An Experimental Research.
By John E. Purdon, M.B.
On the morning of the 4th inst., while making my round of the wards of the Station Hospital, Guernsey, a report was made to me by Private W–, aged 28, and by Private L–, aged 25, that occurrences of an unnatural character (sic) such as inexplicable knockings, and the presence, visible and tangible, of a hand, and the figure of a man, had caused them both apprehension and discomfort from loss of sleep.
The men being in the prisoners’ ward, the windows of which are provided with iron bars and the door of which is always locked, the key being in the possession of the sentry posted on the hospital gate, it was evident that nothing but an imposition on the part of the men, or a natural, but hitherto uninterpreted series of events occurring in conjunction with peculiarities of the nervous systems of human beings, whereby their normal expressions were modified, could account for the observed facts, as reported to me.
Being very familiar, from long previous experience, with a certain class of cases presenting symptoms of functionally deranged innervation, I proceeded according to my own method to investigate the subject, and to apply principles previously discovered by me in this field of research.
On the night of the 4th – 5th of January, I sat for some time in the room with the men mentioned, the light being turned out so as to leave the room quite dark, with the door locked, and the key in charge of the sentry. During that time I heard knocks several times, but I did not attach any special importance to them, my investigation so far being preliminary. On that occasion, I entered the ward, where the two men alone were confined, about 11.50 p.m., leaving it about 12.50 a.m., on the 5th of January. At that time the hospital was perfectly quiet, and the slightest sound could be heard. This hour I have found a satisfactory one for investigations, for the above reason.
Since that date I have spent a considerable part of each night, with two exceptions, in the ward with the prisoners, and I have made as minute a study as I could of the nervous equilibrium of both the prisoners, through the study of the blood stream and the variations of the circulatory apparatus. I am satisfied that the nervous system of the man W— is highly excitable; the cardiac control is very imperfect, the changes in the pulse tracings showing tha tthe slightest emotional influence or change of position finds itself registered through the abnormally responsible cardiac centre.
The opposite sides of the body present marked differences when analysed with the sphygmograph, th eright side also showing a decided dilatation of the pupil, the index of a want of proper balance between the antagonising muscles, the nervous supply of which is from different sources. This nerve strain, I may add, is one of th ecommonest signs of the neurotic temperament in the young soldiers of the present day, and the application of the principle upon which it depends, when generalised, is of great assistance in enabling one to understand the disturbing influence at the bottom of many, so-called, nervous complaints.
The second prisoner, private L–, though steadier in his circulation, is far from normal, the state of disturbance of nervous and hoemic equilibrium being exemplified by the fact tha the has lately had bleeding from the left nostril on three successive mornings, at the same hour, knockings in the room having been well marked the night before; an occurrence which may have been more than casual, for I have some remarkable records of epistaxis [nosebleeds] accompanying the expression of abnormal nervous activity with physical indications of the same.
I may mention that of these men W– showed indications of the arthritic diathesis [diathesis = a tendency to suffer from particular disease], the type being a mixed one, the lymphatic and the nervous elements being both well marked. The diathesis was also arthritic in the case of L–, the strumous [skin diseases] and the nervous types being evident in his case.
Private W– stated he had suffered from a form of epilepsy from the time he was five years of age until about five years ago. He noticed that the attacks became less frequent after marriage. Private W– was the son of a man who indulged in alcohol to excess habitually and who moreover had been born deformed.
It was thus evident that in both cases there was a strong disposition to abnormal nervous states, and I may add that there was a clear and connected story of prevision sadly and terribly verified in the case of W–‘s mother, while there was also an account of some appearance out of the common to the mother of the second man, at or after the death of her brother.
While making my preliminary enquiry a remarkable discovery was made, which complicated the physiological investigation undertaken to elucidate the proposed mystery. On the opposite side of the wall of the prisoners’ room was located a married couple, two most respectable people, an hospital orderly and his wife, the young woman presenting just those symptoms of derangement of the nervous system which are classed under the hystero-epileptoid type, but to an extent which, generally speaking, would be hidden from the eyes of all but those of the expert, except during an attack of insensibility with spasm, which occasionally occurred. There was an account of an early history of fright followed by a “fit,” and the continuance of similar attacks at intervals until after marriage.
