Sezito Myself

Success, implanted in the mind by his power of Auto-Suggestion is worth more than a fortune to any man. In this way we should, by a steady habit of Auto-Suggestion, fix in the Subjective Mind the strongest possible faith in our own ability. Dr. Quackenbos of Columbia University has accomplished seemingly miraculous results in developing great ability in music and art in boys and girls in a few months by Suggestion, which would ordinarily have taken years of training, and which ability might never have manifested under any length of training but for the strange power which Suggestion has of calling out the latent powers of the soul.

HYPNOTISM IN MENTAL AND MORAL CULTURE

When the thought occurred to the author during the winter of 1898-99 to test the availability of hypnotic suggestion as a means of removing criminal impulses and substituting conscience-sensitiveness for moral anesthesia among young criminals and castaways, he was convinced that the results of his investigations would possess deep interest for the men and women of his profession, and he purposed publishing them, together with his conclusions, in the form of a medical monograph. But he was wholly unprepared for the sensation that has been excited throughout this country and in Europe by the premature birth of his report in the columns of the daily press. The demand for full and authentic information regarding hypnotic suggestion, which has suddenly become appreciated as a great moralizing power at its true worth and with an intelligent reference to the wide range of its applications, explains the appearance of the present volume.

Hypnosis, X-ray vision and Clairvoyance.

Akin to clairvoyance is X-ray vision, the power to see through opaque bodies — supernormal sight induced by hypnotic suggestion. An authentic case of X-ray vision is that of Leo Brett, the twelve-year-old son of Dr. F. M. Brett, formerly Professor of Bacteriology and Physical Diagnosis in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Boston, reported with great detail in The Coining Age, November, 1899. Dr. Brett gives this account of his discovery of the power in his boy: "Leo had had scarlet-fever when young, and it had left his stomach very weak. His food was not being properly assimilated, and his general health suffered in consequence. As other treatment did not result so favorably as I could wish, it occurred to me that he might be benefited by hypnotic suggestion. The result was most gratifying, as he began to improve immediately and was soon perfectly well. He has since remained in excellent health. One day, when I had hypnotized him, he said: 'Papa, I can see the bones in your body.'
This led to examination and experimentation, and I found, to my great surprise, that when under hypnotic suggestion he was able to look right into and through the human body, apparently seeing the internal organism as readily as you or I would see objects through the window."

The doctor presents the following instance as illustrative of the boy's strange gift. A patient from Fall River, who was accompanied by his father, a gentleman of intelligence, thoroughly familiar with the uses of the X-ray, was a subject for examination.

Dr. Brett called his son Leo in from the street. The boy came with face flushed and eyes dancing from the excitement of his play. He sat down, and was almost instantly hypnotized by his father, who, as soon as he was unable to open his eyes, said to him: "Now, Leo, you will be able to see the young man's arm plainly when you open your eyes. Open your eyes." The command was promptly obeyed, and the boy was then requested to look at both arms and to describe what he saw. This he did, and in a few moments stated that he could see the left clearly, but the right arm he could not see plainly.

I will state here that the patient had his coat on, so it was impossible to see the nature of the trouble with the arm, although it was perfectly apparent from the way he held his right arm that it was wounded. The father then said, " We had better remove the coat." This was done, after which the boy was requested to look again.
He said, immediately: "Why, some of the bone of the upper part of the arm is gone."
"Well, do you see any bone-formation going on?"
"On the inside," he replied, "the bone is growing, because I see a place between the old bones where it looks like gristle, and I think the bone is forming there; but on the outer side there is a place where there is no bone."
He was then requested by the father to show just the location, which he did by touch. His father also requested him to draw a diagram of the bone, which he did, showing exactly where he contended there was no bone on the outer side and the part of the arm where the new-formed bone appeared more like gristle than bone. The father of the patient then stated that this description corresponded with the opinion given by Dr. McBumey, who examined the arm when the patient had been under treatment at Roosevelt Hospital, in New York, and it was also substantially the opinion held by the physicians in Fall River.

Leo was then requested to see if he could not perceive anything else. He looked very intently. He seemed to be concentrating his gaze almost as a microscopist would in examining something quite fine. He was seated about three and one-half feet from the subject. Finally he said: "I see holes, but I do not see anything."
The doctor said: "Look again."
He replied: "I don't see anything there. I see some holes."
The doctor then asked the father if he had any objection to his telling Leo how the accident occurred. Permission being given, the doctor explained to his son that the young man's arm had been shot almost off, and the father added that there were probably about five hundred pellets shot into the arm, that it occurred a year ago last January, that several operations had been performed, and a great majority of the shot had been removed, but that the X-ray still showed some to remain. The doctor then said again, "Look and see if you cannot see any of the shot."
Again the boy looked very intently over the arm, and replied: "No sir; there are none that I can see. I see holes, but no shot."

It was suggested that as the accident occurred so long ago there would not be any holes in the tissues, and that it might be possible that what appeared to be holes to the child were in reality the shot. The doctor then asked him to point with his hand to where the holes appeared. This he did, and the father said, "That is exactly the place where the shots are." He then asked him if he saw any other holes, and he said:
"Yes; up there," pointing to another place.
"How many?"
"Three."
The father said that this was correct. The X-ray revealed three shots in that location, but to the boy they appeared merely as holes. The doctor then asked him how many holes there appeared near the bone where he had indicated.
He replied: "Quite a number. They are very close. I do not know how many."

