AWAKENED BY HYPNOTISM.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2697, 30 December 1909, Page 3

AWAKENED BY HYPNOTISM.

A SOMNOLENT TRAVELLER. A remarkable case of cataleptic sleep, to end which a doctor resorted successfully to hypnotic suggestion, was reported last month from Milan. The sleeper was found late at night in a wayside station in Northern Italy. All efforts to awaken him in the train were fruitless, and the man was therefore carried to the police station, and a doctor was summoned. The professional investigation showed that the man was in a cataleptic trance, and he was ordered to be removed to the hospital. The mysteriously somnolent traveller was a middle-aged man, decently attired as a well-to-do artisan, and his features were characteristicallv of the German type. For forty-eight hours he continued to sleep,. remaining perfectly insensible even to the disturbing influence of pinpricks, and making no response to the administration of stimulants. The director of the hospital, supposing that the man could understand French, presently tried to hypnotise him, and ordered him in that language to get up and open his eyes. A shudder passed through the sleeper’s body, but otherwise the doctor’s summons remained unheeded. Being persuaded that the man was a psychopathic subject, the doctor then called upon a German resident and begged him to repeat the summons to awake in the German language. The experiment met with success. Hearing his mother-tongue, the sleeper shivered, lifted his arms, rubbed his eyes, and stared vacantly at the unknown persons around him. It took him some time to recover his faculties. Then he spoke- and told hi s story. -Ludwig Hen 11 was his name, and he was a workman. From Widau he had gone to Borne and Loreto on a religious pilgrimage. At Borne he had visited every church, praying intensely at each, and at Loreto lie had remained for some hours in ecstatic rapture before the famous statue of the Madonna. After taking the train he remembered little -or nothing before he opened his eyes in the Ancona hospital. Evidently he was a deeply religious man, whose faith had degenerated jnto fanaticism, and this, in combination with his neuropathic temperament and the powerful suggestion of the holy things, he had seen, had caused him to fall into a kind of liypnotic trance.