When hypnotism came in vogue again at the end of the nineteenth century, it was a case of chronic rheumatism that gave it its first impetus in scientific circles. Professor Bernheim of Nancy had tried in vain all of his remedies in the treatment of a patient suffering from lumbago. The patient disappeared {252} for a time and when Bernheim next saw him, he was cured. Bernheim had treated him futilely for months and was curious to know how he had been cured. The patient told him that he had been cured by hypnotism as practised by Liebault. This brought Bernheim to investigate Liebault's method of hypnotism and made him a convert to its practice. It was the interest of the school of Nancy in the subject that finally aroused Charcot's attention and gave us the phase of interest in hypnotism which attracted so much public attention some thirty years ago. Many other cases of those very refractory affections--lumbago and sciatica--have been cured by hypnotism when they have resisted the best directed treatment of other kinds over very long periods. It is these chronic rheumatisms, so called, the chronic pains and aches in muscles in the neighborhood of joints, that were cured by the Viennese astronomer, Father Maximilian Höll, in the eighteenth century. He simply applied the magnet and saw the result, and felt sure that there must be some physical effect, though there was none. His work was taken up by Pfarrer Gassner of Elwangen who, after using the magnets for a time, found {253} that there was no need of their application, provided the patients could by prayer and other religious means be brought into a state of mind where they were sure that they were going to get better. They then proceeded to use their muscles properly in spite of the pain that might result for a time, and as a result it was not long before they were cured of their affections. The Church forbade his further practise because of his expressed idea that pain came from the power of evil and dropped from men when they turned to God, which was the eighteenth-century anticipation of Eddyism. Dowie's cures were largely of similar affections, and patients sometimes dropped their crutches and walked straight who could not walk before.