A Study of Metabolism during Fasting in Hypnotic Sleep

Frank Sohn, on whom the following observations were made, was a hypnotic subject of Mr. Santanelli, a professional hypnotist. The boy had become so subjective that Mr. Santanelli proposed to keep him in a continuous hypnotic sleep for a week, without food or drink, and to use the seven-days sleeper as an additional attraction for his nightly exhibitions of hypnotism. Only two days before the exhibition began, Mr. Santanelli called on us and proposed to leave the sleeping subject in our care, and ~o allow us to make any observations we might choose. The time was too short to make any preparations for observing the loss of water and carbonic acid from the lungs, so we had to content ourselves with analyses of the urine, and making hourly observations of the pulse, respiration and temperature, and daily records of the loss in weight. Twelve of the students of the Western Reserve Medical School very kindly volunteered to watch the sleeper. The watches were divided into four hours each, two men being on duty together. The patient was so carefully guarded that it would have been impossible to have given him food or drink, or to have practiced any deception regarding the sleep. Mr. Santanelli claimed that only two weeks previous to coming to Cleveland he had kept another subject asleep for one week without food or drink, and he proposed to do the same in this case; but, as will be seen later, the hypnotist was disappointed. The subject was 19 years of age, 5 feet 10 inches in height, and weighed 129 pounds; hair, dark brown; eyes, grey; features quite regular, with the exception of a short chin; muscular development