A generation after Perkins died, a totally uneducated rustic of New Hampshire, Samuel Thomson, took his place with an entirely different practice. His knowledge of medicine had been gained by watching old women prepare concoctions of herbs. With that as a basis, he developed an entire system of therapeutics. He made the great discovery that man was composed of earth, fire, water, and air. Earth and water were the substances of the machine, and fire and air gave it motion. Heat, he said, is life, and cold is death. The stomach is a sort of fireplace, or stove, and is liable to get foul or clogged and need cleaning. “All disease,” said Thomson, “is caused by some filthy accumulation and the art of curing consists of removing this undesirable detritus.” The obvious way was to chew lobelia which has a strong emetic power and, by use of other herbs, to keep the passages of the body clean. Thomson published a pamphlet on his discoveries and developed a most ingenious scheme for making money out of it. He sold the pamphlet with the right to use the preparations described in it for $20 and this sum gave the owner the right in perpetuity, but only for himself and his family. In addition, Thomson instructed practitioners, and he and his disciples formed Free Botanic Societies all over the country and sent delegates annually to great Botanic Conventions. Thomsonist practitioners numbered about two thousand in the 1840’s and constituted a vast majority of all irregular practitioners who made any pretense to science. Occasionally, a disciple died. Once Thomson was indicted for murder, but the judge having charged that there was no malice aforethought, Thomson was acquitted. True believers cried out that he was being persecuted as Harvey and Jenner had been and, by some occult logic, suggested that, as Thomson shared the fate of these discoverers, he was worthy to share their glory.
Thomson is important because he was the most successful of the nature-curers and, although he was ultimately discredited, his influence was powerful. When communists, and vegetarians, and other radicals, erected their systems of nature worship they took over the essential idea of Thomsonism, that nature in her primal state can cure all earthly ills.
Ten years after the beginning of Thomsonism, Dr. William Turner imported the theory and practice of Chrono-Thermalism which was originated by Samuel Dickson in London and was flourishing in France and Germany, Sweden, Prussia, and Denmark. The essential doctrine of this quackery is unusual. Most other quacks provide a single cure for all diseases, but Chrono-Thermalism discovered the great Unity, which transcendental politics and religions were also seeking, not in a panacea, but in disease itself. Dickson announced, in short, that the human race is subject to one disease, to wit, ague or intermittent fever, and that all other morbidities were only conditions of this single ill. At the end of twenty years, there were still three hundred Chrono-Thermalists practicing. There were, at the same time, three times as many homeopathists although they had been subjected to years of ridicule. Hahnemann, it is said, claimed that the true science of medicine began with him. His followers were classed among the Humbugs of New York in a book bearing that title and were ridiculed for the absurdity of believing that an infinitesimal dose of common table salt is capable of producing 895 serious and dangerous forms of drug sickness, and for prescribing the smell of a cork of a bottle containing salt and sugar in milk pellets as a cure. There remained, however, in spite of ridicule, the attractiveness of the homeopathic theory. There seemed a moral righteousness in having like cure like.
In addition to practitioners in specific systems, such as these, there were eclectics who chose bits from various systems, omitting orthodox practice and combining the herbs of Thomsonism with the waters of Hydropathy, and adopting simultaneously the theories of Homeopathy, Isopathy, and Chrono-Thermalism. The same thing exists to-day and suggests that there must be a large number of people to whom any eccentricity is attractive, and who are willing to combine the most incompatible elements, so long as none of them is orthodox. The same tendency can be observed also in politics and morals and religion, and a “debunker” of almost a century ago seems to have observed it very competently. Mr. Mencken could hardly withhold approval from these sentiments taken from Humbugs of New York: Being a Remonstrance Against Popular Delusion; Whether in Science, Philosophy, or Religion:
“But it were an endless task to enumerate the half of similar impostures which our city has witnessed; and if it were even done, it would be fruitless. While the reign of humbug continues, our citizens have neither eyes nor ears; and experience itself seems to have been lost upon them, though bought so dearly. Every year, and indeed almost every month, brings to our city some imported mountebank; some foreign or domestic humbug; each of which in its turn is greedily swallowed while the rage of novelty lasts, until another more clamorous, or more showy, succeeds it. Meanwhile, however, each of these acquires proselytes; and as fanaticism is constitutional, the same individuals, in many instances, deliberately swallow them all. Indeed there are gentlemen and ladies in this city, who have been successively gulled by Matthias, Fanny Wright, the moon story, and the Crawcours. They have taken the pills of foreign and domestic quacks by the thousand, with Lobelia, Cayenne pepper, and vapor baths. They have swallowed Maria Monk, abolitionism, and homeopathia; and are now equally busy in bolting down Phrenology and Animal Magnetism. These several humbugs having been disposed of, the same persons, and thousands more, will be prepared for still farther experiments in gullibility, ad infinitum.”