The doctor then pressed him. "Should you say there are ten, fifteen, twenty, sixty, or a hundred?"
"I should say there were at least fifteen," replied the boy; "and there seem to be some a little way off from the bone- only a few."

The father remarked that the X-ray showed about twenty shots in the locality to which the boy referred.

When the examination was over, the doctor released Leo with a word and the suggestion that he rest for a minute. When he came into a perfectly normal state he was able to talk about and describe what he had seen just as intelligently as he did while hypnotized, but, of course, he was no longer able to see in any other than a normal way.
HYPNOTIC THERAPEUTICS.
BY JOHN DUNCAN QUACKENBOS, A.M., M.D.
Published February, 1908.
It would clearly not be long before reports were received of people claiming to have precisely the X-ray eyes mooted by Jules Bois. The most detailed of these concerned Afley Leonel Brett, the eleven-year-old son of Massachusetts physician Dr Frank Wallace Brett. Dr Brett was in the habit of hypnotising his son (we are not told why), but knew nothing of his son’s accomplishment until, one afternoon, in November 1897, ‘upon coming out of a hypnotic state into which he had cast him, he made use of this curious expression, “

Oh, papa, I can see your bones!

” ’ (Anon 1899, 6). Not only was the boy able ‘to see through the usual clothing, underclothing, and flesh of a man, and to observe the bones and internal organs as clearly and as accurately as the ordinary eye reads a newspaper’ (Anon 1899, 6), he could see more detail than X-rays provided:
Outside clothing, linen, underwear, the human skin and flesh itself, are as nothing in his sight. The bones of the subject stand out in bold relief, and the organs of the person upon whom he may be looking are spread before him as though on a chart. These miraculous eyes also behold the human anatomy in its true colours, red, white, brown, even to the blue of the venous blood. This is impossible with the X rays. Under its use everything appears of the same shade. (Anon 1899)
From text written to accompany Phillip Warnell’s film, The Girl With X-Ray Eyes (2008). A version of this text was also given as a talk given for the annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science, Keele University, March 29, 2008.

Below is from: Mataura Ensign , Issue 660, 11 November 1899, Page 4

Natalya Nikolayevna Demkina (born 1987 in Saransk, Mordovian SSR, Soviet Union), usually known under the hypocoristic naming Natasha Demkina, is a Russian woman who claims to possess a special vision that allows her to look inside human bodies and see organs and tissues, and thereby make medical diagnoses. Since the age of ten, she has performed readings in Russia. Under studies in the states she’d been given a list of the conditions and in Japan the diagnosis was to be restricted to a single specific part of the body–the head, the torso, or extremities–which she was to be informed of in advance.
No clairvoyant, medical intuitive, medium or seer should have any prior knowledge of the facts or people involved prior to demonstrating their ability.
The confirmation should come with the test results.

METAPSYCHICS IN THE FUTURE

We are still on the threshold of discovery. We know nothing as yet. We have but gathered a few pebbles at the water's edge of the great tarn of the future; vast reaches of fact and fantasy remain to be sifted in the interest of humanity. And man is certainly as much at liberty to question nature in ethereal spheres as to search for her secrets in the laboratory or to read her laws in the heavens. The end is not yet. I firmly believe that as an agent of physical cure, hypno-suggestion will shortly come to be universally employed by trained nurses for the purpose of carrying their patients through the crises of disease.

Intelligent physicians will anticipate by such treatment an inherited tendency to malignant growths, fortifying through the channels of suggestion the system of the subject against any chemical, mechanical, or emotional cause for the development of cancer. Carcinoma, for instance, being rare under thirty, the physician of the future will keep up the vitality of the threatened tissues, in cases where the heritage is suspected, by powerful suggestions to the sub-personal mind; this treatment may be begun at the age of twenty-five.

A prominent New York surgeon contends that the germ theory, which is universally accepted in explanation of departures from health, will give place to the Psychic Theory which conditions it and makes it possible. Disease, and he does not except cancer, is due to lapse of psychophysical control. The moral as regards treatment is luminous. The intelligent practitioner knows that there is a mental element in every lapse from the normal.

. . .

Suggestion will further be used to regulate fecundity, and so control the population of the earth; to aid the induction of anesthesia in operations (many surgeons are already so using audible suggestions of encouragement to advantage); and as a substitute in the twilight sleep for scopolamine.

Such promises to be the development of the twentieth century, while hypno-science seems further destined to demonstrate immortality on philosophical principles ; to discover the laws that govern telepathic intercourse, clairvoyance and clairaudience; to determine the possibility or impossibility of human communication with discarnate souls (a question left open for our investigation by the New Testament writers); to put a premium on dying, which men now fear, and to give us a sweet and happy and painless passage out of this consciousness, at the summons of the Death Angel.

BODY AND SPIRIT
AN INQUIRY INTO THE SUBCONSCIOUS
BASED UPON TWELVE THOUSAND EXPERIENCES IN THE author's PRACTICE
BY
JOHN D. QUACKENBOS, A.M.,M.D.
1916.

