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.

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    As professor of the clinic I read Charcot's descriptions with enthusiasm and tried to reproduce the phenomena observed at La Salpêtrière. I did not half succeed, often not at all. It was in vain that I brought pressure to bear upon the eyeballs of patients or surprised them by making a terrible noise ; they wouldn't go into a cataleptic state. I was not able to get the contracture by pressing on the ulnar nerve, and I was a little bit ashamed of my lack of ability. I then heard some one speak of Doctor Liébault who, they said, plunged his patients into an hypnotic sleep, and I had the curiosity to be present at his experiments. I found in his office several persons in the hyp- notic state, some sleeping in a natural position and others fixed in cataleptic attitudes. I was able to satisfy myself that anesthesia could be produced in these subjects, and to study, under the direction of a physician who was convinced of it, the very strange phenomena of hypnotism. Still quite skeptical, I made some attempts upon an inmate of an insane asylum; then on the different patients of my service. Faith came to me, and with it suggestive authority; to-day I can obtain a result by a simple verbal suggestion nine times out of ten. The facts are there; they are undeniable; they can not be ignored by those who are interested in nervous pathology ; yet, nevertheless, to-day one still sees treatises on hysteria, the authors of which seem to ignore absolutely the discoveries at Nancy. Also, in discussing the subject with one's confrères, even with those who are not bound down by any theories of their own, one is surprised to see how few can go to the end of their logic and recognize this fundamental fact of human suggestibility. Since the works of G. Beard, a new nervous disease has been imported from America, and seems to.be propagated like an epidemic. The name of neurasthenia is on everybody's lips ; it is the fashionable disease. But I am mistaken, the dis- ease is not new; it is the name by which it is known that is changed. It used to be described under the name of hypo- chondria, or melancholia ; often it was confused with hysteria.