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later and often spoke to me about it. My
comrades in the hospital wards all knew about it,
Charcot himself knew about it and often utilized
it. Professor Voisin, the famous alienist of Asile
St. Anne, often made me assist him in his
desperate endeavours to hypnotize some of his
lunatics. We used to work for hours with these
poor lunatics screaming and raving with rage in
their strait-jackets, unable to do anything but
to spit in our faces, as they often did. The result
of our efforts was in most cases negative, but on
several occasions I succeeded in calming down
some of them when the Professor himself had
failed, notwithstanding his marvellous patience.
All the keepers in the Jardin Zoologique and
Ménagerie Pezon knew about it. It was a familiar
trick of mine to put their snakes, lizards, tortoises,
parrots, owls, bears and big cats into a state of
lethargy, quite similar to Charcot’s first stage of
hypnosis, often I even succeeded in inducing
profound sleep. I think I have already
mentioned how I opened an abscess and extracted
a splinter from the paw of Léonie the magnificent
lioness in the Ménagerie Pezon. It could not be
explained but as a case of local anæsthesia under
slight hypnosis. Monkeys, notwithstanding their
restlessness are easily put to sleep thanks to their
high intelligence and impressionable nervous
system. Snake charming is of course a hypnotic
phenomenon. I have myself put a cobra into
a state of catalepsy in the temple of Karnak.
The training of wild elephants has, I suspect, also
something to do with hypnotic influence. The
way I once heard a mahout talking for hours to
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