George Cheyne was a Scottish physician, one of a parade of ambitious and talented young men who had moved south to make their fortune around the time of the 1707 Act of Union between the two kingdoms of England and Scotland. A wit and initially something of a wastrel, Cheyne had sought to build his practice among the socially superior by hanging around the London coffee houses, flattering his would-be customers, polishing his credentials as a modern follower of Newtonian notions, and eating and drinking himself to a gargantuan size. More than 32 stone, or almost 450 pounds at his peak fighting weight, Cheyne grew so corpulent that he could barely move, and so naturally set himself up as a diet doctor. Affluence and luxury, after all, set loose the appetites, and excess exacts a predictable price in expanding waistlines and that quintessential eighteenth-century disease, gout. Who was better placed to preach restraint than one who had experienced at first hand the perils of its opposite?
But Cheyne was also a man prone to bouts of depression and despair, blessed or cursed with the very sort of nervous temperament that his professional brethren were now making so much of. One is tempted to suggest that he leapt on the bandwagon, but leaping was, of course, not an activity George was actually able to perform. (By the late 1710s, forced to support his almost unsupportable bulk, his legs “broke out all over in scorbutick ulcers” and he confessed that, “if I had but an hundred paces to walk, I was oblig’d to have a servant following me with a Stool to sit on.”1) His own mental anguish, however, had brought him to a certain sympathy with the hysteric and the hypochondriac, and his trolling for suitably affluent patients had already secured him at least one well-connected “nervous” patient, Catherine Walpole, the oldest daughter of the Whig grandee and prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, whose patronage Cheyne secured courtesy of the far more established physician to the aristocracy, Sir Hans Sloane.
4. George Cheyne (1671–1743) in 1732, a year before the appearance of The English Malady—a picture that flatters the corpulent diet doctor. (Wellcome Library, London)
Catherine became Cheyne’s patient in April 1720. Just 16, the young woman had come to Bath, like many of the jeunesse dorée of her generation, to partake of the waters, a remedy increasingly embraced by the leisured classes. But Catherine’s symptoms seemed more serious than most. She displayed an alarming lack of appetite, a propensity to vomit, and complained of mysterious pains in her side. Then there were “fitts” and faintings, mysterious swellings, and amenorrhea (quite possibly the result of malnutrition). “It was rumoured,” as Cheyne wrote to Sloane, that “disappointments [in love] had some hand in [her] original ail.”2 In time-honored fashion, the doctor sought to regulate the equilibrium of her system by encouraging her evacuations and the restoration of her menses, “wherein, I take a good deal of her Distemper to Ly.” (The excess of retained blood, he thought, found its way to the brain, and there prompted her hysteria.) Spa waters were observed to have a cathartic effect, and to these Cheyne added such purgatives as rhubarb, castor oil, and a bitter emmenagogue, together with lavender to strengthen her nerves.
Catherine’s mother appears to have been less than impressed than her husband with her daughter’s Scottish physician, and sought a second opinion from a more experienced rival, Sir David Hamilton. Professional courtesy prevailed, however, and Hamilton largely endorsed Cheyne’s prescriptions. At length, there appeared to be some progress—at least, Catherine began to menstruate. But her pains and debility continued, and Sir Robert wrote to Cheyne in the summer of 1720, lamenting: “Her severall symptoms are worse rather than better.” The patient herself insisted on moving from Bristol (whose cooling waters Cheyne had recommended) back to Bath, where he found her prone to repeated fainting fits, constipated by the opiates she had been taking, and convinced that she would have died had she stayed on in Bristol. By October, she seemed much better. Cheyne boasted: “She has had none of the Great fitts (which I call Hysterick) these 12 or 14 days. Her faintings are less frequent … [her] only Complaint … is her sickness after eating, which indeed is terrible …” A month later, bathing in the Bath waters had brought further improvement, and she was seen as “most miraculously recovered,” so much so that she promptly left for London for the “season” of dinners and balls that marked the coming of age of a young aristocratic lady.
Soon, however, Catherine entered a slow decline. Cheyne prescribed mercurial purgatives (which seems an odd choice of medicine for one so frail and inclined to vomit up her food), and combined these with a new course of Bath waters. Many of her more prominent symptoms seemed to abate, but he fretted nonetheless that she “lives all most on air and water, two thin Elements; she eats not food Sufficient to Maintain a Parrot.” Catherine grew emaciated. Her legs swelled. She became “totally obstructed.” Recognizing that she had “but faint hopes of … Recovery,” Cheyne first redoubled her purgatives, and then in despair indicated that he planned “to let her do just as she pleases, to attempt nothing … & wait till Nature has releas’d her, or indicated some thing that may effectually relieve her.” Nature apparently declined to indicate a way forward, and 18-year-old Catherine soon succumbed, dying at Bath in early October 1722, just a little more than two years after Cheyne had been summoned to her bedside.
