- Project Runeberg -  The story of San Michele /
303

(1929) [MARC] Author: Axel Munthe - Tema: Medicine
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when turned into a pigeon, lift her skirts with a
shriek of terror when a glove was thrown at her
feet with a suggestion of being a snake. Another
would walk with a top hat in her arms rocking it
to and fro and kissing it tenderly when she was
told it was her baby. Hypnotized right and left,
dozens of times a day, by doctors and students,
many of these unfortunate girls spent their days
in a state of semi-trance, their brains bewildered
by all sorts of absurd suggestions, half conscious
and certainly not responsible for their doings,
sooner or later doomed to end their days in the
salle des agités if not in a lunatic asylum. While
condemning these Tuesday gala performances in
the amphitheatre as unscientific and unworthy of
the Salpêtrière, it would be unfair not to admit
that serious work was done in the wards to
investigate many of the still obscure phenomena
of hypnotism. I myself was just then by the
permission of the chef de clinique carrying out
some interesting experiments in post-hypnotic
suggestion and telepathy with one of these girls,
one of the best somnambulists I have ever met.

I had already then grave doubts as to the
correctness of Charcot’s theories, accepted without
opposition by his blindfolded pupils and the public
by means of what can only be explained as a sort
of suggestion en masse. I had returned from my
last visit to Professor Bernheim’s clinic in Nancy
as an obscure but resolute supporter of the
so-called Nancy school in opposition to the teachings
of Charcot. To speak of the Nancy school at the
Salpêtrière was in those days considered almost
as an act of lèse-majesté. Charcot himself flew

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