A writer waltzes into a Paris hospital and asks a doctor to act incredibly unethically and the medico eagerly complies, as reported in an article in the February 1, 1893 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which was originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette. An excerpt:

“The other day I wanted to include in a page of fiction a realistic description of the agonies that a starving person undergoes before death puts an end to the suffering. I had consulted several doctors and obtained from them statements of the symptoms preceding death from starvation. Still, I felt a description based on such information was wanting in certain particulars and could not well be put into the mouth of a supposed sufferer. Suddenly it occurred to me to go to the Hospital de la Charite, and beg the doctors attached to the Clinique Hypnotherapique to hypnotize one of the patients, to suggest that she was starving, and then to allow me to write down the sensations experienced by the subject as she described them. I called at the hospital unexpectedly and explained the object of my visit. The doctor smiled, and without a word sent for a patient, who was immediately put into a hypnotic state. Nothing passed between the doctor and the subject before she was hypnotized.

It was then suggested to her that she had been without food for many days and was actually starving. The patient soon showed signs of great suffering and distress and at the doctor’s invitation described the sensations she felt. I was astounded. A symptom that I had noticed in scores of cases among the starving Russian peasants last winter was described by the hypnotized woman with a physical movement familiar to me, although I had entirely forgotten it, and my attention had not been called to it by any medical man consulted.

The patient was taken by suggestion progressively through the stages of starvation as far as was safe  and was afterward brought back to a normal state on it being suggested to her that she had swallowed nourishing food. Still, it was some time before the food she had taken in imagination seemed to benefit her; she persisted in declaring that it caused her a great deal more bodily pain than the pangs of hunger. Dr. Jules Luys, member of the Academy of Medicine, the eminent professor at the Charite, was greatly interested in the result of this experiment, which was carried out for me under the observation of Dr. Encausse, his chief of the laboratory. He told me afterwards that he had known this woman for many years and was sure that she had not suffered from hunger.”