Mesmerism in nineteenth-century England

BBC Radio 3, 24 October 1973¹⁵⁸

At the end of the eighteenth century and for more than half of the nineteenth, Europe was seized with an interest in the occult. For more than three-quarters of a century, books, pamphlets and articles poured from the press on the related subjects of trance, somnambulism, table-turning, animal magnetism and miracle cures. Human beings have always speculated about a life beyond the grave and about the sort of existence that lies beyond the veil of everyday appearances. Mankind has always set high value upon the significance of dreams, and the subjects of trances or fits have been invested with sacred dread since time immemorial. Witchcraft and sorcery are as old as society, and the magical power of thought has always held a strong fascination. In this sense, the occult interests of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are no more than a continuation of an ancient tradition.

Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about the way in which the Victorians continued and revived these traditional interests – especially as the avowed principles of the period seemed so much at odds with such beliefs, and the growth of large towns had done a great deal to destroy the social fabric within which occult practices had a natural place. To judge by the official documents of the period, encyclopaedias and so forth, the occult was dismissed as a regrettable survival of primitive superstition – something which would disperse as popular scientific education became more widespread. But, of course, it is easy to select as representative of the recent past only those publications which conform to modern ideas of what that past was like. In those periods which we regard as seedbeds of modern culture, we emphasize the work which appears to provide respectable antecedents for our own beliefs, and neglect and even suppress anything which looks like an embarrassing inconsistency. This process of retrospective editing sometimes applies to the work of a single man. The reputation of Isaac Newton has been artfully managed in order to shape him into the dignified ancestor of modern scientific rationalism. His interest in alchemy, astrology and the Hermetic mysteries proved so embarrassing to the historians who had chosen to appropriate him as the forerunner of tough-minded empiricism that they carefully omitted any reference to the million words he devoted to occult subjects. The truth is that these interests were part and parcel of the real Newton.

My point is that the historian of ideas cannot afford to be fastidious. As Professor Palmer has said, ‘The tendencies of an age appear more distinctly in its writers of inferior rank than in those of commanding genius.’159 For anyone interested in the overall complexion of a historical period it is necessary to plunge into the undergrowth of forgotten publications: the anonymous world of pamphlets and broadsheets. And in the case of the Victorians, constant reference must be made to the enormous periodical literature – a task now made easier by the heroic Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, a Mount Palomar telescope through which the night sky of Victorian thought can appear as a majestic panorama of genius and error.160

Although it is hard to find any mention of hypnotism or mesmerism in what we now regard as the orthodox writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the topic springs into sharp relief as soon as one turns to the unofficial sources. I propose to follow the fate of mesmerism after its arrival in England in 1785.

Franz Anton Mesmer, its originator, was born on the shore of Lake Constance in 1734. After studying philosophy he turned to medicine and in 1766 published his MD thesis on the influence of the planets on human disease. He was prompted to do so, it is said, by his reading of a similar essay written by Isaac Newton’s physician, George Mead. According to Mesmer, the human frame came under the influence of planetary motions through the medium of an impalpable fluid which filled the otherwise empty spaces of the universe. By the time Mesmer put forward this idea, the notion of an imponderable universal fluid had already gained wide acceptance, largely as a result of Newton’s own suggestion that the presence of such a medium might be necessary in order to account for the propagation of light, heat, electricity and magnetism. In his book Mechanism and Materialism in the Age of Reason (1969), Robert Schofield has traced the vicissitudes of this idea, proving that it received favourable emphasis in many of the later popularizations of Newton’s work. From 1740 onwards we get pamphlet after pamphlet advertising the importance of an imponderable fluid. Newton himself had suggested that this might explain the propagation of nerve impulses, and, if you look at the Croonian Lectures published by the Royal Society throughout the eighteenth century, you repeatedly come up against the idea that the hollow nerves were filled with a so-called ether, and that this weightless, elastic medium served to transmit the urges of the will down towards the muscles. On the assumption that the fluid which fills the nerves is the same as that which fills the void of the universe, it only requires a small leap of the imagination to conclude that the medium which links the mind to its muscles could serve equally well to link one mind with another. Mesmer took this leap, and, after making preliminary experiments with the therapeutic effects of magnets, concluded that the human frame was a reservoir of animal magnetism, and that through the medium of the ether one person could bring influence to bear on any other, without resort to metal magnets.

