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
any part of the good result which he had obtained, and that if many
consumptive patients adopted the remedy, a large proportion, if not
all, would inevitably succumb very quickly. The other portion of his
account is all that concerns us here, being all that illustrates our
present subject. He said: 'I determined to exercise every muscle of my
body; I set myself in front of a mirror and concentrated my attention
and all the power of my will on the muscle or set of muscles I proposed
to bring into action. Then I exercised those muscles in every way I
could think of, continuing the process till I had used in succession
every muscle over which the will has control. While carrying out this
system, I noticed that gradually the will acquired power over muscles
which before I had been quite unable to move. I may say, indeed, that
every set of muscles recognised by anatomists, except those belonging
to internal organs, gradually came under the control of my will.' Here
I interrupted, asking (not by any means as doubting his veracity, for
I did not): 'Can you do what Dundreary said he thought some fellow
might be able to do? can you waggle your left ear?' 'Why, certainly,'
he replied; and turning the left side of his head towards me, he moved
his left ear about; not, it is true, waggling it, but drawing it up and
down in a singular way, which was, he said, the only exercise he ever
gave it. He said, on this, that there are many other muscles over which
the will has ordinarily no control, but may be made to obtain control;
and forthwith, drawing the cloth of his trousers rather tight round
the right thigh (so that the movement he was about to show might be
discernible) he made in succession the three muscles of the front and
inner side of the thigh rise about half an inch along some nine or ten
inches of their length. Now, though these muscles are among those which
are governed by the will, for they are used in a variety of movements,
yet not one in ten thousand, perhaps in a million, can move them in the
way described.
How far A.'s system of exciting the muscles individually as well as in
groups may have operated in improving his health, as he supposed, I am
not now inquiring. What I wish specially to notice is the influence
which the will may be made to obtain over muscles ordinarily beyond
its control. It may be that under the exceptional influence of the
imagination, in the hypnotic condition, the will obtains a similar
control for a while over even those parts of the nervous system which
appertain to the so-called involuntary processes. In other words,
the case I have cited may be regarded as occupying a sort of middle
position between ordinary cases of muscular action and those perplexing
cases in which the hypnotic subject seems able to influence pulsation,
circulation, and processes of secretion in the various parts or organs
of his body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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