Faria's downfall was spectacular and probably unfair. An actor pretended to be mesmerized by him and to perform some of the clairvoyant feats typical of the time. In the middle of the performance, he opened his eyes and denounced Faria to the audience as a fraud. It was unfairly assumed that if one subject could fake it, all the others were frauds too. The ruse did the actor's career no harm, because he gained the lead part in a popular farce called Magnetismomania, written by Jules Vernet, in which he played a mesmerizer who looked suspiciously like Faria. The abbé, though, was forced into retirement and died a few weeks later.
In every branch of science and walk of life there are people about whom you feel that if they had only lived longer they would have gone on to even greater things. In the early history of animal magnetism Alexandre Bertrand is one of these. When he died in 1831, in his thirties, he had already left a body of important work. He combined the scholarly caution of Deleuze and the insight of Faria. It was Bertrand, as much as anyone, who was responsible for the return of mesmerism from the provinces to Paris: the course of lectures on the subject he gave there in 1819 and 1820 were hugely successful, and forced the medical authorities to pay attention to the subject. Then in 1820 a magnetizer, Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy, who will later play an important part in the story of hypnosis, was invited to come and heal one of the patients in the Hôtel Dieu, one of the main Paris hospitals. The patient was a good subject and self-prescribed her cure. In 1821 the first well-publicized mesmeric operation was carried out in Paris by Dr C.A. Récamier.
Bertrand's first book was Traité du somnambulisme (1823), written more or less from an orthodox fluidist point of view, but by the time he wrote his second book, three years later, he had undergone a conversion, as a result of thinking more deeply about the work of Faria and his associate F. J. Noizet. In Du magnétisme animal en France, he argued that suggestion alone is responsible for the phenomena of magnetism, and that no fluid is needed to explain them. This explains, for instance, why subjects who merely believe they are sitting under a magnetized tree will feel the same effects and behave in the same way as those who are sitting under a genuinely magnetized tree. He made the rapport between operator and subject the central phenomenon of hypnotism, because it is rapport that makes the operator's suggestions effective, and he understood that rapport also explains why post-hypnotic suggestions work. The patient or subject, he argued, becomes open to the least suggestion of the operator, by word, gesture or intonation. Given a few more years of life he would have followed up these tentative speculations on the power of the subconscious mind to cause health and disease.
Dupotet conducted apparently successful experiments on mesmerizing his somnambule from a distance, but Bertrand thought they were badly set up, and argued that her entrancement was due to suggestion. At this time, there was generally uncritical acceptance of the marvellous phenomena of hypnosis. Bertrand was the exception – not that he didn't accept some phenomena about which we would be sceptical today, but he did at least carry out his own careful analyses of many cases of trance. As a result of his experiments, he came up with a list of what he saw as the twelve main phenomena of mesmerism:
Division of memory between trance and normal life
Time-distortion
Anaesthesia
Exaltation of imagination
Exaltation of intellectual faculties (e.g. hypermnesia)
Instinct for remedies
Prevision (seeing into the future)
Moral inertia (i.e. passivity in relation to the operator's will)
Communication of the symptoms of maladies
Thought-transference
Clairvoyance
Control by the subject over his own involuntary organic processes.
The sixth item on the list is literally just instinct – the kind of instinct that animals show when they find the right herb to chew when they are ill. It is noticeable, then, that he omits intro-vision (self-diagnosis) and medical prediction; he didn't believe that these were genuine phenomena, and argued that in most cases the subject showed little knowledge of anatomy, ascribed most ailments to ‘abscesses’ or obstructions, and proved incapable of predicting the course of serious diseases, only trivial ones. This showed, he claimed, that no actual prediction was involved, but rather that by autosuggestion the subject would manifest the appropriate trivial symptoms at the right time.
We have already seen that there were two main schools of thought about mesmerism at this time (with countless individual variations, to be sure): fluidism and animism. Although clearly closer to animism than fluidism, Faria and Bertrand effectively initiated a third school of thought: that suggestion is responsible not only for the induction of trance, but also for the phenomena of mesmerism. In due course of time, after a period when magnetism was again in the doldrums in France, their work would come to the attention of Bernheim and the Nancy school, and by this route would exert an enormous influence on modern thinking about hypnosis.