The facts presented in the following pages are based on twelve thousand intimate experiences with the subconscious mind in extra-planetary life. Psycho-physicians should record and make public such experiences, inasmuch as there are so many failures, and so much misunderstanding and misrepresentation exist regarding psycho- therapeutics. Hypnotherapy is trivialized by many medical men, who know nothing of its philosophy and possibilities, and who have never witnessed its uplifting' effects nor its establishment of physical, mental, and moral control. These are they who, in that prevailing spirit of opposition to any radical departure in the treatment of disease, oppugn this most important advance in the healing art, relegating its practice to illiterate mountebanks, religious fanatics, "new-thoughters," and mystics. And what is equally deplorable, the country is flooded with books on suggestion and its psychology by authors who have never practised it themselves nor ever seen it practised, but who derive their theories entirely from a heavy-footed imagination. The erroneous impressions disseminated in this way are a direct menace to a proper under-standing of medical psychology and a consequent deterrent to unhappy sufferers whose only hope lies in its dynamogenic power. Persons without experience of the subconscious mind cannot intelligently discuss its nature and forces.

The strongest of all arguments for the efficacy of suggestion is the argument from experimental knowledge, that subjective conviction which springs from a personal communion with intelligences gifted with supernormal energy and force, that actual sense of their subliminal life and responsiveness to appeal which stands upon the same firm foundation as the certainty of one's own existence. There is no illusion, no imagination, no obsession about such certainty. The facts of practical psychics can no longer be misrepresented nor passed over in contemptuous silence.
. . .
The book is given to the world in the hope that it may prove a source of inspiration to those who wish their fellows well or are themselves searching for spiritual freedom.

J. D. Q.

New York, April, 1910.

Nurses Should be Hypnotists.

Professor John D. Quackenbos, the New York physician who has made some special investigations in hypnotism – and likewise some startling statements concerning it – now suggest that trained nurses should study to become adepts in the science so as to exert as powerful an influence as possible on their patients. The Schulenburg Sticker (Schulenburg, Tex.), Vol. 8, No. 33, Ed. 1 Thursday, March 20, 1902
One can hardly overestimate the significance of suggestion in the hands of the trained nurse — the disciplined woman, acquainted with the natural history of diseases, qualified by education to care scientifically for the sick, and singularly blessed with opportunities that are at once life-serving and life-saving through the evocation of a psycho-physical control adequate to the arrest of exaggerated destructive metamorphosis, the re-establishment of the processes of repair, and thus the carriage of the patient through the crises of disease.

. . .

In her psychic treatment, the trained nurse is never to lose sight of the nervous control automatically operated by the superior spiritual self, which is the power behind the throne of the physical. In less serious cases, she will have abundant opportunity to test the truth of Churchill's philosophy:

"The surest road to health, say what they will,
Is never to suppose we shall be ill.
Most of those evils we poor mortals know,
From doctors and imagination grow.''

That is, no doctors, no imagining that we have any of the diseases they are qualified to treat. But the trained nurse is to be the doctor's coadjutor. She is never to interfere with the physician's treatment, but, assuming it to be correct, render it effective by assurances given through suggestion. This is intelligent supplementary treatment. She is to remember that suggestion implies enlightened anticipation of grave changes. It may not be safe to await the arrival of the physician. She is supposed to know what to do until the doctor comes. She will not take the chance of waiting; too much of life is spent in waiting. For her, now is the appointed time, and the appointed way of escape is in many cases through the channel of suggestion only.

HYPNOTIC THERAPEUTICS
IN
THEORY AND PRACTICE
WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS OF TREATMENT BY SUGGESTION

BY John Duncan Quackenbos, A.M., M.D.

1908

Alcohol, Tobacco and Suggestion.

THE PSYCHOLOGIC INTERPRETATION OF ALCOHOLIC INTEMPERANCE AND ITS PHYSIO-PSYCHIC TREATMENT.

By John D. Quackenbos, A.M., M.D., Emeritus Professor in Columbia University; Member of the London Society for Psychical Research; Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, of the New Hampshire Medical Society and the New Hampshire Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis; Member of the New York Medical Association; Member of the American Medical Association; Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

* Delivered at Washington, December 15, 1916, before the American Society for the Study of Alcohol and Narcotic Drugs.

Bits and Bites

By way of introduction to the theme that has been assigned me, I beg your leave briefly to describe the weapon with which I strike at the physio-psychic complex involved in every case of alcoholism.

There exists in human beings a mass of latent unused power — a reserve fund of energy, or capacity for performing work, which is applicable to emergencies, to extraordinary demands on the fortitude, exalted control, innate aptitude, or regenerating faculty of the individual. It is this power that may be incited to control the psychic elements in all diseases, and so affect the cure of those that are functional and the alleviation of suffering in those that are organic. It is this power that commands the output of thought, the projection of genius, the material expression of all that is best in the man. It is this power which, dynamically directed and applied, regenerates the outcast, sobers the drunkard, rescues the drug-fiend, restores to normal thought and feeling the distraught and suicidal, the perverted and the obsessed.

. . .

There is no suggestion to the will of another in psycho-therapy. Nobody but a fool would submit to such treatment, were this possible; and nobody but an unprincipled operator would practice; even for the relief of suffering, a method that makes a fellow being his automaton. My subjects do what I urge them to do, not because I urge them, but because they are made clearly to see that the course suggested conjugates with right, truth, expediency, necessity.

One of the most important applications of psycho-dynamics is its combination with rational physical attention in the treatment of drink and drug habits. The results here obtained are without parallel, dependent as they are on the automatic operation of a super-physical control rendered active by a resistless appeal. The drink and drug cures so extensively advertised fail utterly to impart the great essential to radical regeneration and lasting abstinence — viz., spontaneous unresisting moral sway. They evoke not those forces of the soul that are a thousand times stronger than appetite or desire. Hence about 70 per cent of drinkers who seek relief at the sanatoriums are sobered only for a time and sooner or later relapse. The drink habit cannot be cured by nauseating the victim with lobelia, purging him with drastic cathartics, blinding him with belladonna, or vomiting him with apomorphia. Such treatment creates revulsion in the patient. He soon recovers from the effect of the physic used to find his craving unchanged and his powers of resistance as poisonless as ever. Drug cures leave the moral nature uninfluenced. Dr. Partridge of Clark University convincingly contends that no drug can reach the heart of the intoxication impulse.

