Gentlemen,—I have three important duties to perform this afternoon. The first is once again to offer you a most hearty welcome to the City of York and to the Retreat. The second duty is an equally pleasurable one, namely, to thank you, from the depths of my inner consciousness, for your courteous thoughtfulness in spontaneously offering to revisit York this year, in celebration of the Retreat Centenary, and for your great goodness in conferring on me, just before my retirement from office, the high honour of the Presidentship of our Association. The third duty, however, is more difficult; indeed, the thought of it has been ever present with me during the past year. The more I have thought of the best subject for a presidential address, and the more previous presidential addresses I have re-read and studied, the more difficult and onerous my task has seemed to me.

The subject of hypnotism has attracted great attention of late amongst the medical profession and the public. The accounts of its phenomena have sometimes been so extraordinary, and have bordered so closely on the miraculous, that intense interest was excited in them. As these statements were attested by men of science and of reputation, and as it was said that hypnotism had such enormous therapeutic possibilities before it, it was essential that serious attention should be given to the study of this subject by those interested in scientific medicine. This study was, however, commenced in this country with feelings of great distrust and reluctance, as it was notorious that for years unprincipled persons had imposed on the public by pretending to all manner of occult powers as mesmerists. They had so offended by these means the feelings of right-minded people, and had produced such a disgust of these phenomena, that many felt it was impossible to investigate hypnotism without contamination. In addition to this, discredit was brought on the subject by the fact that there were two schools in the field with opposing theories, observations and practice, whose pupils carried on a bitter warfare in the press. The most contradictory statements on matters of observation had been made by distinguished physicians, and phenomena had also been recorded which, if true, seemed to overturn the established laws of Nature and all our fixed ideas of things. In spite of the antipathy produced by these facts, one instinctively felt that underlying this mass of contradiction, absurdity and imposture, there lay important truths, and so, impelled by a mixture of scientific and idle curiosity, I paid a visit to the principal teachers in Paris and Nancy, to see with my own eyes what hypnotism was, and what use was being made of it. In the accompanying notes of my visit I have not attempted to draw up a systematic account of hypnotism, as this may be found in books, but I have merely given a plain description of the phenomena I myself witnessed.

As katatonia, “a mental disorder,” writes Spitzka, “well marked but not generally recognized,” has hitherto received but scant notice in this country, the following observations, based on the study of a group of cases which well illustrated its alleged characteristics, may not be devoid of interest.