The French Commissions of 1826 and 1837
But the careful, quiet work of Bertrand was overlooked for a while due to the excitement of what was going on elsewhere, for instance with Récamier's famous operation on a magnetized patient. Then there were the show-stealing methods of Dupotet, who used to magnetize his patients in hospital by screaming at them to go to sleep. This kind of activity led to magnetizers being banned once more from the Paris hospitals. The pendulum was swinging either for or against the medical use of magnetism in an erratic fashion. In 1825, in order to try to put things on a sane and steady keel, a certain Dr P. Foissac persuaded the medical section of the Academy to appoint a fresh committee, especially to investigate the diagnostic abilities of somnambulists. Foissac offered to provide somnambules if they would appoint a commission to investigate the subject. There was some nervous debate as to whether they should proceed. The usual arguments were trotted out: Mesmer and de Puységur were quacks; the whole thing was faked; it was beneath the dignity of the Academy to investigate it; it had already been condemned in 1784. But a commission of eleven was appointed on 28 February 1826. The timing was right: where Mesmer had found few allies among really significant scientists, by the 1820s Laplace and Georges Cuvier were giving the science named after him cautious affidavits. Cuvier said, for instance, that two living bodies in close contact undoubtedly did communicate with each other through their nerves – that although it was sometimes hard to distinguish real physical causes from imagined ones, in this case something real was going on. Another eminent scientist gave even more explicit support to mesmerism. The 1820s saw the publication of the multi-volume Dictionnaire de Médecine, a work of exemplary respectability. The article on magnetism was written by Dr L. Rostan. To everyone's surprise, he showed himself to be a believer in the reality of magnetic sleep, and even described his own successful experiment in clairvoyance.
The commissioners started with Céline, Foissac's somnambule, but obtained no worthwhile results. They then tested magnetism on some patients in the hospitals, until the General Council reminded them that magnetism in the Paris hospitals was still forbidden. Starved for suitable subjects on whom to experiment, the inquiry dragged on for another five years, and even after all that time only about a dozen people were tested. None of the commissioners could himself mesmerize, so they had to rely on Foissac and Dupotet, who selected their subjects for their sensational effects. In the end, then, the committee, guided by these two enthusiasts, shifted its focus on to paranormal phenomena rather than therapeutic value, and overlooked Bertrand in favour of fluidism. They assumed that a certain something is passed from operator to subject and therefore looked for proof of this something. They found such proof not only when the operator was in physical contact with his subject, or made close hand passes, but occasionally in telepathic hypnosis as well. The kinds of paranormal and supernormal phenomena which they ratified were feats of abnormal strength, prediction of epileptic fits, diagnosis of oneself and others. The report was favourable to
mesmerism. When it was presented to the Academy, some wanted to discuss it, but it was forced through on the credibility of the commissioners. This report is often cited by mesmeric enthusiasts later in the nineteenth century as a vindication of their practice, but it is clearly unsatisfactory in many ways, and is not even representative, in that it ignored the kind of magnetism that was being practised by the likes of Bertrand and Faria.
One case covered in the report was that of Mme Plantin, who in 1829 underwent an operation for breast cancer while anaesthetized in magnetic sleep. The operation, by Jules Cloquet, was apparently successful (although the poor woman died three weeks later of ‘a diseased liver’ – perhaps the cancer had spread, since it is clear from the description in the report that it was far advanced), but in a fashion typical of the shambles surrounding this committee, the relatives refused to allow the commissioners to visit Mme Plantin for themselves, so that they had to rely on hearsay. They were present only at her autopsy a few weeks later.
These were the days before chemical anaesthetics had been discovered. You just had to grit your teeth (unless you were undergoing a dental operation, of course) and suffer. Under these circumstances, you'd think that the benefits of hypnotic anaesthesia would be obvious, and that any medical body worth its salt would investigate the matter. But the French Academy buried its head in the sand. The problem was the old one: the startling nature of the paranormal phenomena and the fanciful nature of many of the theories caused sceptics to concentrate on debunking these rather than focusing on what was important about mesmerism.
Consequently, in 1836 a Dr Hamard decided to bring matters to a head. He anaesthetized a dental patient and got a member of the Academy, Dr M.J. Oudet, to perform the operation. Discussion followed in the Academy, with many making the implausible claim that the whole thing was a fraud. Then another physician, Didier Jules Berna, offered to convince the Academy of certain facts about magnetism, principally somnambulism, insensibility to pain and the action of his unexpressed will on the subject as shown by the loss and restoration of movement or sensation in given limbs. A commission of nine was appointed. They concluded that magnetic somnambulism did not exist, that insensibility to pain was not proven, and that clairvoyance and sympathy between operator and subject were illusory. In a final attempt, Berna tried to induce clairvoyance in a different subject, but he failed. This commission's report to the Academy was, understandably, negative. Some protested that the issues required more than just a few hours’ work, on two subjects, but their voices went unheard in the general climate of hostility towards mesmerism. For roughly half a century, in France, animal magnetism was thought to have no therapeutic use, and its practice was entirely given over to showmen, and to exploration of its paranormal and mystical aspects.