This is not the place to record the ins and outs of Mesmer’s career. The story has been accurately summarized in Ellenberger’s great work, The Discovery of the Unconscious (1970). The important point is that Mesmer encountered the hostility of the Viennese medical establishment and moved to France, where he started a thriving practice in animal magnetism. Throughout the late 1770s and early 1780s, mesmerism became a huge cult in Paris and throughout the French provinces. The subjects, clients or patients – it’s hard to settle on the right title – grouped themselves around a tub or bucket in which, according to the Mesmeric orthodoxy, the magnetic fluid would accumulate. Gripping iron bars plunged into the fluid, the subjects experienced every type of trance, fit and transport. Every effort was made to encourage a susceptible state of mind: soft entrancing music, drawn curtains, and the master himself stalking the salon in a magician’s robe. According to the faithful, all sorts of illness vanished under the treatment; there is a marked stress on rheumatic illnesses and on all those other disorders which have subsequently proved particularly susceptible to hypnotic influences. Schismatic culls were soon established, each with its own apostolic succession of practitioners. And in some cases the cosmic theory which underpinned the practice was used to promote a programme of radical social reform.

By 1784 Mesmer had aroused the angry suspicions of the French medical profession, and a commission was formed to investigate the claims of mesmerism. The commissioners, among them scientists like Lavoisier and Franklin, concluded that the effects – some of them admittedly very dramatic – were due to the influence of the imagination; that is to say, the expectation of powerful effects was enough to bring them about. In other words, there was no need to invoke the existence of a mysterious fluid, at least not in this context. This form of criticism was reiterated from then on, and by the time animal magnetism had gained a foothold in England there was a well-established tradition of referring to the influence of the imagination, if only to counteract the claims of those who invoked the agency of the universal fluid.

Following the report of the commission, Mesmer suffered a personal eclipse, and although animal magnetism continued to flourish in one form or another, the figure of Mesmer himself now fades into obscurity. Meanwhile, the idea had crossed the Channel, and struck root in England in the year 1785. A French practitioner, one de Mainaduc, established a mesmeric salon, and by 1786 the topic was reported widely enough for the surgeon John Hunter to refer to it in his lectures on surgery. As one might expect, he felt that any effects would flow from the expectant imagination. Hunter said:

I was asked to go to be magnetized, but at first refused, because the spasm on my vital parts was very likely to be brought on by a state of mind anxious about any event [and] I feared lest [it] should be imputed to animal magnetism. But considering that if any person was affected by it it must be by the imagination being worked up by attention to the part expected to be affected, and thinking I could counteract this, I went; and accordingly, when I went, I was convinced by the apparatus that everything was calculated to affect the imagination.161

Writing in the same year, Joseph Priestley expressed the same scepticism and offered, by way of explanation, the same hypothesis:

With respect to what you saw of animal magnetism. All that I ever saw was a poor woman thrown into an hysteric fit. […] I have conversed with several persons conversant in the business, and have read a small publication, said […] to contain the true principle of the practice, and see [only] what is usually called imagination.¹⁶²

In 1788, when the magnetic enthusiasm was already at its height in England, a Bath physician, William Falconer, was moved to publish a long essay on the influence of the imagination upon the diseases of the body, formulating principles which could easily be applied to what was going on in the mesmeric séances of London and Bristol.¹⁶³ Twelve years later, Falconer’s friend John Haygarth had the opportunity of testing these ideas, not against mesmerism, but against a therapeutic novelty which was closely allied to it. In the 1790s an American called Elisha Perkins had introduced a pair of iron tongs – he called them ‘tractors’: according to him the magnetic influence set up by these tongs would, when drawn across the skin, alleviate any form of painful muscular or skeletal disorder. Haygarth insisted that this was a perfect example of what he and Falconer were talking about. The patients’ expectation of cure supplied all that was needed. Haygarth set out to prove this in what must be the first example of a blank clinical trial – one involving the use of a type of placebo. He obtained a pair of wooden tongs – that is to say, tractors which could have no possible electromagnetic influence – painted them with black lead to give them the appearance of metal, and then drew them across the patient’s affected part. The result was just as good as it had been with the real tractors.164

Ironically, Falconer’s caution did not extend to the spa waters from which he must have gained a large part of his living. He published a separate pamphlet on the subject of spas without any reference to the effects of the imagination, and yet pious expectation accounts for most, if not all, effects attributed to mineral springs.¹⁶⁵ It would be unwise, therefore, to over-interpret these medical theories of the imagination. They are not really contributions towards psychosomatic knowledge, but rather blunt instruments with which enlightened sceptics tried to put down any medical novelty which smelt, for one reason or another, of mysticism or superstition. None of the physicians who used this explanation in order to criticize the claims of mesmerism tried to explain how the imagination might wield its dramatic effects.

