Ambroise Tranquille Sassard, principal surgeon of the Hospital la Charité at Paris, recommended the employment of a narcotic previous to serious and painful operations, the dose to be proportioned to the age and strength of the patient.[17] He does not state whether the plan was actually tried. Mr. James Moore, surgeon,[18] recommended compression of the large nerves, and tried it on a patient in St. George’s Hospital, whose leg Mr. John Hunter amputated below the knee. The crural and sciatic nerves were compressed for nearly an hour by an instrument contrived for the purpose, and Mr. Moore considered that the greater part of the pain was prevented. The patient complained more of the sawing of the bone than of the cutting part of the operation. I am not aware whether this plan was tried in other instances, but it is certain that it did not come into general use. M. le docteur Liégard (de Caen) has stated,[19] that the peasants in his part of France are in the habit of tying a band very tightly round the arm or leg before operations on the extremities. He had himself removed a toe-nail in two cases, without pain, after a handkerchief had been tied very tightly round the lower part of the leg. By this measure both the nerves and blood vessels are, of course, more or less compressed. The persons who believe in the existence of a force or power, which they call Mesmerism, or animal magnetism, made many and persevering efforts in recent times to cause insensibility to the surgeon’s knife. In some cases they were imposed on by dishonest and designing patients, who afterwards confessed they had suffered the pain to which they had pretended to be insensible, but in other cases I have no doubt of the operations having really been performed without pain. Absence of consciousness and sensation is a common symptom in many cases of hysteria and catalepsy, and in certain susceptible persons, hysteria and catalepsy, or conditions nearly resembling them, can be induced by acting on the imagination, or by exhausting the attention by means of the fixed stare and monotonous “passes” of the so-called Mesmerisers. Dr. Esdaile was more successful in putting Hindoos to sleep, and operating on them in the hypnotized[20] state, than any one has been with Europeans: yet it was only in a portion of the cases in which it was tried that the alleged agent took effect. In many instances, efforts continued for two or three months had no effect on the patient; and in many of the operations, which were reported as successful, “there was much convulsive movement of the limbs, corrugation of the brows, and even loud cries and sobs,” although the patients afterwards denied all knowledge of what had passed.[21]