. . .

The drink habit is growing, especially among our women, from shop maid and nymph du pave to the pampered dames of upper society. The punch bowl figures at functions, and proud-pied belles dip freely therein. Cocktails and highballs are everywhere on dress parade, and the wanton cordax[1] has been revived by dancemad, up-to-date Bacchantes [2] amid the hocktide familiarity of the roof-garden and the misnamed "the dansant." Girls representing good families, conspicuously made-up, are not missing from the throng. Debutantes, not necessarily of the fast set, unblushingly assert a right to drink wine and smoke cigarettes at luncheons and levees, at high-priced cafes and in the corridors of the hotels; and not a few of this class, as well as young married women, have been brought to the writer's office in a state of intoxication. Such has become the vogue; and, worse than this, girls in their teens see no impropriety in drinking publicly with men companions. A few years ago, a woman with a cocktail before her, amid much surroundings, the air polluted with tobacco smoke, would have been set down as a Cyprian (Licentious or Wanton). The abstinent, unobtrusive young lady of the past generation is giving place to a coarse, boisterous, immodestly attired bon-vivant, controlled by unworthy impulses, and wholly unfit to fulfill her function in the community as an inspirer to meritorious action, or her function in the home as a character-former, a wife and a mother. Verily, the beaumonde reflects a piteous state of preparedness for combat with the forces of evil that threaten to disrupt society. Verily, the national force that is wasting today in America is woman; and she who prostitutes her obligation to her sex in I, life of self-indulgence and demoralizing example should be brought to her senses by the thought that no nation can be truly great in which the rights of woman are not deservedly upheld, and her refined intellect is not respected as a directing agency and an impelling power.

What has been said is germane to the attitude of the well-do-do classes for with the great mass of working people in the cities, the habit of drink is noticeably on the wane; and the saloon-keepers who have long absorbed a generous fraction of the laborer's hard-earned wage fear for the future of their nefarious business of "swapping the souls of men" for mammon [3]. The poor or moderately salaried man is not only developing a knowledge of the perils of alcoholic indulgence through the strenuous efforts of both Catholic and Protestant educators, but he recognizes the necessity of economy, and has come to appreciate the superior attractions of the photo-drama. The moving picture-show is the great adversary of the saloon. In its comfortable parterre, a man may be entertained with his family an hour or two for less money than he would naturally spend in the card rooms that figure at the rear of every bar. These clubs of the poor, where a man of labor and the youth of the store pass their evenings in drinking and card-playing, are dehumanizing our brothers of the tenement, aiming to destroy their capacity both for conferring and enjoying domestic happiness. The moving picture-show offers a form of instructive entertainment that is cheap enough to be within the reach of all working people, and popular enough to drain the lounging-rooms of the cabarets. The saloon is out of step with the times.

. . .

What these persons drink to reinforce nervous energy is itself a most dangerous compound mad of crude grain or potato spirits, or fusel oil, and various "essences" manufactured in laboratories — a compound sixteen times as deadly in its effects on the brain and other organs as is ethyl alcohol in pure whiskey. And the beer and ale of this country all contain sulphurous acid and other adulterants, much of it preservatives, rendering it antagonistic to digestion which is a form of fermentation, and, constituting it a kidney and liver irritant which has to. be reckoned with by the doctor and is taken into serious, consideration by life insurance companies.

In spite of these accepted facts, drinking goes madly on. A discussion of the psychology of the habit would, seem to imply a presentation of the various reasons advanced by intemperants for their addiction to "the juice divine" (Rubaiyat.[4])

Some drink to hide conditions that mortify, worry, depress, or agonize — business entanglements, loss of wife or fiancee, blood-guilt. Like Omar Kaiyam[4], they drink inconsolate, not for pleasure or profligacy, nor to renege religion and good morals, but solely to drown care and escape from themselves. How often it has to be demonstrated to these deluded patients that obscuring conditions does not alter them, but merely renders the dupe less capable of coping with them. "To drink my wine and take my pleasure," said the Persian poet, "that is how I live. To care no jot for heresy or orthodoxy, that is my creed." Yet heresy and orthodoxy continue to exist, and the man's responsibility is none the less. Many men drink exclusively from habit and not from desire for intoxicating effects. Many again plead business necessity; others, lowered nerve tone, and whip themselves to greater effort, forgetting that in the lash of the whip is hidden a scorpion's sting. And some fools who have been cured touch, handle and taste in cold blood to see whether they really are cured, often with disastrous consequences that are likely to follow playing with fire.

A popular fallacy with the alcoholic is the progressive conviction that, in consequence of a long period of good behavior he is entitled to a spree. This applies to patients who are willing to take a six months' voyage on a sailing vessel innocent of liquor, or be interned in a sanatorium, perfectly happy and apparently without desire, but living on the expectation of "going on another whizzer," as one patient denominated it, as soon as the ship docks or the sanatorium doors are unbarred.

. . .

