We may illustrate this by a personal observation. A boy about ten years of age WM admitted to the hospital on account of severe hysterical spasms for which he had been repeatedly treated without success, and in the hope of showing good and rapid results the boy was subjected to painful faradization after every attack. Although the boy was very much afraid of the treatment, the spasms refused to yield, becoming worse rather than better, and the boy was taken away about ten days later no better than when he was admitted, after treating the father to a striking attack on the occasion of his first visit. On leaving the clinic the father, who believed the condition was epilepsy and indignantly refused to accept the diagnosis of hysteria whieh had been written on the boy's card, went to a neurologist in this city who accepted our diag nosis and proposed that the boy bc admitted to his private clinic. The father could not bring himself to consent to this at once and took the boy home for another trial, promising to bring him to the clinic if the spasms should return. From this time on the boy never had another attack. He was cured by the fear of being, sent to another hospital. This is all we could learn in regard to the patient, whom for obvious reasons we never saw again.
I'Ve do not of course wish to deny that treatment sometimes fails even in a hospital. Many of these patients recover through some " mirac ulous cure,'' by a quack, or as the result of some fortunate accident as in the case just described. In others the symptoms subside gradually
as in the hysteria of adults. Of the prognosis in such eases of course nothing more can be said. Under certain circumstances it may be jus tifiable to employ hypnotic treatment as a last resort.
We are as much in the (lark on this point as in regard to the nature of hypnosis in general. 'While the school of _Nancy (Bernheim and his followers) regard hypnosis as a perfectly harmless procedure when carried out in a rational, scientific manner, and recommend it as a peda gogic measure in the moral education of the child (Berillon), the school of the Salpetribm IChareot, Gilles de la Tourette and others) adopt the opposite view. They consider the hypnotic sleep an hysterical con dition and believe that it may be followed by results that are much more serious than the disease for the cure of which the hypnosis WaS employed. At all events the hypnotizer must be an expert in his line, and the method must be limited to cases of the greatest gravity and then only employed as a last resort. In Germany- hypnotism has rarely been employed in the treatment of infantile hysteria by responsible and serious physicians, and it is not likely that it will be more extensively employed in the future, especially as its popularity appears to be waning.