So pronounced and public a failure with so prominent a patient might have been expected to inflict grave damage on Cheyne’s professional prospects. Not a bit of it. Cheyne was helped, of course, by the fact that patients and their families had lower expectations for medicine’s powers in the early eighteenth century. But his continued success had other sources as well, for the good doctor had discovered he had an unequaled talent for writing medical treatises aimed at a general audience. Writing popular books on gout, and on diet as the royal road to health and longevity, propelled Cheyne to an ever greater prominence over the next decade. When combined with his obsequious deference to his social superiors (in full view in his surviving correspondence with one of his more prominent “hysterical” patients, the Countess of Huntingdon), it brought him an ever larger clientele among the affluent and the nervous. Seizing the opportunity, Cheyne capitalized on his reputation to expand his practice to a quite remarkable extent.
Just as syphilis had been variously labeled the French disease (by the English), the Spanish disease (by the French), and the Neapolitan disease (by the Spanish), no one wanting to own so stigmatizing a disorder, so Europeans had been pleased to poke fun at the English as peculiarly prone to melancholy and what were by now seen increasingly as nervous disorders. Blackmore had glumly noted that one synonym for the “hysterical affections” was “the English spleen; since it has here gained such a universal and tyrannical Dominion over both Sexes, as incomparably exceeds its Power in other Nations …”3 It was Cheyne’s conceit to turn this reproach into an occasion for celebrating England’s national superiority, a superiority that then, as now, seemed self-evident to his fellow countrymen.
The English Malady, the most popular of all Cheyne’s guides to health, appeared in 1733, and only two years later was already in its sixth edition. In its pages, Cheyne loudly proclaimed that “nervous Disorders … a Class and Set of Distempers, with atrocious and frightful Symptoms, scarce known to our Ancestors,” were responsible for “almost one third of the Complaints” of the age.4 They were a commonplace—or at least, as he hastened to add, were a commonplace among “the People of Condition in England.” For the various manifestations “of nervous diseases of all kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers” were the unlucky province of the social elite: the urbane, the cultivated, the refined, the delicate. Sensibility, after all, was a quality of the civilized—indeed of the quality. It was absent among hoi polloi, for the lower orders were like wood, dull, essentially unfeeling creatures, and “Fools, weak or stupid Persons, heavy and dull Souls, are seldom troubled with Vapours or Lowness of Spirits”—any more than is “a heavy, dull, earthy, clod-pated Clown.”5 By contrast, the more refined, delicate nervous systems of the elite put them at risk of falling into hysterics and related nervous states, for it was those “of the liveliest and quickest natural Parts, whose Faculties are the most bright and spiritual, whose Genius is most keen and penetrating, and particularly where there is the most delicate Sensation and Taste,”6 who were most prone to such disorders. (No wonder that Cheyne was proud to boast that he ranked among their number, his own case being presented “at large” (sic—Cheyne was deaf to irony) in the book’s closing pages.)
Nervous diseases, hysteria most notably among them, were diseases of civilization. Their extraordinary proliferation in the higher ranks of English society, so far from being a reproach, was a sign of England’s global superiority over all its rivals. Among primitive peoples, “Temperance, Exercise, Hunting, Labour, and Industry kept the Juices sweet, and the Solids brac’d.” Where all was “simple, plain, honest, and frugal, there were few or no diseases.”7 But in modern times, the ambition for success in business brought “Anxiety and Concern.” Its achievement led to diversions and dissipation. Both betrayed the nerves, and brought with them suffering and prostration. It was England’s unbridled success, the triumph of its economic and social arrangements, that made hysteria and associated nervous complaints so prominent a part of its medical landscape. “Since our Wealth has increas’d, and our Navigation has been extended, we have ransack’d all parts of the Globe to bring together its whole Stock of Materials for Riot, Luxury, and to provoke Excess… sufficient to provoke, and even gorge, the most large and voluptuous Appetite.”8 The English climate, “the Moisture of our Air, the Variableness of our Weather,” did not help matters. But the true sources of England’s unwanted preeminence in the realm of nervous disorders were “the Rankness and Fertility of our Soil, the Richness and Heaviness of our Food, the Wealth and Abundance of the Inhabitants (from their universal Trade), the Inactivity and sedentary Occupations of the better Sort (among whom this Evil mostly rages), and the Humour of living in great, populous and consequently unhealthy Towns …”9 The “English malady,” in other words, was in large measure a badge of honor, not of shame.