The general psychology of the medical quack and his victim is not specifically our concern. The points which have to be noticed in connection with blue glass cures, and rattlesnake oil, and sarsaparilla and whiskey tonics, and a thousand nostrums since driven under cover by belated legislation, are first their unorthodoxy and second the implication of miracles. The first point is connected with the breakdown of authority which went on in other fields. The connection is not so close as that between phrenology and the degeneration of Calvinistic doctrine; but it is at least illuminating to note that the criticism which attacked authority did not spare the learned professions. Among the intellectuals, lawyers and doctors were as suspect as divines, and more than one community signalized its departure from convention by refusing the services of doctors, and either established an unconventional system of curing diseases or “lived in accordance with nature” and needed no physician.
The belief in miracles, a superstition in a country preëminently Protestant, is itself a point of interest. The Catholic Church jealously guards its miracles,[1] and makes them the property of saints but, again and again, we find Protestants in unorthodox sects proving, by the occurrence of miracles, that their religion contains the whole truth of primitive Christianity. As the great miracle is the raising of the dead, the next greatest and most easily accomplished must be the cure of the sick. We constantly find this claim among the impostors. Because the miracle proving saintliness is so often the cure of the sick, any cure which is not performed by scientific methods soon comes to be considered a miracle and a proof of divine inspiration. From this idea, it is only a short step to religions which are based entirely on the cures themselves.
“De par le roi, Defence à Dieu,
De faire miracle en ce lieu.”
The significance of Friedrich Anton Mesmer lies precisely in this: that he was the first healer who never claimed any special sanctity for himself. In his own estimation, he was not a prophet inspired by God: he was a scientific discoverer. He was not a fanatic, but a man of the world.
The science with which Mesmer began was magnetism. Like Perkins he used magnetic plates. He was accused of stealing the idea of these plates from a Jesuit, Father Hell, and it is quite possible that Perkins had heard of these when he created his tractors. Trouble about these plates persuaded Mesmer to leave Austria, and, in February of 1778, he appeared in Paris as “the famous Viennese physician” and took lodgings near the Place Vendôme, charming a growing circle of friends with his wit, his beautiful piano playing, and his skill on the new harmonica. He charmed them also with a catchword as potent in its time as “
inferiority complex” is in ours. Mesmer’s phrase was “animal magnetism” and, although it was never itself fully explained, it explained everything else.
Mesmer cured. A committee of famous scientists investigated his work and refused to give him their approval. But modern investigators, although certain that his claims were exaggerated, cannot deny that cures did take place. Actually, Mesmer made a contribution to therapeutics with his discovery of the uses of hypnotism. He wrapped it up in an involved theory which assumes “a mutual influence existing between the celestial bodies, the earth, and all living beings,” and suggests the existence of a magnetic fluid passing through time and space from the healer to his patient. Nor was the mechanism of Mesmer’s cure calculated to inspire respect in the mind of a Lavoisier or a Franklin. But as the scientists repudiated Mesmer, the multitude, rich and poor, intelligent and brutish, flocked to him. It became impossible for him to magnetize, or hypnotize, each patient individually and he had recourse to a peculiar system called the baguet. In a setting of stained glass and dark draperies, with soft music, dim lights, and strange fragrances, Mesmer would place his patients in two concentric circles. In the center stood a large oaken tub full of bottles of water resting on layers of powdered glass and of iron filings, the whole covered with water. Each bottle of water had been previously magnetized by Mesmer. Each patient held a little iron rod, and all were bound together by a cord which looped around the body and passed back to the tub. The whole thing was a travesty of the galvanic cell but, as Mesmer and his assistants passed around the circles, directing rods to the point where disease was supposed to rest, or applying their magnetic hands to obstinate cases, patients cast away crutches, proclaimed themselves cured of cancer and other diseases, and often went into such fits of hysteria that a special salle des crises had to be provided for their recovery.
The cures of Mesmer were not, in themselves, influential on the course of American mind-healing. Hypnotism was. Mesmer had actually put subjects into a trance and, after the decline of Mesmerism in Europe—he undertook to explain his method in 1815 and quickly dropped from sight—Charles Poyen and other disciples made their way to America to exhibit hypnotic trances.
Oddly enough, skepticism in this country fixed upon the one thing which science was later to uphold, for the opponents of animal magnetism refused to believe in the genuineness of the trance. With Mesmer, the nineteenth century stood upon the threshold which it hesitated to cross—the threshold of the unconscious. It began an examination of the mind which was not to end until the unknown, the unconscious, was raised completely to the position of ascendancy. In its time, Mesmerism was largely a fad. The trances were often not real and the clairvoyance, fortune telling, location of missing objects, and prescriptions for cures, were humbug. As a piece of quackery, Mesmerism is chiefly interesting because it is a good illustration of an almost universal law, namely, that education, and even the possession of intellect, form no bar to the ravages of superstition provided it sounds scientific. In Providence, Rhode Island, factory girls, quack doctors, and unsuccessful grocers, not only believed in Mesmerism; they quickly learned how to duplicate its phenomena and how to draw in the yokels at county fairs at a dollar a head. But a contemporary report also assures us that one French professor of animal magnetism in the same city “seems to have gained over the faculties of physick and divinity”; and that, at Schenectady, the president and faculty at Union College “seem to have swallowed the humbug whole—some of whom have committed themselves in writing.” It was, in fact, Colonel William L. Stone, editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser and one of the analysts of the impostures of Matthias, who was most responsible for the welcome given to some of the most obvious charlatans among the Mesmerists. Toward the end of the 1830’s, New York was having at least two public exhibitions of Mesmerism a day and magnetic séances were being held “for the accommodation of private parties.”
