It is certain that the present interest in hypnosis depends upon its therapeutic utility. According to the generally accepted view, hypnosis is a state of increased susceptibility to suggestion, although, as we have seen, other factors play a part in it. We shall see that in its therapeutic application other properties of hypnosis may also have to be considered. At all events increased susceptibility to suggestion plays an important part. It follows from this that suggestibility exists apart from hypnosis, and that the therapeutics of suggestion in, and out of hypnosis, are complementary. It is the Nancy school which has pointed out that there are many suggestions without hypnosis, and it was the first of all to recognize the therapeutic value of purely empirical suggestion. The Nancy school, also, has never denied that many were cured or relieved by suggestion long before hypnotic suggestion came to be studied. A patient's conviction that his condition will improve has always contributed to such improvement. Every capable practitioner uses this suggestive treatment, which is as old as disease. Most of the miraculous cures one hears of we may now consider the results of the unconscious employment of empirical suggestion.

There must in such cases be some means of conveying the suggestion; and this can be accomplished equally well by the influence of some distinct personality or by an object. The first is the case when, for example, special powers are ascribed to a particular person, as in the healing of Jeroboam, whose hand, the Bible tells us, was motionless, but recovered the power of movement through the prophet's words. In the second case an object conveys the suggestion - for example, a spa, a particular medicine, etc. The great point in the therapeutics of suggestion is to implant in the patient's mind the conviction that he will be cured. But the physician is not always able to achieve this.

even when the patient has great confidence in him. In such a case hypnosis is a good means of implanting the idea and causing it to take root, provided the sleep be deep enough. If we admit that confidence occasionally facilitates the cure of disease, we must also admit that hypnosis is a valuable accession to therapeutics.

We have to thank the late Dr. Liebeault, of Nancy, for having been the first to use hypnotic suggestion methodically in therapeutics. It is true that verbal suggestion was occasionally used by the old mesmerists, Kluge, Lausanne, Jobard, and many others, as Du Prel and Pick justly point out. But method was entirely wanting. Braid also recognized and used suggestion, but he did not recognize its fundamental significance in hypnotic therapeusis; this fact has to be mentioned in spite of the opposite view held by some investigators, Bramwell, for example, and it in no wise detracts from Braid's great services. Some investigators in Breslau, for example, Friedberg, and more especially Berger, in 1880, concluded that hypnosis was a therapeutic agent. Berger saw a hemiplegic patient make movements in hypnosis which he could not make awake. He saw sufferers from locomotory ataxy cease to stagger during hypnosis and for a short time after. But Berger, to whom the simplified method of Liebeault was unknown, also overlooked the great importance of suggestion.

Many people, who had never heard of Liebeault had seen that, from a medical point of view, a state in which contractures and paralyses, analgesia and pain, etc., could be induced and removed, must be of great importance; but Liebeault was the first to find the right path, while Bernheim, Wetterstrand, Forel, and others, developed the methods and made them known.

It is not astonishing that objections have been made to the therapeutic use of hypnosis. The history of medicine teaches that hardly any essential progress has ever been made in that science without a struggle. Every one knows how the use of quinine, of vaccination, and of emetics, was contested; how the water-cure was treated with contempt, and how R. Remak was attacked in Germany before the galvanic battery was accepted in the medicine-chest. Ewer relates that when Lingg laid his method of treatment before the highest officials in the land he was dismissed with the remark that there were quite enough jugglers and mountebanks about without burdening the country with fresh ones. And Ewer himself, who had done so much to introduce massage into Germany, had often enough to put up with a supercilious shrugging of shoulders and deprecatory smiles when he first ventured to talk about massage before physicians. And yet in the present day all these methods are reckoned among the most highly-valued treasures of the medicine-chest. Certainty some people now try to prove that it was only hypnotic treatment and not mental treatment that was opposed.

Now, since psycho-therapeutics is almost universally recognized a legitimate branch of medicine, whereas the importance of hypnosis is still under discussion, those who opposed hypnosis, but accepted mental treatment, might consider themselves justified Still, to prevent any fairy tales creeping into the history of psycho-therapeutics, I must lay the strongest stress possible on the fact that, in reality, the attack was directed more, or at least quite as much, against psychotherapeutics in general, than against hypnosis in particular. In 1880 Ewald, for example, who was at first opposed by no one but me - Forel and others certainly joined the opposition soon after - distinctly stated that psycho-therapeutics was only a form of quackery\ and quite unworthy of being called medical treatment. Hypnosis was not specially singled out for attack; it was the acceptance of psycho-therapeutics as a legitimate form of treatment that was opposed.

Although some people may at first have ascribed too much importance to hypnotic treatment, the attack on it was a failure. I am not going to point out that it is often impossible to draw a sharp line between hypnotism and suggestion, or between the latter and mental treatment in general. But one thing must not be forgotten; it was the study of hypnosis that first proved how much can be achieved by mental influence in therapeutics. Although, as already pointed out, suggestion and mental treatment had often been used before, the full extent of the efficacy of these methods was only established by hypnotism, which thereby essentially brought about the development of modern psycho-therapeutics. It was hypnotism that first drew general attention to suggestion in waking life, to the questions of work and occupation, to medical measures in education, to instructing the patient, to diversion, the power of the will, and many other branches of psycho-therapeutics which had all been too long neglected. And even if we can to-day dispense with hypnosis in many cases in which it was used before general mental treatment was sufficiently understood, we must not forget that we owe our knowledge of these accessory therapeutic methods to hypnosis.