3. The third case gave my joy in suggestion its death-blow. This was the manner of it. She was a lady of sixty-five who came stumbling into the consulting-room with a crutch. She had suffered from pain in the knee-joint for seventeen years, and this at times kept her in bed for many weeks. No doctor had been able to cure her, and she had tried every possible remedy of present-day medicine. After I had suffered the stream of her narrative to flow over me for some ten minutes, I said, "I will try to hypnotise you, perhaps that will do you good." She, "Oh yes, please do!" leaned her head on one side and fell asleep before ever I said or did anything. She passed into somnambulism and showed every form of hypnosis you could possibly desire. After half an hour I had the greatest difficulty in waking her; when at last she was awake she jumped up: "I am well, I am all right, you have cured me." I tried to make timid objections, but her praises drowned me. She could really walk. Then I blushed and said, embarrassed, to my colleagues: "Look! behold the wondrously successful hypnotic therapy." That day saw the death of my connection with treatment by suggestion; the therapeutic praise won by this case shamed and humiliated me. When, a year later, at the beginning of my hypnotic course, the good old lady returned, this time with the pain in her back, I was already sunk in hopeless cynicism; I saw written on her forehead that she had just read the notice of the re-opening of my clinic in the newspaper, that vexatious romanticism had provided her with a convenient pain in the back so that she might have a pretext for seeing me, and again let herself be cured in the same theatrical fashion. This proved true in every particular.