Hypnotism attacks the real _origo mali_;--not, indeed, the pressure on the tooth-nerve, which can only be removed by extraction, but the representative power of the central sensorium which converts that pressure for us into pain. It _diverts attention_ from the pain, as the excitement of battle might do; but diverts it without any competing excitement whatever. To this topic of _influence on attention_ we shall have to recur again and again. For the present it may suffice if I refer the reader to a few cases--chosen from among some thousands where hypnotic practice has removed or obviated the distress or anguish till now unmistakably associated with various bodily incidents--from the extraction of a tooth to the great pain and peril of childbirth.[72] This suppression of pain has naturally been treated from the therapeutic point of view, as an end in itself; and neither physician nor patient has been inclined to inquire exactly _what_ has occurred;--what physiological or psychological condition has underlain this great subjective relief. Yet in the eye of experimental psychology the matter is far from a simple one. We are bound to ask _what_ has been altered. Has there been a total _ablation_, or some mere _translation_ of pain? What objective change on the bodily side has occurred in nerve or tissue? and, on the mental side, how far does the change in consciousness extend? How deep does it go? Does any subliminal knowledge of the pain persist? The very imperfect answers which can at present be given to these questions may, at any rate, suggest directions for further inquiry. (1) In the first place, it seems clear that when pain is inhibited in any but the most simple cases, a certain group of changes is produced whose _nexus_ is psychological rather than physiological. That is to say, one suggestion seems to relieve at once all the symptoms which form one idea of pain or distress in the patient's mind; while another suggestion is often needed to remove some remaining symptom, which the patient regards as a different trouble altogether. The suggestion thus differs both from a specific remedy, which might relieve a specific symptom, and from a general narcotisation, which would relieve all symptoms equally. In making suggestions, moreover, the hypnotiser finds that he has to consider and meet the patient's own subjective feelings, describing the intended relief as the patient wishes it to be described, and not attempting technical language which the patient could not follow. In a word, it is plain that in this class, as in other classes of suggestion, we are addressing ourselves to a _mind_, an _intelligence_, which can of itself select and combine, and not merely to a tissue or a gland responsive in a merely automatic way. (2) It will not then surprise us if,--pain being thus treated as a psychological entity,--there shall prove to be a certain psychological complexity in the response to analgesic suggestion.