It has been shown that abundant adequacy exists in the man to destroy any and all abnormal craving of his objective nature, and that this dormant power may be awakened and exploited by suggestional appeal. The suggestions given in drink habit cases must be iconoclastic and uncompromising, for radical cure depends on change in the mental state.

. . .

Your speaker has treated in this way persons who came to him unwillingly, who entered the sleep reluctantly with pronounced mental reservation, even men who defiantly sneered at his proffers of help. In many such cases, he has overridden a righteous impulse to eject them from the office, placing love for the sinner before hatred of the sin, has brought the subject into his own presence, made him aware of his obligations with his power to meet them and disclosed to him an earnestness and sincerity of purpose in the effort at reclamation. Such a patient generally emerges from the first sleep, always from the second, a changed being and happy in the change. The surly ruffian who had to be handled with the utmost finesse, is transformed into an affable and appreciative gentleman.

. . .

The rational treatment of alcoholic addicts has been characterized as physio-psychic. This means that it does not lose sight of the necessity for physical repair. It recognizes the interdependence of brain and psychic offices, for in the light of modem science, "bodily and psychic functions are only different forms of the same brain and nerve activity." The successful carriage of the suggestions offered depends then on the integrity of these organs.

. . .

The psychological cause for alcoholic excess is not infrequently emphasized by the depression and nervous irritation resulting from the abuse of tobacco.

Physicians who have had much to do with alcoholic inebriates realize that there is a direct relationship between alcohol addiction and such abuse. The first effect of tobacco smoking is stimulating, with a rise of blood pressure; a sedative effect follows, with a fall of blood pressure; and if the smoking be continued, the nerve cells are depressed. The depression is cumulative in the system of the smoker, and after a varying interval (of days, weeks or months) it creates an instinctive demand for the antidote to tobacco poisoning — and that is alcohol. The intemperate use of tobacco thus explains 75 per cent of all drink habit cases. The alcoholic thirst is engendered and inflamed by smoke.

The real danger in smoking consists largely in the habit of inhalation, whereby the volatilized poisons are brought into immediate contact with at least 1000 square feet of vascular air-sac walls in the lungs, and are thus promptly and fully absorbed, to be diffused into the blood and carried on their disastrous errand to the several organs of the body.

. . .

Inhalers of tobacco smoke are listless, forgetful, independable, backward in study, and conspicuously lacking in power of attention and application. A patient who began to smoke at seven and smoked all the time he was awake until, as he described it, he "got a jag on the smoke," at 35 could not "pin himself down to any business." As the habit is pushed, the habitué becomes excessively nervous, suffers from shortness of breath, muscular cramps and tremblings, rapid and irregular heart, nausea, giddiness, insomnia, irritable throat ("cigarette cough"), impaired digestion, and often from dimness of vision which has been known to culminate in blindness (tobacco amaurosis[is vision loss or weakness]) — all of which disappear with discontinuance of the habit.

. . .

The government has begun a most meritorious campaign against drug-taking in the enforcement of the Harrison law. But it has left unnoticed two habits that are doing infinitely more damage to the brains and physical constitutions of the people of the United States than all the drugs put many times together, viz., the drink and cigarette habits. Three times the amount of our national debt (about $3,000,000,000) is spent annually in the country on alcoholic drinks and tobacco. Twenty billion cigarettes, it is estimated, are smoked every year in the United States. Boys and girls, men and women, are permitted without protest from high quarters to destroy their mental faculties and moral propensities by this practice. Physicians have come to realize that those who abandon themselves to the double indulgence in tobacco and alcohol are practically committing suicide on the installment plan. They can never be at their best, and a cigarette smoker represents as hazardous a risk from the viewpoint of life insurance as a consumer of liquor.

In closing, let me insist on one fact, viz.: The ill-success of a given suggestionist in the treatment of an alcoholic or drug addict, does not imply that such a subject is incurable through psycho-dynamic influence. The sufferer should make trial of another personality. Especially is this to be considered in the failures of Emmanuelism, so noble in its conception and so successful in the hands of its founder, where cures are attempted by unqualified clergymen who are ignorant of the mental states in which receptivity is at its height, and apply extremely crude methods with faith in their efficacy. The same criticism applies to the quixotic efforts of the therapy and the tedious procedures of psycho-analysis.

THE Alienist and Neurologist
A JOURNAL OF Scientific, Clinical and Forensic
NEUROLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY AND NEURIATRY.
VOLUME XXXVIL
1916

[1] The cordax was a provocative, licentious, and often obscene mask dance of ancient Greek comedy. Modern philologists maintain that the cordax later became the fandango. This amatory dancing with undulations of the loins and buttocks was called cordax.
[2] A Bacchante in Roman mythology is a female follower of Bacchus, god of wine and intoxication.
[3] Riches, avarice, material wealth or greed from the New Testament
[4] The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer. A ruba'i is a two-line stanza with two parts (or hemistichs) per line, hence the word rubáiyát (derived from the Arabic language root for "four"), meaning "quatrains".

In 1988, for the very first time, the Rubaiyat were translated by a Persian translator. Karim Emami's [5] translation of the Rubaiyat was published under the title The Wine of Nishapour in Paris. The Wine of Nishapour is the collection of Khayyam's poetry by Shahrokh Golestan, including Golestan's pictures in front of each poem.

Illustration by Edmund Joseph Sullivan for Quatrain 11 of Fitzgerard's 1st Version.

[5] Karim Emami(1930, Calcutta, India – 2005, Tehran, Iran) was a highly regarded Iranian translator, editor, lexicographer, and literary critic.