Mesmerism, as a fad, ran a comparatively short course. Its decline is an illustration of H. L. Mencken’s thesis that no quackery is ever rejected by the American public until a more scientific sounding, but inherently less plausible, quackery is ready to take its place. In rejecting the hypnotic side of Mesmerism and turning to the bump theories of phrenology, the general public was as wrong as it possibly could be. It was as wrong, in fact, as George Eliot, and Richard Cobden, and Alfred Russel Wallace, and Abbott Lawrence, and Horace Greeley, and Henry Ward Beecher, and Metternich, and thousands of other men of education and achievement, all of whom believed, not indeed in the theory of bumps, but in the much better sounding theory of “faculties.” Among these were Amativeness and Adhesiveness and Ideality and Vitativeness, and Pneumativeness (or the tendency to take in air), Parentiveness and all the other fantastic categories of phrenology which have been utterly discredited by science.
Like Mesmerism, Phrenology was an importation into the United States. When the ecclesiastic authorities had put an end to the lectures of Franz-Joseph Gall in Vienna, in 1802, he and his pupil, Johann Caspar Spurzheim, began to spread the doctrines of Phrenology over the rest of Europe and, after the lapse of thirty years, which period seems to have been required in those days for a sensation to be made ready to cross the Atlantic, Spurzheim arrived in America and was received with a great deal of respect by intellectuals of Boston. “The course of lectures,” wrote Nathaniel Bowditch, in November, 1862, “was attended by a more brilliant company than have listened here to any other lecturer upon any subject whatever.” The death of Spurzheim was considered a loss to the intellectual life of America. His work was taken up by George Combe, a Scottish Phrenologist, who spent three successful years explaining the theories of his masters (and afterwards published one of the most entertaining and intelligent books ever written about the United States).
The scientific pretensions of phrenology were mingled with an extraordinarily unscientific method. Gall, who ranks well in the history of anatomy, especially for his localization of the speech centers, observed that monkeys loved their young and that the superior occiput in women slopes backward like the monkey’s, whereas in the male it is not so recessive: on this evidence alone he localized the maternal instinct. In fact, most of his discoveries were guesses, and had been made, as he himself says, “in a moment when the mind was favorably disposed.” Both he and his pupil, Spurzheim, would observe the actions and temperaments, either of their friends or of total strangers, and associate them with peculiarities in the structure of the head. When the skulls of Burke, the body-snatcher, and two or three other notorious murderers coincided at a certain point, the position of the brain corresponding to that point was promptly marked on the phrenological chart as the seat of the organ of destructiveness. The Phrenologists proceeded from the known to the unknown, but so rapidly that their deductions were almost always guesses. When Spurzheim, for example, found a lack of Ideality and a strong organ of locality in the perpetually wandering idealist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the guess was obviously not a good one. Yet it was claimed for Gall and Spurzheim that they did as much for the science of mind as Copernicus and Newton for the sciences of matter.
The principles of phrenology are extremely simple. Departing from Aristotle, who believed that the function of the brain was to temper the heat of the heart, the phrenologist assumed that both the mental powers and the sentiments of man can be analyzed into a number of natural “faculties.” Each of these faculties is seated in a specific portion of the brain. According to others, each faculty is located in two places and the difference in distance between the two is the measure of strength. The bump theory is of course rejected by all scientific phrenologists, but the line of cleavage between the scientist and the faker is very hard for the average mind to follow. We do not know quite what to say of the statement that “the heart . . . is recognized in the chin; the lungs each side of the nose; . . . the stomach the center of the cheek;. . .” and wonder whether it differs essentially from
“Just here the bump appears
&nb
sp; Of innocent hilarity;
And just behind the ears
Are faith and hope and charity.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Alfred Russel Wallace, looking back on the decades in which he had shared with Darwin the honor of propounding the doctrine of evolution wrote, “In the coming century phrenology will assuredly attain general acceptance. It will prove itself to be the true science of mind. Its practical uses in education, in self-discipline, in the reform treatment of criminals and in the medical treatment of the insane will give it one of the highest places in the hierarchy of the sciences; and its persistent neglect and obloquy during the last sixty years will be referred to as an example of the most inconceivable narrowness and prejudice which prevailed among men of science.” But on the 21st of April, 1927, Dr. John B. Watson, the behaviorist, wrote, “Phrenology passed out of the interest of scientific men many, many decades ago. Neurology is the science which has taken its place. . . .” Between the forecast and the epitaph it is hardly necessary for the unscientific layman to judge. There have been efforts to reconcile phrenology, usually under another name, to modern science but, on the whole, phrenology is now practiced almost exclusively on the boardwalk at Atlantic City and in obscure villages among the ignorant and the deluded.
The Stammering Century Page 38