The psychic treatment of nervous disorders : (the psychoneuroses and their moral treatment) / by Paul Dubois ... ; translated and edited by Smith Ely Jelliffe ... and William A. White.

  • Dubois, Paul, 1848-1918.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The psychic treatment of nervous disorders : (the psychoneuroses and their moral treatment) / by Paul Dubois ... ; translated and edited by Smith Ely Jelliffe ... and William A. White. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

    30/488 (page 16)
    handled his subjects as he would; and without, perhaps, taking them sufficiently into account, he suggested to them their atti- tudes and their gestures. Example is contagious in the domain of neurology, and in the great hospitals of Paris, at La Sal- pêtrière, all cases resemble each other. At the command of the chief of the staff, or of the internes, they begin to act like marionettes, or like circus horses accustomed to repeat the same evolutions. Actually one can still find at La Salpêtrière some of these old horses doing their turn. The dream or suggested fancy of these poor patients has been respected, and the exhi- bition, given to physicians who are strangers, always follows the same program. The regularity of the phenomena observed is due to the suggestion which the physician, either voluntarily or involuntarily, exercises. Under Charcot this pseudoexperimental study impelled the observer, as it were, to create hysteria and to give to it the complete reality of a morbid entity; to-day at La Salpêtrière, as elswhere, they imagine that they can cure at the same time that they are studying the symptoms. The influence of suggestion upon the development of symp- toms has been brought to light particularly by the work done by the school of Nancy on suggestions made in the hypnotic sleep or the waking state. These experiences, repeated every day in all countries, have shown that man in his normal state is much more credulous than he supposes himself to be—in fact, that he is suggestible in the highest degree. The doctrines of the observers at Nancy have spread in spite of the definite opposition of Charcot and his pupils. At La Salpêtrière, in short, to be hypnotizable was to be hysterical, sick. It was in the subjects attacked by major hysteria that Charcot succeeded in provoking by different means catalepsy, anesthesia, and somnambulism. When Liébault and Bernheim succeeded in producing sleep in a large number of non-hysterical patients, when they were able to reproduce in healthy persons the curious experiences brought about by somnambulism, they were just a little bit embarrassed at Paris. It was still worse when Bernheim declared that the hypnotic sleep was nothing but the result of