Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Hypnotism, mesmerism and the new witchcraft / by Ernest Hart. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![[From the British Medical Journal, November 16, 1895] The pivot on which Mr. Du Maurier's extremely able and popular book depends is a hypnotic phenomenon of which the publicity is adversely criticised in many well- informed quarters. Mr. Ernest Hart, however, the author of ' Hypnotism, Mesmerism, and the Xew Witchcraft,' of which no small part is devoted to exposing many of the shams and impostures exhibited and described under that title, is of opinion that while Mr. Du Maurier has with dramatic and artistic instincts somewhat stretched the working probabilities of hypnotic condition beyond the ordinary limits, and has artistically concealed the difficulties and mechanism by which his striking effects are produced, he has, nevertheless, not outstepped the bounds of possi- bility. Of course, to the uninformed critic and observer, the mere fact of the apparent endowment of Trilby, under the influence of suggestion, with powers and capacities which she does not possess otherwise or at other times than when placed under this influence, appears either miraculous or false, or suggestive of some new force, some transference of nerve power, or some so called magnetic influence, to use the ordinary jargon. Those who have followed Charcot, or who agree with Mr. Hart in his analysis of the phenomena known as suggestion or hypnotism, hold that no such agencies exist, and the phenomena such as those which the hypnotic state presents are due to the transformation effected in a perfectly natural and physiological manner in the subject under the influence of external or auto-mental suf^estion. It is by no means uncommon—and of this many instances have been widely observed, and are recorded in Mr. Hart's book—to find persons who, under the influence of suggestion, and when in the deep hypnotic](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21912439_0224.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