Prof. John D. Quackenbos, the eminent New York scientist, says:

"The time has indeed come, as Maeterlinck predicted it would, when souls may know of each other without the intermediary of the senses."

[The Science of Psychic Healing By Yogi Ramacharaka 1909]

HYPNOTISM THE CURE-ALL

Prof. John D. Quackenbos Would Regenerate the Human Race

HIS SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTS

Crime and Disease Succumb to the Treatment – Working of the Cure – Illegitimate Hypnosis

Hypnotism as a means of reforming criminals and of removing crime and moral obliquity from this terraqueous sphere is the latest theory which advanced science has to offer. The originator of this idea for applying hypnotism for the wholesale regeneration of the human race is Prof. John D. Quackenbos of Columbia University, who for the past year has been conducting experiments. Prof. Quackenbos says he has cured by this means stammering, drug and alcoholic addictions, moral perversions, and excessive cigarette smoking.
“My claim in this matter", said Dr Quackenbos yesterday, “is that this cure by hypnosis can be carried into prisons and other such institutions, and even into the slums. For a year I have been experimenting along this line of hypnotic cure at the Newsboys’ Home and elsewhere, and it is a fact that of the fifteen or more cases which I have treated I have found them all to be entirely successful. In fact, I have not once failed.


“My idea now is to get some induction to see how far it can be demonstrated that one can apply hypnotism to the treatment of all crime. In other words I want to ascertain for a certainty whether it is feasible to apply the treatment to inmates of institutions and prisons. Nobody who is at all familiar, with the subject doubts that it can be done in special cases, but my idea is to see how far it is practicable in all cases.
“I first saw a practical application of hypnotism as a cure in the Academy of Medicine about six years ago, but it was only for a limited purpose. Later the matter was further brought to my attention-in fact, certain physicians in this city have for some time used hypnosis, especially in the treatment of nervous diseases. Then I discovered that I possessed the power to hypnotize, and I decided to try it. The most satisfactory results are obtained where the patient is old enough to realize, not only the significance and purpose of the treatment, but also is possessed of the desire to be made better.
“My chief difficulty thus far has been in getting a sufficient number of cases due to all kinds of opposition, including ecclesiastical. In one case I was told by a matron who was in charge of about 100 or 200 patients that my suggested hypnotic cure was not for an instant to be thought of. Yet in the very next breath she admitted that several of the cases were being treated by Christian Scientists.
“Not only is hypnotism, properly used, a great force for moral reform, but it will also elevate the intelligence. When the hypnotist-physician gets a patient under his control the patient is for the time being part of himself. He has, in short, lost his own will, and has to act and think as the hypnotist suggests and the result is that if elevated ideals and thoughts are presented to the subject he will be elevated accordingly; while if low and debased thoughts are suggested the patient will in proportion be lowered and debased.
“Here I want to speak of legitimate and, If I may use the word, illegitimate hypnotic treatment. I actually believe that a great deal of this illegitimate hypnotic treatment is resorted to in this city, with the result that to me, it seems that people so influenced are induced to leave their money and property in fact just as the hypnotist desires and influences. I believe that persons have been hypnotized and made to steal; indeed, one of our Police Captains told me some time ago that he had such a case.
“Then, too, take the case of those who are hypnotized for purposes of exhibition. A person so repeatedly hypnotized is very seriously injured mentally. That, of course, I consider criminal. But no possible harm can come to a mind put under the influence of a reputable physician, say four or five times. I would suggest therefore, in view of this illegitimate hypnotism, that the power to hypnotize be placed only in the hands of reputable physicians.
“Reputable physicians in Europe as well as in America are reporting cases by the thousands in which hypnotism has acted as a palliative or cure. These cases include not only functional nervous diseases, but also diseases in which the pain is a prominent symptom. The nervous symptoms are controlled, cured by the establishment of functional harmony through the power of suggestion.
“Let me explain to you from the medical standpoint, the working of the hypnotic cure. The phenomena of hypnotism are scientifically explicable on the supposition of a double ego, a duplex personality, implying two distinct states of consciousness – one called the primary consciousness, involving the mind’s recognition of its own acts; the other, called the secondary consciousness, holding those mental processes and procedures of which we have no knowledge. (Note: Thomas Troward and others used the term Subjective and Objective minds) That is, each human being is one individual with two distinct phases of existence. Now, it is this secondary consciousness that is amenable to in hypnosis to what is called suggestion or the insinuation of a belief, impulse, or image into the mind of the subject by emphatic declaration.
“Both a Christian Science healer and a hypnotist seek to alleviate pain by arousing in the subject the idea that it does not exist, and each obtains control of the secondary consciousness to effect his purpose. In ordinary hypnosis there are two distinct conditions: lethargy, or the inactive stage, and somnambulism, or the alert stage. The first is a condition of deep sleep, the second one of exalted mind power and increased physical activity, in which the subject lives an unreal live that he remembers nothing after awaking. But his subliminal self unhesitatingly accepts, in either of these stages, every emphatic statement or direction of the hypnotist, no matter how it may conflict with stereotyped convictions and every-day experience. Suggestions for post-hypnotic fulfillment are even carried out to the letter, sometimes for months after the treatment.
“ I keep my patients under hypnotic control for about fifteen or twenty minutes each time, and I have found that if the treatment is repeated three times in most cases, at intervals of four days to week, the required results are produced – certainly after a fourth time. I once cured a thief eighteen years old. When I first put him under my influence I gave him the suggestion that he should steal no more and that he lived in a country where honesty not only prevailed, but was rewarded by promotion. In short, I put a promising future before his mind, basing that future on hos honesty. I not only cured him as a thief, but when he came to see me, saying that he no longer had any temptation to steal, he had an open, frank countenance.
“Another case I cured by hypnotism was that of a confirmed cigarette smoker twenty years old, whose heart was pitching around in an awful way and who was generally a wreck. In a very short time I had him entirely cured, the first week reducing him from twenty cigarettes a day to four a day for the whole week. Another case I cured was that of a young fellow who stammered. I simply put him under my influence, told him that his stammering was hurting him in his business, and that I wanted him to stop.
“I am now trying to make arrangements with the management of the New York Juvenile Asylum to get some boys and girls with whom to experiment. As fear may be expressed by some people that these experiments may do the subject harm, I may say that they certainly will not do them any mental harm, and, as for harm otherwise, you can’t make them any worse than they are. In all my experiments I never try to get my subjects into a somnambulistic state, for the reason that it is not necessary for the accomplishment of my purpose, and is verging on dangerous ground.”

