Popular Superstitions, and the Truths Contained Therein: With an Account of MesmerismMayo, Herbert
History
Popular Superstitions, and the Truths Contained Therein: With an Account of Mesmerism
Mayo, Herbert
Mesmerism; Parapsychology and medicine; Superstition
M. Petetin attended a young married lady in a sort of fit. She lay
seemingly unconscious; when he raised her arm, it remained in the air
where he placed it. Being put to bed, she commenced singing. To stop
her, the doctor placed her limbs each in a different position. This
embarrassed her considerably, but she went on singing. She seemed
perfectly insensible. Pinching the skin, shouting in her ear, nothing
aroused her attention. Then it happened that, in arranging her, the
doctor’s foot slipped; and, as he recovered himself, half leaning over
her, he said, “How provoking we can’t make her leave off singing!”
“Ah, doctor,” she cried, “don’t be angry! I won’t sing any more,” and
she stopped. But shortly she began again; and in vain did the doctor
implore her, by the loudest entreaties, addressed to her ear, to keep
her promise and desist. It then occurred to him to place himself in the
same position as when she heard him before. He raised the bed-clothes,
bent his head towards her stomach, and said, in a loud voice, “Do you,
then, mean to sing for ever?” “Oh, what pain you have given me!” she
exclaimed; “I implore you speak lower.” At the same time she passed her
hand over the pit of her stomach. “In what way, then, do you hear?”
said Dr. Petetin. “Like any one else,” was the answer. “But I am
speaking to your stomach.” “Is it possible!” she said. He then tried
again whether she could hear with her ears, speaking even through a
tube to aggravate his voice—she heard nothing. On his asking her, at
the pit of her stomach, if she had not heard him,—“No,” said she, “I am
indeed unfortunate.”
A cognate phenomenon to the above is _the conversion of the patient’s
new sense of vision in a direction inwards_. He looks into himself,
and sees his own inside as it were illuminated or transfigured: that
is to say, his visual power is turned inwards, and he sees his organs
possibly by the Od-light they give out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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