We know how the mesmerists would account for this phenomenon of hygienic
introvision and clairvoyance. But here, there is no mesmerizer, unless
the patient can be supposed to mesmerize herself. Long, however, before
mesmerism was heard of, medical history attests examples in which patients
who baffled the skill of the ablest physicians have fixed their fancies on
some remedy that physicians would call inoperative for good or for harm,
and have recovered by the remedies thus singularly self-suggested. And
Hippocrates himself, if I construe his meaning rightly, recognizes the
powers for self-cure which the condition of trance will sometimes bestow
on the sufferer, 'where' (says the father of our art) 'the sight being
closed to the external, the soul more truthfully perceives the affections
of the body.' In short--I own it--in this instance, the skill of the
physician has been a compliant obedience to the instinct called forth in
the patient; and the hopes I have hitherto permitted myself to give you
were founded on my experience that her own hopes, conceived in trance, bad
never been fallacious or exaggerated. The simples that I gathered for her
yesterday she had described; they are not in our herbal. But as they are
sometimes used by the natives, I had the curiosity to analyze their
chemical properties shortly after I came to the colony, and they seemed to
me as innocent as lime-blossoms. They are rare in this part of Australia,
but she told me where I should find them,--a remote spot, which she has
certainly never visited. Last night, when you saw me disturbed, dejected,
it was because, for the first time, the docility with which she had
hitherto, in her waking state, obeyed her own injunctions in the state of
trance, forsook her. She could not be induced to taste the decoction I
had made from the herbs; and if you found me this morning with weaker
hopes than before, this is the real cause,--namely, that when I visited
her at sunrise, she was not in sleep but in trance, and in that trance
she told me that she had nothing more to suggest or reveal; that on the
complete restoration of her senses, which was at hand, the abnormal