For three weeks the magnet was applied to the different muscles, with the suggestion that the limbs would thereby regain their power. Nine treatments in all were given. After the ninth treatment the girl walked into the doctor’s office unaided.
“Yesterday,” her mother explained, “she told me that she thought her arm felt better, and she found that she could raise it. Then she said she believed she could walk; and, getting out of bed, she crossed the room without the least assistance, and without her feet clubbing under her. Can it be, Doctor, that she is cured?”
In fact, she was cured; although, of course, the magnet itself had had no power to cure her, but was used merely as an agent for an efficient “counter-suggestion” to dislodge and uproot the symptom-producing suggestions in the girl’s own mind.
Excellent results have also been obtained in many cases of hysterical paralysis among children by the use of what is known as the “method of surprise,” the invention of a German specialist named Bruns. As employed by Doctor Bruns and his followers, this method has undoubtedly a certain aspect of brutality; but this is more than compensated by its effectiveness. Having determined, by a searching medical examination, that the paralysis in any given case is functional and not organic, what Bruns does is to place the paralysed child in a bath-tub, turn on the cold water faucet, and watch the youngster climb out and scamper off.
“You see,” he then says to him, at this psychological moment, “you can walk very well, after all. Now let us hear no more from you about being unable to walk.”
If for any reason he deems the bath-tub device inadvisable, his plan is to put the child to bed, keep it entirely isolated, and deprive it of all food for a day or so. An appetising meal is then brought into the room, and left some distance from the child’s bed. Frequently this is all that is needed to effect a cure. The suggestion of food overcoming the suggestion of paralysis, the child gets out of bed and starts across the room, being encountered midway by Bruns, who—of course by accident—enters the room at that precise instant, and makes use of verbal suggestion to reinforce and maintain the “miraculous” recovery.
In contrast with this method of surprise is the “method of disregard,” also originated by Bruns and used by him in cases of hysteria other than those involving muscular paralysis—cases, for example, of obsessions, facial “tics,” spasms, or convulsive seizures. In employing the method of disregard the little patient is carefully watched by doctor and nurses but in such a manner that he is led to believe they are paying scarcely any attention to him. As a result the idea that, despite his own conviction, his malady must be most insignificant, gradually takes increasing possession of him, and in proportion as it does so the hysterical symptoms disappear.
But, the reader may ask, does this truly mean that the hysteria itself has been cured? Do not these methods, one and all, achieve merely the removal of symptoms? Is not the child still suggestible enough to develop a new variety of hysterical disturbances should occasion arise?
Such objections are not without force, though in practice it has been observed that the cure of the symptoms by suggestion does actually seem to weaken the tendency to future hysterical outbreaks of any kind. To be on the safe side, however, it is always well to institute environmental changes of a sort that will make for a constantly closer approach by the child to a normal life.
With this, we come to the point that is of supreme interest to parents.