There was, to be sure, not just a perverse national pride, but also a scolding, puritanical tone to some of Cheyne’s admonitions. “If Nervous Disorders are the Diseases of the Wealthy, the Voluptuous, and the Lazy,” he lectured his audience, “and are mostly produc’d, and always aggravated and increased, by Luxury and Intemperance… there needs no great Depth of Penetration to find out that Temperance and Abstinence is necessary towards their Cure.”10 The rich were upbraided for their “Gluttony and Intemperance in fermented Liquors, and … unguarded Leachery,” as well as other forms of “Excess.” Indulging in the richest and strongest foods, cramming themselves with tea and coffee, chocolate and tobacco, they simply transgressed the rules of healthy lives. Besides, they lived an artificial and contrived urban existence, replete with luxury and temptation, and dominated by foolish fashion. Foreign delicacies, imported to stimulate their jaded palates, encouraged them to overeat, while their sedentary lives left them bereft of exercise and deprived of sleep. Small wonder so many of them fell victim to nervous complaints: convulsions, faintings, dislocated speech, despondency, screaming, silence, laughter, or tears without apparent cause.
A number of his colleagues had made much of the claim that hysteria was a real illness. Cheyne loudly endorsed their views, contending that “of all the Miseries that afflict Human Life, and relate principally to the Body, in this Valley of Tears, I think Nervous Disorders, in their extream and last Degrees, are the most deplorable, and beyond comparison the worst.”11 One of his most eminent colleagues had once confided to him that
he had seen Persons labouring under the most exquisite Pains of Gout, Stone, Colick, Cancer, and all the other Distempers that can tear the human Machin, yet he had observed them all willing to prolong their wretched Being, and scarce any ready to lay down cheerfully the Load of Clay … but such as labour’d under a constant, internal Anxiety, meaning those most sinking, suffocating, and strangling Nervous Disorders.12
Yet the “Vulgar and Unlearned,” Cheyne commented with some disdain, compounded the pain and suffering of the victims by placing “Nervous Distempers … under some Kind of Disgrace,” regarding the condition either as “a lower Degree of Lunacy, and the first Step towards a distemper’d Brain”; or else as mere “Whim, Ill-Humour, Peevishness or Particularity; and in the [female] Sex, Daintiness, Fantasticalness, or Coquetry.”13 So widespread were these prejudices that Cheyne confessed that, in his own practice, frequently “I have been in the utmost Difficulty, when desir’d to define or name the Distemper, for fear of affronting them, or fixing a Reproach on a Family or Person.”14 Like Sir Richard Blackmore before him, Cheyne responded by insisting that the Brain was indeed involved, and not in any imaginary or metaphorical way: “the Disease,” he pronounced authoritatively, “is as much a bodily Distemper … as the Small-Pox or a Fever.”15
It was a viewpoint embraced enthusiastically by Cheyne’s patients, whose circle had by now expanded to include a duke, a bishop and the Canon of Christ Church, and a litany of lords and ladies, from Lord Chesterfield to the Countess of Huntingdon. Not only were they reassured that their sufferings, which others cavalierly dismissed as maladies imaginaires, were as real, as rooted in the defects of the body, as any the skeptics might name, but their illness was even a mark of distinction, a badge of honor. No more laughing at their misery, no more dismissing them as frauds or fakes. It can be no coincidence that over the last decade of his life, as he reported to his friend and publisher, the novelist Samuel Richardson, Cheyne’s income tripled, for his enormous financial success provided the most practical indication of the success of his ideas in the cultural marketplace. Insisting that their sufferings were organic and not their own invention, patients were as highly motivated as their entrepreneurial doctors to designate their disorders as genuine diseases.
The fashionability of hysteria and its cognates can as easily be traced in the persistent references to nervous complaints in contemporary novels, drama, and poetry. Umbriel’s address to the Queen of Spleen in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock provides just one example of a literary figure making fun of ladies affecting the “vapors” as a sign of superior sensibility:
Who rule the sex to fifty from fifteen:
Parent of vapours and of female wit,
Who give th’ hysteric, or poetic fit,
On various tempers act by various ways,
Make some take physic, others scribble plays.
