Rough Ways Made Smooth: A series of familiar essays on scientific subjectsProctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
Rough Ways Made Smooth: A series of familiar essays on scientific subjects
Proctor, Richard A. (Richard Anthony)
Science
The instances above cited by Dr. Garth Wilkinson, remarkable though
they may be, are surpassed altogether in interest by a case which
Dr. Carpenter mentions,--of a factory girl, whose musical powers had
received little cultivation, and who could scarcely speak her own
language correctly, who nevertheless exactly imitated both the words
and the music of vocal performances by Jenny Lind. Dr. Carpenter was
assured by witnesses in whom he could place implicit reliance, that
this girl, in the hypnotised state, followed the Swedish nightingale's
songs in different languages 'so instantaneously and correctly, as to
both words and music, that it was difficult to distinguish the two
voices. In order to test the powers of the somnambulist to the utmost,
Mademoiselle Lind extemporised a long and elaborate chromatic exercise,
which the girl imitated with no less precision, though in her waking
state she durst not even attempt anything of the sort.'
The exaltation of the senses of hypnotised subjects is an equally
wonderful phenomenon. Dr. Carpenter relates many very remarkable
instances as occurring within his own experience. He has 'known a
youth, in the hypnotised state,' he says, 'to find out, by the sense of
smell, the owner of a glove which was placed in his hand, from amongst
a party of more than sixty persons, scenting at each of them one after
the other until he came to the right individual. In another case, the
owner of a ring was unhesitatingly found out from amongst a company
of twelve, the ring having been withdrawn from the finger before the
somnambule was introduced.' The sense of touch has, in other cases,
been singularly intensified, insomuch that slight differences of heat,
which to ordinary feeling were quite inappreciable, would be at once
detected, while such differences as can be but just perceived in the
ordinary state would produce intense distress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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