Originally published April 30 1899

SEVENTY-FIVE PER CENT OF DRINK DUE TO TOBACCO

John D. Quackenbos, A.M., M.D., emeritus professor in Columbia University, New York City, is one of the most eminent members of the medical profession. Speaking recently before the American Society for the Study of Alcohol and Narcotic Drugs, at Washington, D.C., Dr. Quackenbos said:

"Physicians who have had much to do with alcoholic inebriates realize that there is a direct relationship between alcohol addiction and tobacco abuse. The first affect of tobacco smoking is stimulating, with a rise of blood pressure; and if the smoking be continued, the nerve cells are depressed. The depression is cumulative in the system of the smoker, and after a varying interval (of days, weeks or months) it creates an instinctive demand for the antidote to tobacco poisoning – and that is alcohol. The intemperate use of tobacco thus explains 75 per cent of all drink-habit cases. The alcoholic is engendered and inflamed by smoke."

Excerpt from: The Case Against the Little White Slaver (1914), by Henry ford

DR. JOHN DUNCAN QUACKENBOS of Columbia University has cured STEALING BY HYPNOTISM,
IMMORALITY AND DRUNKENNESS BY HYPNOTISM,
THE CIGARETTE HABIT BY HYPNOTISM.
Ever since the announcement was made a few days ago that this physician could overcome crime and vicious habit? through suggestion his house and office have been In a state of siege. Day and night appeal has been made at his door by those who insist that they have no strength to resist thieving or strong drink. Young boys and little girls are brought to this man by unhappy father and mothers,who have about lost hope seeing their sons and daughters weakening slowly into cigarette funds. But to one and all Dr. Quackenbos has given the cheering counsel that there is no crime or sin, no matter to what degree of viciousness the victim has fallen, but can be overcome by a hypnotic sleep, when high moral alms are suggested to the patient's mind.
It was early In the winter Just passed that Dr. Quackenbos began his self-imposed task upon the young boys who lived In the Newsboys' Home. New York. One or two of the little fellows at first rather timidly presented themselves to the doctor to be cured of the excessive use of tobacco were treated with such success by this physician that it was not long before dozens of these small chaps were urging the doctor to enable them to do without the cigarettes which were shown to be injurious to their strength and lives.
While petty stealing has been cured in many cases by Dr. Quackenbos since he began to use suggestion for the correction of crime among faithful offenders, the case in which he takes the greatest pride and upon which he bases the theory that even an habitual criminal may be reformed is the case of a young fellow who for five years had stolen right and left. He had been arrested, and was in a fair way to spend a part of his life in the State reformatory, when his case was brought to the attention of the doctor.
Quackenbos stands high In the medical world, where his specialty has been the nervous diseases. He belongs to an old Dutch family, and low of the New York Academy of Medicine, as well as of the New Hampshire Medical Society. Before the latter association in June he read a paper upon "Hypnotic Suggestion in the Treatment of Crime," In which he will tell of his work the past year among the vicious and degenerate of the New York slums.(Excerpt 1899)

According to letter in the ``Annual report of President and Treasurer`` By Columbia University, dated March 30, 1889, Quackenbos also taught English.

A fixed idea of Health, Happiness, Success, implanted in the mind by his power of Auto-Suggestion is worth more than a fortune to any man. In this way we should, by a steady habit of Auto-Suggestion, fix in the Subjective Mind the strongest possible faith in our own ability. Dr. Quackenbos of Columbia University has accomplished seemingly miraculous results in developing great ability in music and art in boys and girls in a few months by Suggestion, which would ordinarily have taken years of training, and which ability might never have manifested under any length of training but for the strange power which Suggestion has of calling out the latent powers of the soul. Suggestions given to a pupil under hypnosis are accepted with unquestioned faith, and faith seems to have a mysterious power of healing and inspiring, and especially of awakening talent lying dormant. Men generally can do what they believe they can do, and they cannot do what they believe they cannot do. We see this in the hypnotized boy who being told he cannot cross a certain line on the floor, struggles in vain to cross it, his belief holding him in captivity and utterly suppressing his natural physical powers. On the other hand, I have frequently heard the hypnotized lad, under suggestion that he was a noted orator, arise and deliver a surprising address, of which he was utterly incapable in his normal state. And I have seen the hypnotized subject leap over a man's head under the stimulus of suggestion a feat he could not possibly accomplish in his waking state. No one knows the reserve powers of the mind. If you would awaken them, you must cultivate daily by Auto-Suggestion unlimited faith in yourself. From B.F. Austin - How To Make Money – 1918

