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A Hypnotist’s Case Book – Professor Alexander Erskine

When I first thought of writing this book it was not my intention to touch upon its use in birth control, for it seems to me that, however right and proper such control may be in certain cases, the indiscriminate practice of it can do nothing but harm to the nation.

On the other hand, when economists express the view that we are over-populated, when judges are found to advocate the changing of the law in regard to the crime of abortion, …….and when the medical profession itself endorses the arguments, it may not be out of place to point out what medical hypnosis can achieve.

The general question of sterility, so far, at least, as the female is concerned, presents no difficulties to hypnosis. Conception is functional. It can be prohibited just as surely and as easily as drink or drugs can be prohibited.  It can be excluded from possibility, permanently or for a specified period, and the ban on it can be removed at any time without ill effects.

The only difficulty experienced in sterilization by hypnosis is that of sending to sleep the feeble-minded person. I know that certain practitioners and writers on hypnosis profess to be able to secure control of the feeble-minded. It is a thing I have never been able to do, and the writer on hypnosis in the Encyclopaedia Britannica agrees with me that they are among the most difficult of all patients-if, indeed, they are not impossible.

With the hypnotic treatment, no operation is necessary. There is no interference with normal sexual life.

Desires are normal. There is no interruption in functions.

The only prerequisite is that the patient- should be willing for the new conditions to prevail at the time the suggestion is made ; and, as I have said, if at any time it is desired that the ban should be removed, its removal is as easy as its imposition.

But there are thousands of married people in this country who, ….. are…  medically unfit….. . In such cases hypnotic sterilization could achieve without pain or trouble all that was necessary to safeguard them and society without destroying or impairing in the slightest degree the sex lives of either.

The lives of some women, as all medical men know, is one long purgatory.  Always before them is the dreaded nightmare of pregnancy.  Control may be exercised, but there is no control known to medical science to-day which is infallible. Complete abstinence may be desirable, but it is too often accompanied by nervous disorders and consequent unhappiness.

It is in such cases that medical hypnosis succeeds where medicine fails.