Saturday. On Saturday she arrived with a cross countenance, presaging failure. The enuresis had come back again. I remembered my wise old woman, and asked: “When did the enuresis return?” She (unsuspecting), “Wednesday night.” I thought to myself, There it is again, she wants to show me that I simply must see her on Wednesdays too; not to see me for a whole long week is too much for a tender, loving heart. But I was quite resolved to give no help to such annoying romancing, so I said, “To continue the hypnosis would be quite wrong under these circumstances. We must drop it for quite three weeks, to give the enuresis a chance to stop. Then come again for treatment.” In my malicious heart I knew I should then be on my holiday and so the course of hypnotic treatment would come to an end. After the holidays my locum tenens told me the young lady had been there with the news that the enuresis had vanished, but her disappointment at not seeing me was very keen. The old woman was right, thought I.
3. The third case gave my joy in suggestion its deathblow. This was the manner of it. She was a lady of sixty-five who came stumbling into the consulting-room with a crutch. She had suffered from pain in the knee-joint for seventeen years, and this at times kept her in bed for many weeks. No doctor had been able to cure her, and she had tried every possible remedy of present-day medicine. After I had suffered the stream of her narrative to flow over me for some ten minutes, I said, “I will try to hypnotise you, perhaps that will do you good.” She, “Oh yes, please do!” leaned her head on one side and fell asleep before ever I said or did anything. She passed into somnambulism and showed every form of hypnosis you could possibly desire. After half an hour I had the greatest difficulty in waking her; when at last she was awake she jumped up: “I am well, I am all right, you have cured me.” I tried to make timid objections, but her praises drowned me. She could really walk. Then I blushed and said, embarrassed, to my colleagues: “Look! behold the wondrously successful hypnotic therapy.” That day saw the death of my connection
