Bradley, who was called in during Dr. Davis's enforced absence, agreed with the majority, that it was the wiser course to hypnotize the patient. During the trance Dr. Chandler introduced hypodermic injections of Republican concoction, the effect of which was that the patient expired in great agony, on the 5th of March, 1877.
"Imagine, if you can," he continued, "the grave responsibilities we are often obliged to assume. Surgeon-General Chandler and the Republican consulting physicians said, that Mr. Tilden's ailment was mortification from corruption, and that the herb never grew which by any possibility could cure him. The Democrats said that the Republican diagnosis was faulty, and that the noble patient had no fatal disease, but that the Republican prescription, like Lucretia Borgia's, was deadly and poisonous. While committees of visiting physicians were making their report upon the patient's condition, the disease proved contagious; it spread over all the country, and at one time it looked as if a national surgical operation was inevitable.
"An investigation of the causes which had brought about this grave condition became an imperative duty. After laborious researches, our leaders reported that several members of the Electoral Commission were obsessed and others were hypnotists; that by the induction of a trance they could obtain as complete sway over their adversaries as a magnetizer who deprives his victim of his mind without leaving any trace of force upon his body; that the press met similar obstacles, in its analysis of this strange power, as the chemist and physicist encounter in tracing animal magnetism in molecular solid, fluid, or gas; that this occult force resident in certain members of this commission was not unknown to scientists, ancient or modern; that Kapila called it 'akasa'; the Theosophists, 'astral fluid'; the Biologists, 'psycholasm'; Baron von Reichenbach, 'brain-waves' or 'psych-aura'; Cope, 'æsthetophone' or 'bearer of consciousness'; and Coues, 'biogen'; that the presence of this 'nervaura', in judicial, legislative, or political hypnotists, enabled them to become national mind-readers, clairvoyant, clairaudient, and to place the public into a somnambulistic trance whenever they desired to control a presidential election or to usurp unconstitutional