Meantime, even so pronounced a skeptic as the philosopher David Hume could be found echoing Cheyne, avowing in his Treatise on Human Nature (1739) that “the skin, pores, muscles, and nerves of a day-labourer are different from those of a man of quality so are his sentiments, actions and manners.” Some years later, his fellow Scot James Boswell was so taken with the conceit that to be nervous was a mark of superior sensibility as to pen a whole series of autobiographical columns under the pseudonym “The Hypochondriack,” boasting there that “we Hypochondriacks may console ourselves in the hour of gloomy distress, by thinking that our sufferings mark our superiority.”16 (Obviously he had not been deterred by Samuel Johnson’s stern injunction to him: “Do not let [Cheyne] teach you a foolish notion that melancholy is a proof of acuteness.”17)
Dr Johnson was not alone in recoiling from the fashionable embrace of nervous disorders, the self-regarding and self-parodying culture where succumbing to sickness and morbid sensibilities became a matter of honor. Jonathan Swift prided himself on being “a perfect stranger to the spleen,”18 and his fellow Tory, the perpetually unwell Alexander Pope, he who once referred to this “long Disease, my Life,”19 nonetheless proclaimed on his deathbed, “I was never hyppish in my life.”20 However intent the hysterics and hypochondriacs were on securing validation of their illnesses from others, to put it mildly, not everyone was convinced that they had an organic illness, and were not malingering.
To be sure, the professional embrace of the nerves showed no signs of slackening. In the next generation, for instance, Robert Whytt, Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh, the leading center of medical learning in eighteenth-century Britain, devoted himself to the experimental study of the nervous system, and threw his prestige behind the idea that hysteria was indeed a disorder of the nerves. His skill at elucidating various properties of the nervous system, establishing, for instance, that nervous impulses could initiate movement independent of either the will or external stimuli (what he called “vital” and “involuntary motions,” and later generations would call autonomic and reflex activity), lent an authority to his pronouncements about the nervous origins of hysteria and hypochondria that they scarcely merited. For Whytt in essence could do more than gesture at a rag-tag series of “causes” for these disorders: worms, blockages of the digestive viscera, phlegm, improper nourishment, a presumed uncommon weakness or delicacy of the nerves, or the impact of strong passions—“horrible or unexpected sights, great grief, anger, terror [occasioning] the most sudden and violent nervous symptoms”—any or all of these might “throw a person into hysteric fits, either of the convulsive or fainting kind.”21
Whether the nervous system was conceived of as a network of hollow pipes, through which fluids flowed in a hydraulic system; or, as Cheyne suggested, as “Bundles of solid, springy, and elastick Threads or Filaments (like Twisted Cat-Guts or Hairs)”;22 or as a series of fibres or strings, it provided what Roy Porter has called an “alternative geography of anguish and action”.23 Often, that new geography placed the brain at the center of the story, but, as Whytt’s reference to the digestive viscera indicates, this was not always the case. At the very end of the eighteenth century, William Heberden preferred to emphasize the sympathetic connections between guts and brain, and the role of the digestive system in the genesis and the treatment of hysteria: “The nerves of the stomach and bowels have so great a domain and controul over the whole nervous system, and these parts are so generally disordered in hypochondriac and hysteric patients, that, in my judgement, the best medicines will be such as correct their acidities.”24
The very centrality of the nervous system in the regulation of all parts of the body (a centrality that would lead William Cullen, who was by common consent the most influential medical teacher at Edinburgh in the second half of the eighteenth century, to proclaim that “in a certain view, almost the whole of the diseases of the human body might be called nervous”25) meant that other geographies of hysteria might emerge in the light of its reclassification as a nervous disease (what Cullen had dubbed a “neurosis”). And so in the Victorian age it would prove. The protean reach and importance of the nerves meant something more: the proliferation of nervous complaints. At the dawn of a new century, Thomas Trotter proclaimed their unsettling triumph: “we do not hesitate to affirm that nervous disorders… may be justly reckoned, two thirds of the whole, with which civilized society is afflicted.” Worse yet, “nervous ailments are no longer confined to the better ranks in life, but [are] rapidly extending to the poorer classes.”26
From the very beginning, the emergence of a nervous etiology for hysteria had also raised the possibility of a new social geography for the disease. Hippocratic and Galenic theories, which had tied hysteria’s etiology to the female reproductive system, had suggested that it was a disorder only of one half of the human species. Yet it had not entirely escaped notice that there were men who exhibited comparable symptoms. The new doctrine of the nerves made it easy to extend the diagnosis to males, and both Willis and Sydenham had explicitly recognized the existence of male hysterics. For all that, women were still seen as contributing a disproportionate share to the ranks of the sufferers, a disparity that seemed easy to explain, for the female frame, and the female nervous system, were simply a frailer, lest robust version of the male. Women’s nerves were more delicate, their brains more susceptible to breakdown.
