Hallucinations: or, The Rational History of Apparitions, Visions, Dreams, Ecstasy, Magnetism, and Somnambulism

First American Edition and first edition in English, from the Second Enlarged and Revised French Edition [1852]. Brown tooled cloth with gilt-stamped spine and pale yellow endpapers. Good copy, ex-library, with numbers to spine and usual marks. Front hinge and joint weak, rest of book in good state. xx+[17]-553+[7]pp. The first substantial psychiatric treatise on hallucinations, a term introduced to medical psychology only twenty years earlier by Esquirol. Believing they constitute a disease sui generis, Brierre de Boismont attempts to reclaim the subject for psychology from medical pathology. He discusses the occurrence of hallucinations in ordinary life, examines the hallucinations of dreams and nightmares and the their occurrence in animal magnetism, somnambulism, and ecstasy. The latter part of the book discusses the causes, symptomatology, and treatment. Widely read, his book "Des Hallucinations, ou Histoire raisonnée des apparitions, des visions, des songes, de l'extase, du magnétisme et du somnambulisme" influenced everyone writing about the subject after him. Translation of the 1852 revised second edition of Des Hallucinations, first published in 1845. A British edition appeared later in 1859 as On Hallucinations. Hunter & Macalpine pp. 1058-1062.…