Sleep and sleeplessness / Haydn Brown.

  • Brown, Haydn.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sleep and sleeplessness / Haydn Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    who were so advanced in neurotic and physical disorder that particular treatments — and even simpler ones—could not be applied, the patient not being in a fit condition either to understand or to carry out instructions; indeed, there are cases in which the patient arrives at such hope- less and black despair that they abandon all ideas of getting well, and decline to seek any further aid from anyone whatsoever. In such cases hypnotic influence prepares the patient to contentedly carry out what is best for their case ; it restores powers of self-examination and study. The hypnotic rest is the very best preliminary to natural sleep, the one passing into the other— the one permitting the other when otherwise impossible. As we have seen that sleeplessness is usually a symptom — that it depends upon various disorders which themselves require treat- ment—it will be understood that in psychical hypnotic influence we have therefore both a direct and an indirect treatment of immense potency, curing the symptom sleeplessness, but also to a very great extent aiding in the treatment of disorder or disease—which may be, as has been pointed out, so severe and so advanced and complicated that no other mechanical, medicinal, or even superhuman method would avail. Cases have proved this times without number. I have had patients who could obtain no sleep excepting under large and dangerous doses of drugs, but who have readily found rest under hypnotic influence. By means of the latter the brain is brought back to calmness, nerve tension is relaxed, and the power of sleep is restored, the