Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  In other words, in a social context the reformist challenge of mesmerism was not strong enough to overcome the normal Victorian prejudices and assumptions. The chain of volition went one way only, downhill. As a popular ballad of the 1840s has it:

  The new Mesmeric sleep is by

  Phrenologists directable.

  They oft begin it on a boy,

  Amusing the respectable.

  Upon the rich it comes not o'er,

  They're not to it susceptible.

  They only Mesmerize the poor

  To please the more respectable.

  While many mesmerists felt themselves to be radicals, then, and even to be ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity on earth, they did not offer a strong enough challenge to the Victorian status quo. In other contexts too the reformist possibilities of mesmerism were too ambiguous to take root. In therapy, for instance, it actually impeded reform. Through the introduction of instruments such as the stethoscope and methods such as percussion, Victorian doctors began to have the means to directly examine their patients’ bodies – but only if they could get them to remove their clothes, a breach of propriety which was repugnant to many. Mesmerism, however, with its emphasis on intro-vision and clairvoyant diagnosis, was safer and more modest in this respect. Feminists too were divided. Mary Wollstonecraft denounced London magnetizers in 1792 in her Vindication of the Rights of Women as ‘lurking leeches’ who invoked supernatural powers to exploit the credulity of ignorant women; but Harriet Martineau and Mary Grove Nichols defended mesmerism as one way for women to reclaim the rights to their own bodies.

  Prurient Fears

  So the normal inequalities of Victorian social life remained in place, largely unchallenged by mesmerism. Men were superior to women and children, the upper classes to the lower; this superiority is displayed by a greater strength of moral will, and will is the all-important instrument of a magnetizer. ‘By the exercise of this influence the operator can often overcome the voluntary power of the subject; that which he wills, the subject does … It seems as if there were two human organisms and but one human will whilst the subject is under the influence.’ Since this was the usual assumption in the nineteenth century about the way mesmerism worked, doubts about the morality of the enterprise were quickly translated from the Continent to Britain. Could one man take over the will of another? Could he force himself sexually on an otherwise reluctant woman? At one point in Peter Carey's excellent novel Jack Maggs, which is set in 1837, a hypnotist's lover feels herself aroused by his control of a dangerous subject, as if submission were in itself sexual. To take just one of many contemporary examples, although the writer Elizabeth Gaskell had very little to do with mesmerism, she was of course aware of it and what was being said about it, and it was precisely this aspect, the possibility of sexual dominance, that worried her and stopped her from investigating further.

  The operator exerts his will; because he is healthy, he transmits his health to the sick person (or whatever the operation may be). He can use his will to mesmerize a suitably sensitive subject from a distance. Even the passes a mesmerist makes with his hands were no longer presumed, except by die-hard magnetists, to do anything mechanically, but were simply means for the operator to focus his will and project his influence. Edward Bulwer-Lytton makes amusing hay with the idea of dominance in A Strange Story, to give an impression of one of his characters:

  Electro-biology was very naturally the special entertainment of a man whom no intercourse ever pleased in which his will was not imposed upon others. Therefore he only invited to his table persons whom he could stare into the abnegation of their senses, willing to say that beef was lamb, or brandy was coffee, according as he willed them to say. And, no doubt, the persons asked would have said anything he willed, so long as they had, in substance as well as in idea, the beef and the brandy, the lamb and the coffee.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was only following all this through to its logical extension when in his 1888 short story ‘John Barrington Cowles’ he said: ‘If there was one man in the world who had a very much more highly developed will than any of the rest of the human family, there is no reason why he should not be able to rule over them all, and to reduce his fellow-creatures to the condition of automatons.’ To Conan Doyle's credit he went against the nineteenth-century trend in making the evil and strong-willed mesmerist of his story a woman. And at least one novel of the time – Isabel Romer's Sturmer: a tale of mesmerism, to which are added other sketches from life, published in London in 1841 – gave a mesmerist the power not just to seduce women, but even to kill.