In Cheyne’s version of the consensus, nervous disorders were associated with “weak, tender, and delicate Constitutions,” whereas “those of large, full, and (as they are call’d) mastiff Muscles, and of big and strong Bones, are generally of a firmer State of Fibres”27 (and thus unlikely to display the symptoms of hysteria). “Soft and yielding, loose and flabby Flesh and Muscles, are sure Symptoms of weak and relaxed Nerves or Fibres,” as was “a fat, corpulent, and phlegmatic Constitution.”28 The gendered implications of such distinctions are clear, and yet, of course, the characteristics that revealed a predisposition to hysteria, while predominantly found among the female of the species, were by no means confined to that half of creation. But the males who shared these traits were, as was freely adumbrated in the literature, weak, effeminate creatures bereft of the qualities generally seen as appropriately masculine.
This sense of the hysterical male as somehow lacking, and the hint of homosexuality that lay mostly unspoken behind such portraits, was a trope that persisted well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, perhaps the quintessential rendering of the type was Wilkie Collins’s memorable creation, the feckless Frederick Fairlie, a central figure in one of the most famous fictional renderings of madness, The Woman in White. Mr Fairlie is introduced to us
dressed in a dark frock-coat, of some substance much thinner than cloth, and in waistcoat and trousers of spotless white. His feet were effeminately small, and were clad in buff-coloured silk stockings, and little womanish bronze-leather slippers. Two rings adorned his white delicate hands … Upon the whole he had a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look—something singularly and unpleasantly delicate in its association with a man, and, at the same time, something which could by no possibility have looked natural and appropriate if it had been transferred to the appearance of a woman.
Possessed of “a querulous, croaking voice,” he is hypersensitive to light, noise, even the residual smells of the lower orders who may have handled his objets d’art, and incapable of enduring any sort of mental upset or strain without threatening to faint on the spot. Lest the reader miss the point, we observe him “leering at the cherubs” who appear in “his matchless Rembrandt etchings,” and are informed by the family lawyer that “marrying and leaving an heir [were] the two very last things in the world he was likely to do.” Put otherwise, in Frederick Fairlie’s own words, we encounter “nothing but a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man … shattered … exhausted … prostrated,” and, as we have a multitude of occasions to observe, selfish in the highest degree—thus the veritable archetype of the male hysteric.
For the most part, the embrace of the nervous theory of the origins of hysteria, while legitimizing the notion of the male hysteric, had little obvious impact on therapeutics. A stress on diet, sleep, and exercise, and on diverting the mind, coupled with the standard remedies of traditional, antiphlogistic medicine—all this made for a therapeutic regime that differed little from what might have been prescribed a century and more earlier. Cheyne’s prescription for his friend Samuel Richardson was entirely typical:
I hope your Case is more Hypochondriacal than Apoplectic. I am for losing a little Blood once in 2 or 3 months, taking a Vomit some days after, drinking only Valerian Small Beer and Valerian Tea [for their diuretic effects]—the more the better of either—living on half a Chicken in Quantity of any fresh tender Meat (any Things else to fill Chinks you please), and drinking only half a Pint of Wine with Water and Small Beer a Day, using all the House or Abroad Exercise you can, keeping good Hours, and never applying [working] long at a time, and for Drugs only these [mercury] pills [to purge you].29
There was, however, one striking exception to this picture of a changed intellectual account of the origins of hysteria married to therapeutic stasis. First in Hapsburg Vienna, and then, when scandal threatened, in pre-Revolutionary Paris, a well-to-do Austrian physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, modified the doctrine of the nerves, and claimed to have discovered a new active principle at work controlling the body: one that he had mastered, and could use to dramatic effect. Employing his innovation allowed the nervous to be restored to the ranks of the hale and hearty.
In some mysterious fashion, there was broad agreement by the last third of the eighteenth century that the nerves ministered between mind and brain, possessing some of the attributes of both. They carried signals and messages to the brain, the sensations on which that organ depended, and in the opposite direction they carried its orders, and animated the machine that was the human body. As for the means by which these signals and orders passed back and forth, a variety of models and metaphors were posited. Some believed firmly in fibers, others in fluids. Some spoke of a nervous ether, others of a nervous electricity.
