she wrote to me: "I feel
as if I had received indelible photographs on my brain which have
since greatly affected my health and from which I may never
recover. This winter the symptoms I have been able to control
returned and I have been ill. I unfortunately saw the newspaper
headlines with my husband's supposed suicide. Though I exclaimed
then, 'how outrageous,' I felt as if I had been struck and since
then I can seldom read a paper without dread and apprehension, and
the hearing of anyone's suicide fills me with terror. When I
hurried to Europe, on the ocean a week from the day of my husband's
death, I had a curious and overwhelming shock. On opening a drawer
and seeing a pair of scissors, they looked to me like a dagger and
suddenly the whole cabin seemed filled with implements of death.
The doctors said that I would find it hard to get over such
impressions but I told them I would, as I had courage and will. But
I have been realizing in these two years that I may be suffering
from something that may be beyond the control of will. I often
become so nervously sensitive that scissors are unbearable for me
to see, or a steel knife or anything that might express death. Our
family physicians are still against hypnotism, and if I should go
to a neurologist of my own selection, it might be to one who
believed still only in nerve foods, baths, or a sanitarium."

The lady came from the South, with her nurse, to Boston and
insisted on being hypnotized by me. I cannot say whether a really
deep hypnotic state was produced at once as I refrained from
testing it. There was certainly no amnesia. Probably it began only
with a slight drowsiness but at the fifth treatment I found a
relatively deep hypnosis. It was a capricious case in which the
improvement was fluctuating but clearly setting in from the first
day. I trained her in hearing and seeing words like death and
suicide with a reenforced feeling of strength and calmness; I
forced her to see and touch scissors with an artificial attitude of
strength and indifference. At the same time I reenforced her good
mood and her enjoyment in life. When she left for England a few
weeks later, she felt herself mentally cured, and throughout the
summer her letters testified the wonderful change which the
treatment