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A Hypnotist’s Case Book – Professor Alexander Erskine

For some weeks I had been treating a woman for nervous exhaustion with very little or no success, for the simple reason that she would not allow me to put her even into the light sleep state, which was all I required to achieve a certain cure.

Disheartened, she had at last ceased to come to me, and I was a little surprised, therefore, when, about a month later, her husband rang me up with the urgent request that I would go round to see her.

I found her in a state of complete collapse, and barely conscious.

"For goodness' sake tell me what is the matter with her," he said.

"That," I replied, "is a physician's task. I can do nothing here."

But he was urgent, and at last, in response to his insistence, I sent for F-, and, after getting him to lie on the bed beside the woman, put him to sleep.

For three or four minutes he lay perfectly still and said nothing. Then, reaching out his hand, he took the woman's wrist and, pulling her arm over to where her husband and I stood, said :

"Look; it's her arteries, you see."

I could naturally see nothing.

"What do you mean? " I asked.

He replied : "The yellow particles. Look. It's the injections."

I turned to the husband.

"Oh yes," he said. "Perhaps I should tell you. After she stopped going to you she went to another doctor"  (giving his name). "He is treating her, and a few days ago decided to give her some injections. He gave her one, and yesterday gave her another. When she collapsed like this I sent for him, and he says he will give her no more. It must be those that he is referring to."

Now that was the first I had heard of a doctor, and I was going to ask more about him, when F-, who still held the woman's hand, stretched out his other hand and pulled my head down till my ear was by his mouth.

"They've killed her," he said. "She will die to-morrow morning at six o'clock."

"What does he say?"

Naturally I could not tell him.

"That she is to have no more injections," was how I interpreted his message.

"Let me know how she goes on," I said as we left.

I was having breakfast next morning, when the telephone bell rang. It was the husband.

His wife had died that morning at five minutes past six.