I had, strange to say, had this case brought to my notice at the same time, and indeed shortly after the report was made to me that the men in the prisoners’ ward had been disturbed by something in the shape of a hand a week before, and by something bearing the appearance of a man with perfect features and form sitting on the bed, showing weight as a man would, on the night before; but it was not until I was engaged in my investigation that I noticed the dates in the two cases corresponded, namely two attacks of an epileptoid character on the part of the woman, at an interval of a week, and the appearance of the hand and the figure of the man on the corresponding nights.
It was very soon evident to me tha tI had the problem of the “medium” under favourable terms for investigation and I at once attacked it with the sphygmograph [measures blood pressure / the pulse], with the view in the first instance of furnishing indications of a possible rapport between the parties on opposite sides of the wall, who were unknown to each other, and in the second place of providing myself with a fixed record of the changes in the prisoners’ circulatory apparatus, or rather of the nerve centres directing such changes, (or perhaps I should more properly say permitting such marked changes through a deficiency in their correlation); the data so obtained to be used in the discussion of the problem in general terms by the application of general theorems.
These three cases are typical examples of the class I have been studying for the last ten years or so, whenever I have been fortunate enough to come across them .The young woman’s case is almost the exact parallel of one I studied in India, in which there was also a history of epileptoid hysteria with hauntings, visual and auditory, set up by the nervous disturbance consequent upon working a sewing machine with the foot, that and the vibratory motions experienced during railway travelling often causing mischief in the instances of individuals with unstable nerve tissue.
I should have mentioned that my female patient in the present study was much troubled by visions of people about her before she had an attack, these creatures appearing to her as real and solid as those of flesh and blood. She also presents at times very marked indications of unequal nerve tension on different sides of the body as shown by pulse and eye. She stated to me that she had been working with a foot machine for some time previous to her present symptoms, i.e., occasional hoemicrania with loss of vision, pain in the right side, low down, loss of consciousness, &c., &c.
To resume, I spent several nights at the ward with the two men mentioned above, and there could be no mistake as to the accuracy of the account they gave of the knockings, which were evident, though not very frequent, and which were of the same vague unlocalisable character so often heard by those who take the trouble to seek for them.
I may mention that there was a metallic sound often heard, which appeared as if it came from a portable closet in the room; the men themselves, who displayed great intelligence and confidence, (when once their fright was removed by their introduction to the rational side of the phenomena), telling me that the explosions were relatively frequent in that quarter; one of the poor fellows going so far as to theorise upon the analogy existing between the observed phenomena and those exhibited by the loadstone – he had in a vague way grasped the idea of an attraction between his or the other man’s body and the metal can.
All doubt in my mind as to the genuineness of the knocks being set at rest by my own repeated observation in the locked room with the sentry on the door, and the ward over head cleared so as to avoid noise, and the observations, moreover, being carried on in the night time for the same reason, and from the fact that the knocks were periodic in their advent, coming on about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I set the men to observe, and report to me all they could hear or see. Their account was strictly in accordance with all I have learned from the best sources with regard to the nature of the same phenomena.
During the ten days that my observations continued, I took many scores of traces with the sphygmograph finding the likenesses between the curve of Private W– and the young woman next door to be often remarkable. On one occasion I found that Private W–, Private L– and myself were showing the same pattern almost exactly. That night our neighbour was eliminated as a disturbing cause? for she was laid up with a very bad sick headache; this was the night on which the knocks were heard the loudest and most frequently.
My proposed explanation of the whole story as told to me by the men is, that in the production of the knocks, Private W– was primarily engaged and possibly Private L–. I have a slight support to this belief, because last night the knocks were nearly nil, possibly from the fact that twenty drops of solution of morphia were put into his evening medicine, for I thought it highly probable that such a result would be the consequence of its exhibition.
I must mention that just at the time the knocks were first heard, Private W– got an attack of muscular rheumatism, and I believe these nerve explosions are related to the same, that in fact they may be insome way related to that extraordinary disease chorea [involuntary movements].
The rappings did not indicate any intelligent manipulation in the background, though I must say that on several occasions when I was speaking to the men or offering explanations, a rap would be heard at an appropriate moment. This, it is easy to perceive, might depend upon, or be related to, an effort of attention on the part of the man, the motor response to such mental state expressing itself through an abnormal channel. If this view be regarded as tenable, the relationship of the case to chorea would be supported on grounds of analogy.