  Sexual fears were not helped by those like the eminent physician (unnamed in my source) who in delivering the Harveian Oration said: ‘The impostors called mesmerists were the especial favourites of those persons, both male and female, in whom the sexual passions burn strongly either in secret or notoriously. Decency forbids me to be more explicit.’ Similar prurient attacks occurred also in the Victorian quarterly reviews, the arbiters of upper-middle-class opinion, such as Blackwood's. But then the eccentric Baron Dupotet, who was indirectly responsible for much of the British passion for mesmerism, wouldn't have helped matters either by likening the build-up of magnetic force in an operator to a (male) orgasm:

  In his body all is in tumult. The force within reaches his skin, while his heart beats harder and harder, like a drum. When it reaches a pitch, his volcano erupts over the human landscape in an outpouring of lava and a whirlwind of sulphur. Behold! This is how you must use your desires, which are like a fire that glows and shines in you unseen. It is exactly like the act of reproduction, except that here the emitting organ is the brain … It is necessary … that a fire runs through you, that a kind of erection (which is not erotic) happens that allows an emission of the brain to depart from your being. Your hand must conduct this animated essence, this living magnet, to the chosen surface, and it must immediately establish the spiritual rapport and attraction proper to it. It is not the female organ that receives this emission … but purer and more active elements which the senses cannot see.

  Mesmerism and the Romantics

  I have said that in the early years of the nineteenth century the practice of mesmerism almost died out in Britain. But there were those who retained an interest in its theory, and many of them belonged to the Romantic movement. It was no impediment to them that mesmerism came to England tainted with the French Revolution – that was a positive plus. They saw Mesmer not as a great innovator, but as someone who had found a way to harness an immutable power, which might be identified with God or Nature. Like many mesmerists, the British Romantics had a millenarian streak, and thought that a new age of spirituality was imminent. Mesmerism was seen not just as a painless method of healing, accessible to all, but also as a means for contacting a reality higher than the mundane one to which humans had hitherto been condemned, and as a complete new science of life, the universe and everything. It was a new revelation, a new dispensation. It would help us to usher in a new age of peace and fraternity. For the Romantics, none of this meant that they were prepared to endorse mesmerism tout court, but they were certainly prepared to give it a hearing.

  One of the main sources of knowledge of mesmerism for the Romantic circle was Robert Southey's Letters from England, written in 1807 under the pseudonym of Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, in order to maintain the conceit that as a foreign visitor to the country he could be objective about its customs. Letter 51 is an ‘Account of Animal Magnetism’, which is in fact a summary of de Mainauduc's lectures. Although de Mainauduc was not quite an orthodox follower of Mesmer, he was a physicalist, and a great deal of Southey's Letter is taken up with a description of the cosmology and physics of magnetism. He explains how man is a microcosm of the universe, and that just as every part of the universe is giving off ‘emanations’ as energy is constantly circulated throughout its parts, so we humans emit particles too. The mind is superior to the body, and the will can direct these emanations as required.
Free circulation of energy is health, obstruction ‘must occasion derangement in the system and be followed by disease’. The theory and practice of medical healing through magnetism then follows, sometimes accompanied by details which reveal astonishing confidence:

  The pathology is soon explained. The impressions produced upon the fingers of the examiner by the stone, will be heaviness, indolence, and cold. Burns and scalds produce heavy dull pricking at first; when inflammation has taken place, great heat and sharp pricking, but indolent numbness from the centre. Rheumatic head ache occasions pricking, numbness and creeping or vermicular motion, heat if the patient be strong, cold if he be relaxed. Inflammation caused by confined wind produces intense heat, pricking and creeping; the heat is occasioned by the inflammation, the pricking by the wind acting against the obstructed pores, and the creeping by the motion of the wind from one part to another. Pus communicates to the hand of the examiner such a feeling of softness as we should expect from dipping the hand in it, but combined with pricking, from the motion which the wind contained in it makes in its endeavours to escape. Diseased lungs make the fingers feel as if dough had been permitted to dry on them, this is called clumsy stiffness. Pleurisy occasions creeping, heat, and pricking; deafness; resistance and numbness. Contracted nerves announce themselves to the examiner by a pressure round his fingers, as if a string was tightly bound round them; cases of a relaxed habit by a lengthened debilitated sensation, diseased spleen, or ovaries, by a spinning in the finger ends, as if something were twirling about in them. The impression which scrofula produces upon the practitioner, is curious and extraordinary: at every motion which he makes, the joints of his fingers, wrists, elbows and shoulders crack. Worms excite creeping and pinching; bruises, heaviness in the hands and numbness in the fingers.

  It is clear from Southey's account that part of the attraction of magnetism was that it purported to be a complete physical system of the universe, occult and therefore giving secrets to initiates. And in fact de Mainauduc's success in London was due in part to his being taken up and supported by a group of Swedenborgian mystics and alchemists. Southey thinks this is all ‘quackery’ and calls de Mainauduc's references to God and Jesus ‘blasphemy’, but nevertheless he did provide an account of mesmeric theory and practice which contained enough meat for his peers to get their teeth into.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a lifelong interest in animal magnetism, but could never make up his mind about it. Its influence on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is obvious:

  He holds him with his glittering eye –

  The Wedding-Guest stood still,

  And listens like a three years’ child:

  The Mariner hath his will.

  But after attending the lectures of J.F. Blumenbach in Göttingen in 1798–9, he was convinced that there was no reality to the apparent phenomena of mesmerism, and he deleted the more overt references to it from the poem, which was first written in 1797 and 1798. However, in 1817 he heard that Blumenbach had reversed his scepticism, and this reawakened Coleridge's interest. In 1820, in a note on Southey's Life of Wesley, he recorded how he had investigated ‘zoo-magnetism’ for nine years, had read widely and never passed up an opportunity to question eyewitnesses, and yet remained uncertain, ‘in a state of philosophical doubt’ about it, as he would say in 1830. The 1820 note carried on:

  Were I asked, what I think, my answer would be that the evidence enforces scepticism and a non liquet; too strong and consentaneous for a candid mind to be satisfied of its falsehood, or its solvibility on the supposition of imposture or casual coincidence; too fugacious and unfixable to support any theory that supposes the always potential, and, under certain conditions and circumstances, occasionally active, existence of a correspondent faculty in the human soul.

  He quotes the German botanist Ludolf Treviranus (1779–1864) who had said to him: ‘I have seen what I am certain I would not have believed on your telling; and in all reason, therefore, I can neither expect nor wish that you should believe on mine.’

  In 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem called ‘The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient’ (published ten years later in the Athenaeum). Shelley had been introduced to mesmerism by Southey's Letter 51, but also by Lord Byron's doctor John Polidori who was a practitioner and who was present on the famous occasion in June 1816 in the Villa Diodati when Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont competed to write a supernatural story – a game which gave the world Frankenstein. The first verse of Shelley's poem contains a poetic induction of trance:

  ‘Sleep, sleep on! forget thy pain;

  My hand is on thy brow,

  My spirit on thy brain;

  My pity on thy heart, poor friend;

  And from my fingers flow

  The powers of life, and like a sign,

  Seal thee from thy hour of woe;

  And brood on thee, but may not blend

  With thine.’

  When the patient – Shelley – awakens, the woman asks him for his own mesmeric diagnosis:

  ‘The spell is done. How feel you now?’

  ‘Better – quite well,’ replied

  The sleeper, – ‘What would do

  You good when suffering and awake?

  What cure your head and side?’

  ‘What would cure, that would kill me, Jane;

  And as I must on earth abide

  Awhile, yet tempt me not to break

  My chain.’

