STRANGE TALES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 708, 6 July 1929, Page 13

STRANGE TALES

DOCTOR WHO HYPNOTISED WOUNDED MAUPASSANT’S MADNESS A strange, discursive book has been published by Anel Munthe, a Swedish doctor, well-known in Rome and Naples. In circumstances of extreme danger he has repeatedly distinguished himself by his zeal and courage—at Naples during the terrible cholera epidemic of 1884, at Messina after the earthquake of 1908, and at Verdun, where he worked in the French ambulances. Many of his experiences are of the gruesome kind, but he writes well and is always interesting. When he was studying hypnotism in Paris under Charcot he made the acquaintance of Maupassant, who was already showing signs of madness: Ho was producing with feverish haste one masterpiece after another, slashing his excited brain with champagne, other, and drugs ,of all sorts . . . One day he told me that while he was sitting at his writing table hard at w'ork upon his new novel, he had been greatly surprised to see a stranger enter, notwithstanding the severe vigilance of his valet. The stranger sat down opposite to him at the writing table and began to dictate to him what he was about to write. He was just going to have him turned out when he saw to his horror that the stranger was himself. Speaking of hypnosis the author says:—

Experiments on hypnotism are not, without their danger, to the subject as well as to the spectators. Persomilly 1 think public demonstrations of hypnotic phenomena should be forbidden by law. He insists on its great value in proper hands: What it was granted to me to do with it for many of our dying soldiers during the last -war is enough to make me thank God for having this powerful weapon in my hands. In the autumn of 1915, I spent two unforgettable days and nights among a couple of hundred dying soldiers, huddled together under their bloodstained great-coats on the floor of a village church in France. We had no morphia, no chloroform, no anaesthetics whatsoever to alleviate their tortures and shorten their agony. Yet he says:—

Many o£ them died before my eyes, j insensible, and unaware, often even a smile on their lips, with my hand on ! their forehead, my slowly repeated words of hope and comfort resounding in their ears, the terror of death i gradually vanishing from their closing > eyes. j

The author’s profits are to be given to the Naples Society for the Protection of Animals.