Essays In Pastoral MedicineWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Religion
Essays In Pastoral Medicine
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
First aid in illness and injury; Medicine
Focachon, a chemist at Charmes, applied postage stamps to the left
shoulder of a hypnotised subject, and kept them in place with ordinary
sticking plaster and a bandage. He suggested to the patient that he
had applied a blister. The subject was watched, and after twenty-four
hours the bandage, which had been untouched, was removed. The skin
under the postage stamps was thickened, necrotic, of a yellowish-white
colour, puffy with the serum of the blood and leucocytes, and
surrounded by an intensely red zone of inflammation. Several
physicians, including Beaunis, confirmed this observation; and Beaunis
made photographs of the blister, which he showed to the Society of
Physiological Psychology, June 29, 1885. (_Animal Magnetism._ Binet
and Féré. New York, 1889.)
In Ricard's _Journal de magnétisme animal,_ 2d year, 1840, pp. 18,
151, is a similar case. Prejalmini, in November, 1840, raised a
blister on the healthy skin of a somnambulist by a piece of ordinary
writing paper on which he had written a prescription for a blister.
At the meeting of the _Société de biologie,_ on July 11, 1885, Bourru
and Burot, professors of the Rochefort school, published records of
epistaxis and of bloody sweat, produced by suggestion on a male
hysteric. On one occasion, after the patient had been hypnotised, his
name was traced with the end of a blunt probe on both the patient's
forearms. There was, of course, no mark of any kind left on the arms.
Then the patient was told: "This afternoon, at four o'clock, you will
go to sleep, and blood will then issue from your arms on the lines
which I have now traced." The man was paralytic and anaesthetic on the
left side. He fell asleep at four o'clock, and while he was asleep the
name appeared on the sound left arm, raised in a red wheal, and there
were minute drops of complete blood (serum and corpuscles) in several
places. There was no change on the paralysed right forearm. Later the
patient himself commanded the arm to bleed and it did so. This second
occurrence was observed by Mabille. (Binet and Féré. Op. cit., p.
199.) Charcot and his pupils at the Salpêtrière have often produced by
suggestion alone the effects of burns upon the skin of hypnotised
patients. The blisters in these cases did not appear at once {350} but
after some hours had elapsed. The blisters, of course, contained
blood.
The weekly bleeding, through the unbroken skin, of the hands and feet
of Louise Lateau is an example of stigmata in our own day, which may
have been supernatural or natural. Physicians would call it natural,
an effect of autohypnosis, but there is no reason why it may not have
been just as miraculous as the stigmata of the saints. Professor
Lefèvre of the University of Louvain, a physician, said her stigmata
were miraculous. Theodore Schwann, the discoverer of the cell
doctrine, deemed her condition natural.
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