  The role-reversal – that the hypnotist is a woman and the subject a man – is remarkable for the time. In his Shelley Papers Tom Medwin, Shelley's friend, gives an account of the therapeutic experiments in 1820 out of which the poem grew:

  Shelley was a martyr to a most painful complaint, which constantly menaced to terminate fatally [kidney stones]; and was subject to violent paroxysms which, to his irritable nerves, were each a separate death. I had seen magnetism practised in India and at Paris, and at his earnest request consented to try its efficacy. Mesmer himself could not have hoped for more complete success. The imposition of my hand on his forehead instantaneously put a stop to the spasm, and threw him into a magnetic sleep, which for want of a better word is called somnambulism. Mrs Shelley and another lady [Mrs Jane Williams] were present. The experiment was repeated more than once. During his trances I put some questions to him. He always pitched his voice in the same tone as mine. I enquired about his complaint, and its cure – the usual magnetic enquiries. His reply was, ‘What would cure me would kill me’ … He improvised also verses in Italian, in which language he was never known to write poetry.

  Presumably, the enigmatic ‘What would cure me would kill me’ is a reference to the fact that in his day the operation for the removal of kidney stones was often fatal. In his Life of Shelley Medwin adds:

  After my departure from Pisa he was magnetized by a lady [ Jane Williams], which gave rise to the beautiful stanzas entitled The Magnetic Lady to her Patient, and during which operation he made the same reply to an enquiry as to his disease and its cure as he had done to me – ‘What would cure me would kill me.’ … Mrs Shelley also magnetized him, but soon discontinued the practice, from finding that he got up in his sleep, and went one night to the window (fortunately barred), having taken to his old habit of sleep-walking.

  Finally, on the subject of Victorian poetry, it is worth mentioning Robert Browning, whose rather obscure poem ‘Mesmerism’ was first published in Men and Women (1855). It explores the typical nineteenth-century themes of control and especially mesmerism at a distance. Browning was acquainted with Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was familiar with mesmeric theory and practice; but more especially his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, had agonized over the issues in the 1840s, eventually concluding that it was a dangerous practice.

  Although other poets dealt with trance (as Keats had in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, written in 1819), it is striking that those who wrote poems directly about mesmerism were more taken by its clinical potential than anything paranorma
l. At first blush, one would have thought that the more spiritual side of mesmerism would have been meat and drink to the Romantics. Perhaps they knew less about it; Southey didn't mention it in his Letter. Perhaps they knew about it, but were sceptical. In any case, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the fire of animal magnetism was barely kept alive by a few intellectuals. It was soon to be fanned into a raging inferno by one man alone, John Elliotson.

  John Elliotson

  In June 1837, Dupotet came over to England, undeterred by his ignorance of the language, to demonstrate the powers of magnetism. He was an arrogant man, slightly built and missing the thumb of his right hand, scion of a noble house that had lost its wealth and position, the author of a handbook on animal magnetism which is filled with purple prose, a practising occultist and magician who was convinced that he was ‘the incarnation of magnetism’, as he puts it at one point in his autobiography. One of his earliest converts was an eminent doctor, the senior physician at University College Hospital, London, which he had helped to found, and the author of one of the standard medical textbooks of the day. This man was John Elliotson (1791–1868), a mere five foot tall, with intense, intelligent features. For all his great fame and dignity, he was looked at somewhat askance by many of his peers because of his presidency of the London Phrenological Society, his championship of acupuncture, and his general eagerness to experiment, to look for new and better ways of treating patients. For instance, he was one of the first doctors in the country to use a stethoscope. On a more personal level, he was the first in his circle to wear trousers rather than the knee breeches and black silk stockings which had been the hallmark of the physician, and to affect side whiskers. These mannerisms were considered signs of eccentricity, but his undoubted personal integrity won him many powerful friends and admirers, including Dickens and Thackeray (he was the model for Dr Goodenough in Thackeray's The Adventures of Philip and Pendennis).