results undoubtedly understate the susceptibility. (See Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 198.) Most of the undergraduates would be drawn from our public schools, and, if these do not always turn out good scholars, they cannot at least be accused of producing hysterical invalids. Braid stated that the nervous and hysterical were the most difficult to hypnotise, while Lidbéault found soldiers and sailors particularly easy to influence.

Grossmann, of Berlin, recently asserted that hard-headed North Germans were very susceptible, and I observed that healthy Yorkshire farm labourers made remarkably good subjects. Professor Forel told me that he had hypnotised nearly all his asylum warders; that he selected these himself, and certainly did not choose them from the ranks of the hysterical. In former times Esdaile's patients were stated to be hysterical. In reply to this, he said, " I cannot possibly see how hysteria has got into my hospitals, where I never saw it before - coolies and felons not being at all nervous subjects.... As natural hysteria may be supposed to be more powerful than imitation, I shall look with impatience for the announcement in the Morning Post that Mrs. Freake has been cured of her nervous headaches by the skilful application of hysteria, and that Lady Tantrum has had her arm cut off while in a fit of hysterics, without knowing it. These should be easy feats for our fashionable physicians and surgeons, as they have the disease and antidote ready made to their hands, whereas it costs me and my assistants great trouble to make the coolies and prisoners of Bengal hysterical to the degree necessary to render them insensible to the loss of their members".

These and similar facts apparently justify the statements of Forel and Moll that it is not the healthy but the hysterical who are the most difficult to hypnotise. According to the former, "every mentally healthy man is naturally hypnotisable;" while the latter says, "If we take a pathological condition of the organism as necessary for hypnosis, we shall be obliged to conclude that nearly everybody is not quite right in the head. The mentally unsound, particularly idiots, are much more difficult to hypnotise than the healthy. Intelligent people, and those with strong wills, are more easily hypnotisable than the dull, the stupid, or the weak-willed".

Are Women more Susceptible than Men?

All observers, with the exception of those of the Salpêtrière School, agree in stating that sex has little or no influence upon the susceptibility to hypnosis.