If Dr. Charcot had believed in what the French call suggestion mentale—­ suggestion by thought-transference (which I think he did not)—­he could have explained the healing of the Centurion’s servant, ’Say the word, Lord, and my servant shall be healed,’ by suggestion & distance (telepathy), and by premising that the servant’s palsy was ‘hysterical.’  But what do we mean by ‘hysterical’?  Nobody knows.  The ‘mind,’ somehow, causes gangrenes, if not cancers, paralysis, shrinking of tissues; the mind, somehow, cures them.  And what is the ‘mind’?  As my object is to give savage parallels to modern instances better vouched for.  I quote a singular Red Indian cure by ‘suggestion.’  Hearne, travelling in Canada, in 1770, met a native who had ‘dead palsy,’ affecting the whole of one side.  He was dragged on a sledge, ‘reduced to a mere skeleton,’ and so was placed in the magic lodge.  The first step in his cure was the public swallowing by a conjurer of a board of wood, ’about the size of a barrel-stave,’ twice as wide across as his mouth.  Hearne stood beside the man, ‘naked as he was born,’ ’and, notwithstanding I was all attention, I could not detect the deceit.’  Of course, Hearne believes that this was mere legerdemain, and (p. 216) mentions a most suspicious circumstance.  The account is amusing, and deserves the attention of Mr. Neville Maskelyne.  The same conjurer had previously swallowed a cradle!  Now bayonet swallowing, which he also did, is possible, though Hearne denies it (p. 217).

The real object of these preliminary feats, however performed, is, probably, to inspire faith, which Dr. Charcot might have done by swallowing a cradle.  The Indians explain that the barrel staves apparently swallowed are merely dematerialised by ‘spirits,’ leaving only the forked end sticking out of the conjurer’s mouth.  In fact, Hearne caught the conjurer in the act of making a separate forked end.

Faith being thus inspired, the conjurer, for three entire days, blew, sang, and danced round ‘the poor paralytic, fasting.’  ’And it is truly wonderful, though the strictest truth, that when the poor man was taken from the conjuring house ... he was able to move all the fingers and toes of the side that had been so long dead....  At the end of six weeks he went a-hunting for his family’ (p. 219).  Hearne kept up his acquaintance, and adds, what is very curious, that he developed almost a secondary personality.  ’Before that dreadful paralytic stroke, he had been distinguished for his good nature and benevolent disposition, was entirely free from every appearance of avarice,... but after this event he was the most fractious, quarrelsome, discontented, and covetous wretch alive’ (p. 220).

Dr. Charcot, if he had been acquainted with this case, would probably have said that it ’is of the nature of those which Professor Russell Reynolds has classified under the head of “paralysis dependent on idea."’[7] Unluckily, Hearne does not tell us how his hunter, an untutored Indian, became ‘paralysed by idea.’