Quackenbos wrote:

• Body and Spirit: An Inquiry Into the Subconscious ...
• Magnhild: A Tale Of Psychic Love (1918)
  
• Hypnotism In Mental And Moral Culture Suggestion As A Means Of Perfecting The Orator, Teacher And Businessman
• Erotomania, Infatuation And Moral Perversion - Pamphlet
• Enemies and Evidences of Christianity;
  
• Thoughts on Questions of the Hour
  
• Illustrated history of ancient literature
• Illustrated History Of Ancient Literature: Oriental And Classical
• Hypnotic Therapeutics in Theory and Practice
• Moral Disease Suggestion As A Means Of Perfecting The Orator,
  
• Teacher And Businessman - Pamphlet
• The Value of Suggestion to Players, Singers, Musicians and Artists
  
• Body and Spirit, an Inquiry into the Subconscious
• Lessons In Geography: For Little Learners (1889)
• Advanced Course of Composition and Rhetoric: A Series of Practical Lessons on the Origin, History and Peculiarities of the English Language ...

SPELL OF HYPNOSIS INSPIRES AN ACTRESS

Dr. Quackenbos Helped Her to Win Fame in a Night.

HE EXPLAINS HIS METHOD

Startling Disclosures of His Influence Upon Halting Ministers, Artists, and Students Whom "Stage Fright" Has Paralyzed.

From December 20, 1901.

The medical fraternity of the entire city discussed yesterday the paper read Wednesday night before the Medico Legal .Society by Dr. John Duncan Quackenboss, emeritus Professor of•Psychology In Columbia University, in which be told of a young actress who a few months ago won fame In a single night while under the spell of hypnotic suggestion.

The spell was put upon the actress by Dr. Quackenbos himself after she had come to him a -sufferer from stage fright at the very threshold of her career. Under its influence, according to Dr Quackenbos, she appeared in a new play -in a Broadway theatre, and under the management of one greatest managers of the country. After her performance the press of city united in commending her work. The audience called her before the curtain seven times. and she became famous at once.

This case was cited by Dr. Quackenbos, as he stated, to give point his contention that hypnotism or Mesmerism is a tremendous force in the being not only of man but of the lower animals, and even of insects, and the scientists of •today are but standing at the threshold of a mysterious realm.

Quackenbos seen yesterday at his office supplemented this example hypnotic suggestion with others equally startling. He denied, however that the actress mentioned in his paper was at the time she made her great success this Fall in a trance-of the Trilby order.

He said:

“I applied in her case principles that are not entirely new. As the time for her first night drew near she became attacked with stage fright and her manager brought her to me as a last resort. In her case I studied her part in the play, and as near as-it was possible for me to do so, saturated myself with its spirit. She was to visit me three times. She made two visits, and on each of these occasions I put her into a hypnotic sleep, and while she was in this state I impressed upon her by the power of suggestion that she was actually the character that She was to portray.

“I filled her with the idea that she was superior to her surroundings, and brought out by suggestion every dramatic capability that had lain dormant within her. I impressed upon her that her acting throughout would be consistent with her interpretation of the heroine of the play in which she was to take part, and would be sincere and natural in,its tone. After two sleeps she became imbued with absolute confidence, and, refusing a third treatment, went before the footlights a consummate mistress of art.

“She was not in a. trance the night she made her first appearance, and I was not even present in the theatre, but the subliminal force in her being had been made for the time the dominant force, and her self-consciousness was completely obliterated.


“That is all there is in the treatment. The operator brings into activity the dormant psychic power in the subject. Hypnotic suggestion will not give a man knowledge. It simply enables him to comprehend things that he has known, but half forgotten; It will bring to his fingers’ ends all the knowledge he has ever had and Inspires him with an overwhelming confidence in himself.

“There is a young woman violinist appearing In this. city to-day, who a short time ago was almost ruined In her art by self-consciousness. I know nothing about violin playing, but by putting her into a hypnotic sleep and impressing on her that she was capable of the very highest expression on her instrument, she performs now as. one Inspired. See her some day and notice the utter absence of self-consciousness in her work.

“I have also had a 'number of ministers of various denominations who got in that state where they dreaded coming of Sunday. They come to, me at regular intervals. I put them into a hypnotic sleep and by suggestion make them think that it is not themselves talking, but the spirit of God talking through them. Some powerful sermons preached in local pulpits recently and reported in the press have come immediately after a hypnotic sleep.

-
“Recently I had a young woman singer come here from California to study under one of the most distinguished teachers In the city. She has a splendid voice, but had certain vices of expression which the teacher, told her would take. two years to .correct. One hypnotic sleep was sufficient to correct these faults entirely. and almost Incur the enmity of her music teacher. It was done by simply impressing her with, a conviction that the faults did not exist.

“The same method has ,worked successfully with scores of students in Columbia University. I had one young man last June, the son of- a wealthy man in the city who was promised a trip abroad if he successfully passed hi examinations. He felt absolutely hopeless of being able to pass and came .to me in despair to be experimented upon. The experiment was a complete success, and he took his coveted trip through Europe. By hypnotic suggestion all the knowledge gained by him during the year was simply brought to his fingers’ ends, so to speak.

“Hypnotism is a vast subject, and has been abused by charlatans and tricksters, but there is much in it.”

From December 20, 1901.