Hypnotism: Its Facts, Theories and Related Phenomena

About this book

An apparently ordinary person enters a hypnotic state and begins responding to suggestions that would have seemed impossible moments earlier. Carl Sextus examines the experiments and theories that made hypnotism a sensation.

His discussion crosses psychology, medicine and public demonstrations, placing suggestion among the unusual phenomena debated at the end of the nineteenth century. Some explanations have since been superseded. The book shows how researchers and entertainers could draw audiences to the same curious border between voluntary action and influence.