Animal magnetism / by Alfred Binet and Charles Féré.

  • Alfred Binet
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Animal magnetism / by Alfred Binet and Charles Féré. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    stretched in perfect unison; when one is moved, all the others are instantly affected. Thus the commissioners have repeatedly observed that when the crisis occurs in one woman, it occurs almost at once in others also. “ This organization explains why the crises in women are more frequent, more violent, and of longer duration than in men; it is nearly always due to their sensitive nerves. Some crises are due to a hidden, but natural cause, to an emotional cause to which women are more or less susceptible, and which, by a remote influence, accumulates these emotions and raises them to their highest pitch, thus producing a convulsive state which may be confounded with the ordinary crises. This is due to the empire which nature has caused one sex to exert over the other, so as to arouse feelings of attachment and emotion. Women are always magnetized by men; the established relations are doubtless those of a patient to the physician, but this physician is a man, and whatever the illness may be, it does not deprive us of our sex, it does not entirely withdraw us from the power of the other sex; illness may weaken impressions without destroying them. Moreover, most of the women who present themselves to be magnetized are not really ill; many come out of idleness, or for amusement; others, if not perfectly well, retain their freshness and their force, their senses are unimpaired and they have all the sensitiveness of youth; their charms are such as to affect the physician, and their health is such as to make them liable to be affected by him, so that the danger is reciprocal. The long-continued proximity, the necessary contact, the communication of individual heat, the inter- change of looks, are ways and means by which it is well