Institute for Hypnotism Study
SOME person of wealth has offered a sum of money for the purpose of endowing a clinic for the treatment of disease by hypnotism. Professor Hyslop, of Columbia University, gave this information recently to a New York Sun reporter, and said that he favored such an endowment for several reasons. In surgical work its use would, he said, be preferable to the use of drugs, experiments having shown that under hypnotic suggestion there was less loss of blood under the surgeon’s knife, besides which the danger from the use of drugs was eliminated. But it is not merely to provide for the use of hypnotism that this institute is planned, he said, but to study its nature and that of all kindred phenomena. “There are,” he said, “collateral branches of the subject that are of intense interest, and of which there has been a lack of specialized study. The whole subject of abnormal mental phenomena would fall within the scope of the institute planned. There is the matter of apparitions of the dead, hallucinations, and loss of personal identity. This matter of forgetfulness of identity is very common. . . . This whole subject of hypnotism, with its kindred abnormal mental conditions, is one that should be specially studied, and, unfortunately, is not so studied. It is to develop that study that we are hoping to found the institute for which we already have a nucleus in the way of a fund conditionally pledged.” The investigation and use of this new and unknown force which has the effect of paralyzing certain functions of the mind, putting one mind wholly under the control of another mind, may promise much good, but it is to be remembered that the human race has been cursed by some things that promised to confer great benefit on it. Whisky, for example, was at one time hailed as almost a panacea for the ills of the flesh, but it has proved to be one of the chief causes of human ills. There is great gain, the Bible assures us, in subjecting our human minds to the mind of God, the Great Physician, “who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases;” but there is great peril in such domination of mind over mind as hypnotism presents.