and so fully laid bare her deceptions that she was compelled to confess, not that she had been playing tricks, but that Wier had cured her.
Wier was not the only person who, even in the sixteenth century, protested against the abuse of the belief in the supernatural. Several educated physicians would not allow themselves to be blinded by the ruling prejudices, and referred nervous affections and convulsions to their true cause, hysteria, which they then called suffocation of the womb, instead of to the devil. It would, however, have been rash for them to deny the action of demons, and they were, therefore, reticent in expression, and used well-rounded phrases to disguise the boldness of their doctrine. "I have seen," says Houlier, "two daughters of a president of one of the Parliaments of France, subject to be taken with such fits of laughing that it was impossible to stop them, either by fright or by threats and scolding." "In suffocations of the womb," says a learned man of the sixteenth century, "incidents frequently occur which cause physicians of little experience to think that it is a case of enchantment or of something extraordinary and supernatural." They had also observed incidents of catalepsy and of burial alive in hysteria, but were very careful against ascribing them to the machinations of the devil.
The efforts of physicians to cure hysteric anæsthesia have only recently been attended with any success. A happy discovery, revealing a series of real but improbable facts, has led to the introduction of salutary modifications in the therapeutics of hysteria. Twenty-five years ago, M. Burq affirmed that the application to the skin of certain metals, as gold, silver, copper, or zinc, would cure neuralgias, headaches, and paralyses, but no one thought of making a scientific verification of his novel assertion. M. Burq passed out of notice, but continued to maintain that the treatment of nervous diseases with metals would lead to marvelous cures. He might, however, have preached in the desert till the end of his days, had it not occurred to M. Charcot to make a test of some of his experiments. He found that M. Burq's representations were correct, at least in part. Though the application of metals gives only moderate results in many nervous diseases, it is nevertheless true that in hysteria, and particularly in anæsthetic hysteria, it is attended with singular modifications in the symptoms. The application of pieces of gold or silver or other metal upon the insensible region is sufficient to produce a complete restoration of sensibility in the course of a few hours. Some patients are cured with gold, others with silver, others with zinc or copper. This process of treatment, which consists in the application of pieces of metal to the skin, is called metallotherapy.
Strange as these facts may appear, they have been verified too many times in France and other countries to permit us to call them in question. Additional researches have disclosed the manner in which