For these aspects the Academy of course had no time. And they had good reason for their official disdain. In the wake of the 1837 report, C. Burdin, a member of the Academy, offered a prize of 3,000 francs to anyone, somnambule or not, who could read without using his or her eyes. This was one of the most common clairvoyant tricks of the time. The whole thing turned into a farce. Dr J. Pigeaire from Montpellier wrote to the commission about his daughter's clairvoyant gifts, and came, on their invitation, to Paris. He and his daughter gave public exhibitions, which were all successful, but when the commission insisted on its own blindfold apparatus being used, Pigeaire withdrew his daughter from the competition. Their public exhibitions continued, however, to public acclaim; even George Sand, the aristocratic but Bohemian novelist, attended and was convinced. Professor P.N. Gerdy decided to investigate Madamoiselle Pigeaire and found – why are we not surprised? – that she could not perform when her blindfold was taped to her face, but could when a little crevice of light remained. Burdin stated his conditions more clearly: if anyone could read with eyes open and in broad daylight through an opaque substance such as silk or paper placed six inches from the face, he or she would claim the prize. Dr Hublier from Provins entered his somnambule, but she was found to be a fraud before ever reaching the commission. When faced with the book she was to read clairvoyantly, she used to plead female indisposition or tiredness or something to get the room clear briefly, and then peek at the book while everyone was out. The use of spy holes was her undoing. A third somnambule of Dr Alphonse Teste also failed in front of the commission, and in the end no one won the prize. At this point the Academy decided that it need no longer concern itself with animal magnetism.
The whole history of the study of paranormal phenomena, whether spontaneous or enhanced by hypnosis, is studded with the same problem. There may well be people – just a few – who possess genuine psychic gifts. They never claim to be able to do whatever it is that they do with unfailing reliability. The appreciation and the proper study of such gifts is spoiled by the fakes and tricksters, who are in it for the money and attention. This puts the whole subject in bad odour not just with the general populace, but with the grant-giving bodies who might finance proper research.
Paranormal Titillations in Europe
Napoléon Bonaparte, we may safely assume, was a pretty hardheaded kind of fellow. But even Napoléon Bonaparte could succumb to the craze for paranormal mesmerism to the extent of consulting a somnambulist seer about the prospects for his first campaign in Italy. Just possibly, though, he did so cynically, or to raise morale, because we also hear of him dismissing clairvoyance. He is reported to have told de Puységur: ‘If your somnambulist is so clever, let her predict what I shall be doing in eight days’ time and which will be the winning numbers in tomorrow's lottery.’
Interest in paranormal mesmeric phenomena conquered Europe as effectively as Napoléon, and maintained its dominance in the absence of any opposition in the form of scientific research into magnetism. In both France and Germany it was common practice to magnetize a group of patients to find which one was the best somnambulist and then get him or her to diagnose the rest; the names of clairvoyants such as Maria Rübel, Marie Koch, Mattheus Schurr, Calixte Renaux and Prudence Bernard were as well known in their countries as their contemporaries Goethe, Beethoven, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas; the Vatican was flooded with letters from anxious bishops in Catholic countries asking for guidance on the matter. At the end of the eighteenth century, several books on mesmerism had been placed on the Index in Rome, but popular interest in the shows of itinerant magnetizers such as Zanardelli and Rummo, but especially the Belgian Donato (A.E. d'Hont) could not be kept down, either here or in other Italian states, by totalitarian measures such as this. The circumspection of the Vatican, however, meant that the therapeutic potential of mesmerism was the main aspect that was studied in Italy, by people such as Francesco Guidi and Pietro d'Amico, in the 1850s.
In other countries too the showmen and paranormalists did serve the purpose of keeping interest in mesmerism alive. In Holland, for instance, P.G. van Ghert's work with clairvoyance paved the way for later study of the medical applications of animal magnetism. Charles de Lafontaine travelled extensively in Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, lecturing and exhibiting; his work with psychic somnambules in Brussels ushered in the golden age of mesmerism in Belgium, and we will later see the crucial importance of his tour of England to the history of hypnotism.
Many of the stories of paranormal abilities among somnambules are hard to assess at this distance, because we don't know how strict the controls were on assessing the results. Even so, there is a fascinating mixture of gold and dross. Here are a few snapshots.
Prudence Bernard, one of the most famous somnambules of them all, continued to tour extensively in Europe, and to receive amazed acclaim, despite having been accused of fraud in Paris in the 1840s. She was subsequently investigated by Professor Wartmann of the University of Geneva. In tests she succeeded in moving a compass needle 45 degrees, apparently by sheer telekinetic will power – but then she was found to be wearing a corset whose busk was made of magnetized steel. In 1852 she took her exhibition to London, and then to Manchester, whe
re James Braid saw her. Her main trick at this time was playing cards while blindfolded. Braid challenged her, saying that he was sure she could see through gaps at the bottom of the blindfold. He suggested a more thorough blindfold, but she refused to comply. Prudence's flamboyant mesmerist, Auguste Lassaigne, hardly inspires confidence, since he trained as a stage conjurer before discovering – and marrying – Prudence. He felt he had a sacred mission, to spread the gospel Prudence revealed when hypnotized (for she also acted as a medium) and through her, a modern Joan of Arc, to restore France to the True Faith.
In Germany Dr Franz Nick's somnambule, Miss C. Krämerin, predicted the death of the king of Württemberg on 28 October 1816. The story goes that they tried to keep it secret, fearing official repercussions, but news leaked out and led to the merry sport of court officials placing bets as to whether she had got it right, or which exactly would be the day of death. It turned out to be a couple of days later than predicted.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 17