There is but one possible explanation of the appearance of the hand and of the man in the room, and that explanation is deduced from the general theory of representative images which I adopt, and into which I cannot enter now. On the two nights in question, the woman on the other side of the wall suffered from attacks of an epileptoid or hysterical character, which are always accompanied by disturbance of the visual centres in the cortex of the brain. The man and the hand were then, according to my views (from the physical standpoint) solid dreams, real things in space, the outline having been sketched by the woman and filled in by the man.
The sphymograph or pulse-writer, is an instrument, which by means of a needle moving forwards and backwards under the pressure of the pulse, and a spring (which restores the needle to its original position at the beginning of the stroke) combined with a slip of smoked paper moving forward at a uniform rate, presents us with a curved line, the rhythmic continuity of which is the sign which supplies with information as to the state of the pulse and the nerve centres governing the circulatory machinery. I have used the instrument almost entirely as an indicator of the psychical attitude of the nerve centres governing the circulation of the blood.
A word will serve to explain my meaning: I attached a sphygmograph by means of an elastic tube to a small steam engine, and by turning the fly wheel according to any jerking motion I chose, I had a certain sign of the chosen mental configuration presented to the eye, the elasticity of the tube of course entering as a necessary factor. Using my mouth in place of the engine, I could show the rhythmic contraction of various muscles of my mouth, &c., and perceive when there was a break in the curve from fatigue or mental confusion.
Now the conscious self working through volitional impulses, being exchanged for the unget-at-able psychical standpoint of the medulla oblongata, we see that we can in a vague and rough way trace a parallelism between a higher self and a lower agent of self, constructed on the same psychical lines, when we use the sphygmograph as an index and the blood as the transmitter of the pressur eof the heart under the varying guidance of the nere centres.
I was working with the siste rof two of the best known mediums in England, when, seeing the needle jerk, and the trace change its character as she said that a certain well-known figure presented itself to her mind’s eye, it flashed upon me that the sphygmograph might, with patient work and multiplied observations, be made to tell a vague symbolic story of the important change in the centres directing the change of rate of work in the body, and the relation that might exist between individuals when so engaged, as to have similar distributions of work-plan or work-image within the body. I have worked ever since with the hope of realising the possibility of that idea.
I am driven to adopt some such view, at any rate provisionally, from the results of my studies of these apparent nervous relationships during my charge of the Station Hospital, Guernsey; and I think that the application of the same hypothesis of interaction between nerve centres of different individuals so as to account for community of feeling, volition, and thought, is not insuperable; for the tensions which precede knocks, raps or movements may be regarded under other conditions as directed from one nervous system to another, so as to explode in the centre appropriate to the instrument of expression in another, to the neglect of the analogous instrument of the originator himself, a conscious or even subconscious knowledge of the operation being impossible to both parties, except as a secondary event from without, given as a representation of the external world through the agency of the senses. This, it appears to me, would follow from the accepted theory of consciousness as sensori motor in its essence; volition, with sensation and the perception of motion, being necessary to the individual man for the recognition of the fact that it is his act and his alonewhich he perceives from inception to execution.
In nature the joint products of two nervous systems may o rmay not come under the category of monstrosities.
The development of some of the ideas here advanced has, I believe, enabled me to recognise certain interactions between the nervous systems of different individuals at special times and under peculiar determining conditions. I have seen them in the case of friends and relations, and during the performance of those psychological experiments called “Willing.” I have also seen them, I believe, between nervous subjects in hospital and between doctor and patient, and lastly I have seen them, or rathe rthe above assumed (whether correctly or not remains to be proved by an extended experience) symbolic expression for them, in the identities I have found in the pulse tracings of individuals at other times as different as possible.
What these interactions may be, and what the class of physical quantities may be which represents them, I am not of course prepared to say; but considering the fact that all the cases presenting similar symptoms and histories which I have examined in and out of the army, have shown me the two sides of the body out of gear to an unmistakable extent, I am inclined to advance the hypothesis that a physical disturbance of a rotational character is propagated through space from the body of the individual in a state of strain, and that there may thereby be a reasonable analogy to the acknowledged principles of magneto-electric action at a distance, but vastly more complex in its study from the fact that the polar instrument and source of energy are within the same body, the transmitting medium being in addition a form not alone of sensuous, but of even a more radical intuition.
The Spiritualist, 20th January 1882.