Metalloscopy and expectant attention / by D. Hack Tuke.

  • Tuke, Daniel Hack, 1827-1895.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Metalloscopy and expectant attention / by D. Hack Tuke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    appears definitively. “ En tons deux, les oscillations sont completes.” Such were the experiments in regard to the alleged influ- ence of metals, galvanism, the magnet, and electricity, in removing anaesthesia, followed by its transference to the other side of the body. I should add that two patients took chlo- roform subsequently, one of whom passed into a state of hystero epilepsy, closely resembling the drawings M. Charcot has had made of patients in one of these fits. The other was excited and hysterical, but the epileptoid condition was not so marked. In both cases M. Charcot suddenly roused them to consciousness by pressure over the ovaries. In my brief narration of the foregoing experiments, I have avoided, as much as possible, confounding the post hoc and the p>ropter hoc. Whatever the terms employed may seem to convey, I wish simply to describe what I witnessed, and in so doing, bear my testimony to the succession of certain pheno- mena in these cases, in accordance with what M. Charcot has described in his interesting lectures. This is due to him. That these results admit of different explanations ; that the facts are one thing and their rationale another, Charcot would be the first to admit. He has, in his lectures, referred to my work on the u Influence of the Mind upon the Body,” and pointed ont that, from the principles maintained in that book, such phenomena would be explained by the author as due to expectant attention. That which I should wish to maintain, in regard to these experiments at the Salpetriere, is that, knowing how many phenomena are due to the influence of the imagination only, every possible test should be resorted to in order to ascertain how far a metal or the magnet exerts a real effect per se. I should think it presumptuous on my part positively to assert that the facts whose true nature is sub judice, are all certainly explicable by suggestion, atten- tion, imagination, and so forth. M. Charcot assured me he had employed tests which precluded the possibility of such explanations, and that the uniformity of results in different subjects, unknown to each other, in and out of the Salpetriere, and without any knowledge in the first instance of what was expected, puts such a solution of the problem out of court. Obviously before an independent observer and a stranger to the exact tests which have been employed, can form a positive opinion on this point, lie must go through a series of care- fully prepared experiments himself. My time in Paris did not allow of my doing this, though every opportunity was