Observations placeholder
Braid, James - Charlie needed neat gin
Identifier
002297
Type of Spiritual Experience
None
Background
Not a terribly successful experiment spiritually but it is quite amusing in an alarming sort of way
A description of the experience
Neurypnology: or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep – James Braid
When we consider the great difficulty to some persons of abstracting their minds, and the greater difficulty of ensuring that patients operated on in a public room shall be able to abstract their minds entirely from the circumstances with which they are surrounded, and from other considerations concentrate their ideas entirely on the subject in hand, and the equally great difficulty of securing absolute quiet where a large number of people are assembled, and the extreme quickness of hearing when patients are passing into the hypnotic state, which makes them liable to be roused by the slightest noise, it must be evident, that a public lecture-room is by no means a favourable place for operating on patients for the first time.
[nevertheless]......................
In the Stockport Chronicle of 4th February, 1842, there is a report of a lecture delivered in that town a few days before. A dozen male patients were made to stand up at once, and treated according to my method, six of them became hypnotised, and two of them so deeply, as to cause the lecturer very considerable trouble to rouse them. With one named 'Charlie', all the usual means, including buffeting and frictions before a fire, did not succeed in restoring speech until he had been made to swallow nearly half a tumbler glass of neat gin.