od of recovery the carriers convey horrible images of fiery figures. It is
the carriers who convey the pain of rheumatism from the lost limb.
A man who was recovering from
typhus fever believed he had two bodies, one of which was tossing in pain on an
uneasy bed, and the other lying sweetly on a delicious couch. I am not disposed
to ascribe this hallucination to the duality of the brain, but to a conflict
between the recollection of his sufferings and the experience of his recovery.
If the patient should have been permanently unable to overpower memory by
reality he would have been insane, like the maniacs who believe their legs to be
stalks of straw, or their bodies fragile as glass.
Pictures have produced
hallucinations. Leaving aside the eyes of Madonnas, cases in which the power of
religious ideas come into play, I may mention another instance of their effects
on a mind keenly sensitive to the beauties of the fine arts. A French
physiologist, while studying intensely an English engraving of Landseer's
Horse-shoeing, smelt horn burning, and fixed the idea in his mind for the moment
that the smell came from the foot of the horse in the engraving.