He took up a large magnet and showed it to the little girl. She watched him with the keenest interest, while he used it to lift several pieces of iron. “Now look,” said he. Holding it over his left hand, he slowly raised that hand until it touched the magnet, pretending that it had been drawn up exactly as the pieces of iron had been. “You see the power of this instrument,” he said, to the wondering child. “It can move your arm, and give strength to your legs and feet, in the very same way.” For three weeks the magnet was applied to the different muscles, with the suggestion that the limbs would thereby regain their power. Nine treatments in all were given. After the ninth treatment the girl walked into the doctor’s office unaided. “Yesterday,” her mother explained, “she told me that she thought her arm felt better, and she found that she could raise it. Then she said she believed she could walk; and, getting out of bed, she crossed the room without the least assistance, and without her feet clubbing under her. Can it be, Doctor, that she is cured?” In fact, she was cured; although, of course, the magnet itself had had no power to cure her, but was used merely as an agent for an efficient “counter-suggestion” to dislodge and uproot the symptom-producing suggestions in the girl’s own mind. Excellent results have also been obtained in many cases of hysterical paralysis among children by the use of what is known as the “method of surprise,” the invention of a German specialist named Bruns. As employed by Doctor Bruns and his followers, this method has undoubtedly a certain aspect of brutality; but this is more than compensated by its effectiveness. Having determined, by a searching medical examination, that the paralysis in any given case is functional and not organic, what Bruns does is to place the paralysed child in a bath-tub, turn on the cold water faucet, and watch the youngster climb out and scamper off. “You see,” he then says to him, at this psychological moment, “you can walk very well, after all. Now let us hear no more from you about being unable to walk.” If for any reason he deems the bath-tub device inadvisable, his plan is to put the child to bed, keep it entirely isolated, and deprive it of all food for a day or so. An appetising meal is then brought into the room, and left some distance from the child’s bed. Frequently this is all that is needed to effect a cure. The suggestion of food overcoming the suggestion of paralysis, the child gets out of bed and starts across the room, being encountered midway by Bruns, who—of course by accident—enters the room at that precise instant, and makes use of verbal suggestion to reinforce and maintain the “miraculous” recovery.