Mesmer claimed to have identified a different nerve force. Having earlier tried electricity and steel magnets as curative instruments (a not uncommon tactic at the time), he had observed, or so he thought, a related and more subtle power bearing some similarities to these, but unique to the human body, a property he began to refer to as animal magnetism. Here was a natural healing power, a “fluidum,” that provided a means of influencing the nervous system and curing all manner of disease. Its strength could be augmented and directed, for certain people (Mesmer himself, of course, prominent among them) possessed the ability to harness this mysterious force, even to transfer some of it from the outside into the body of the patient. That might occur simply through the force of one’s gaze, or through the laying-on of hands, or even through “passes” (the movement of the hands over the surface of the body without actually touching it). Or it could happen by sitting down at a tub filled with iron filings, from which protruded rods that the patients might grasp to access the stored magnetic energy.
Mesmer’s most prominent patient in Vienna was an 18-year old blind pianist, Maria Theresia Paradis, who, as a result of his attentions, announced that she could see. That those attentions might have extended beyond the bounds of professional propriety was only one of the rumors Mesmer’s jealous competitors circulated about him. Worse still, perhaps, Paradis discovered that her recovery from her presumably hysterical blindness was not exactly a useful professional move, as demand for her concerts fell sharply once she could see. Not long afterwards, she announced she was blind again, a relapse seized upon by Mesmer’s enemies. Within three months, he felt forced to flee the debacle, ending up in Paris.
Among the French aristocracy, especially the female aristocrats, Mesmer’s reputation as a charismatic healer spread rapidly. His house in Paris was overwhelmed by crowds of the nervous and the hysterical, seeking relief from their troubles and pains. The baquet (a specially designed tub filled with animal magnetism, whose curative properties were transmitted to patients via the iron rods that protruded from it) allowed for treatment en masse, and Mesmer soon hypothesized that the passage of magnetic fluid to large numbers rather than a single patient augmented rather than reduced its therapeutic effects. To accentuate the effects of the treatment, soft music was added (Mesmer taking a turn on a glass harp, which he apparently played rather well), and the good doctor dressed in a lavender-colored silk robe, and wandered among his ecstatic patients, brushing them with a long magnetized iron rod. On occasion, he magnetized oak trees and streams, and removed the whole enterprise outdoors. His mostly female patients swooned and swore they were vastly improved, while Mesmer’s professional rivals, seeing their wealthy patients flock to these séances, gnashed their teeth, spoke disdainfully of the quackish nature of his cures, and sought to discredit his gatherings as erotically charged and dangerous occasions.
At length, prompted by their complaints, the French authorities sought to outlaw Mesmer’s activities. His disciples, seeking to overturn the ban and confident of his cures, prevailed upon the King to set up a commission of the Royal Academy to adjudicate the quarrel. A distinguished body it was, too, numbering the chemist Lavoisier, the astronomer Bailly, and the American ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, among its members. “Animal magnetism,” they concluded, was a phantasm, a figment of Mesmer’s and his patients’ imagination, and his vaunted cures merely the product of credulity and suggestion. It was a verdict Mesmer bitterly resented, for he was every bit as convinced as other eighteenth-century theorists of hysteria and the nerves that he had identified a real physiological phenomenon, and that the magnetic force he mobilized was a genuine physical entity that worked by breaking up obstructions and reopening channels of communication in the recesses of the body.
5. A group of patients mesmerized by Franz Anton Mesmer himself in Paris, 1778. (Wellcome Library, London)
Resent it he might, but Mesmer and mesmerism were now branded as a species of charlatanry. That hysteria might perhaps be a disorder of the mind rather than the brain and the nerves, that there might be value in treatments that operated at the level of the psyche, were thoughts neither he nor his critics were willing to entertain. In the aftermath of the commission’s report, Mesmer felt compelled to leave Paris, retreating into social and professional obscurity. Yet, despite its official rejection, mesmerism lived on, and during Victorian times would enjoy a remarkable underground popularity among the well-to-do and the chattering classes, even while medical men dismissed it as a worthless anathema. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins were but two examples of those drawn to its rituals. But the mesmeric trance was a source of entertainment and mystery, only occasionally drawing the support of mainstream physicians, and those who ventured into its waters, like the London professor John Elliotson, were promptly ostracized and professionally ruined for their pains.