The odd thing is, however, that as far as mysticism was concerned, the theoretical justification for mesmerism was no less vague or mystical than the fluid theories which were widely favoured as explanations of electricity. Great scientists like Thomas Young were quite happy to suggest that the ether might serve as a medium for universal mental activity. In his Lectures on Natural Philosophy in 1807, Young says:

nothing can be more fit to constitute a connecting link between material and immaterial beings, than some modification of a fluid, which appears to differ […] in its essential properties, from the common gross matter of the universe, and to possess a subtility and an activity, which entitle it to a superior rank in the order of created substances.¹⁶⁶

For all its Newtonian ancestry, the theory of a universal fluid was a thoroughgoing example of occult spiritualism. In fact, there is evidence that Newton was drawn to it himself for that very reason. Far from representing a break with the mystical traditions of antiquity and the Renaissance, the introduction of an imponderable ether merely revived a well-established belief in the so-called ‘world soul.’ This tradition goes back to the Stoics, and perhaps further. The Florentine Neoplatonist Ficino describes this principle in words which practically paraphrase what Thomas Young said: ‘[The cosmic spirit] is a very subtle body; as it were not body and almost soul. Or again, as it were not soul and almost body. […] It vivifies everything everywhere.’167 As D. P. Walker has said, Newton’s speculations about the ether might become clearer if seen against the background of the long history of ambiguities and muddles generated by the concept of the spiritus or world soul. For this reason, perhaps, the English sceptics of the late eighteenth century were unimpressed by the Newtonian credentials of mesmerism. Not that they necessarily knew the extent to which Newton had been influenced by his readings in the occult tradition: few people did until this century. But they were probably suspicious of the mystical smell associated with the doctrine of an imponderable fluid, and, in spite of Newton’s great reputation, chose to overlook his seal of approval.

Henceforth the current of opinion about mesmerism divides on this very issue. Those who rejected the claims of the mesmeric fluidists did so out of hostility to the whole tradition of imponderable spirits, while those who embraced the fluid doctrine did so precisely because it seemed to continue a lost tradition of magic and mysticism. The sceptical tendency initiated by Falconer and Haygarth, by Hunter and Priestley, culminates in the 1840s in the work of James Braid, a Manchester surgeon who practised animal magnetism extensively, insisting nonetheless that the effects were mediated through the imagination, largely as a result of the unnatural fixation of the subject’s gaze. It was Braid who retitled the phenomenon hypnotism or ‘nervous sleep’ and who is rightly celebrated for putting the subject on a firm intellectual footing.¹⁶⁸

On the other hand, those who remained loyal to the doctrine of a magnetic fluid did so as part and parcel of their mystical enthusiasm for the great traditions of alchemy, astrology and the Hermetic mysteries. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s we find mesmeric theorists whose publications in favour of mesmerism are thinly-disguised Neoplatonist tracts. In the first full-length English work on mesmerism, published in the 1830s, J. C. Colquhoun embraces the idea of a universal fluid:

[We may assume] a very subtile and attenuated ethereal fluid, probably secreted in the brain […] acting under the command of the will169 […] the existence of a nervous circulation [seems to] render probable the external expansion of this […] fluid – an expansion […] supposed to take place with such energy, as to form an atmosphere […] of activity [like those] of electrical bodies.¹⁷⁰

He goes on to suggest that through the medium of this fluid the subject may be put in touch with the universe at large, entering into a mystical clairvoyant oneness. This idea was elaborated ten years later by the Reverend Chauncy Townshend, a friend of Lord Lytton. (Lord Lytton was himself a Rosicrucian enthusiast.) In his influential book Facts in Mesmerism (1840), Townshend exploits the fluid doctrine in order to advertise a thoroughgoing Platonism. According to him, the mesmeric trance, mediated through the magnetic fluid of the universe, released the subject from the blindfold of the senses. Here he is talking about the five senses: ‘it appears that the apparatuses of the senses are contrivances for blunting, not for heightening, the sensibility. They are masks, and careful coverings to instruments of too exquisite delicacy to be bared or exposed to the outer world.’¹⁷¹ Also, ‘There are evidently but two ways of perceiving objects; – the one by being present to them in their essential verity; the other by communication with them through the intervention of types or shadows.’¹⁷² This is little more than a summary of Plato’s image of the cave, where the prisoners are condemned to view reality in the form of shadows cast from behind. According to Townshend, mesmerism offers the chance of escape from Plato’s cave: ‘Separated from the usual action of the senses’ – by the mesmeric trance – ‘the mind appears to gain juster notions, to have quite a new sense of spiritual things.’¹⁷³ And as Plato suggested, the mind thus released from its prison of sense also gains a more accurate moral insight.

Townshend writes:

The great indication of this elevated state of feeling is a horror of falsehood, which I have found common to all sleepwalkers. Sincerity is their especial characteristics; they cannot feign or flatter: they seem to be taken out of common life, with all its heartless forms and plausible conventions.174

We will find this moral strain in mystical mesmerism taken up by other authors in order to exploit the radical social possibilities of animal magnetism.

A more extreme example of the same strain is found in the little-known work of Mary Anne South. Bom in 1817, she spent most of her life sharing the mystical seclusion of her clergyman father. She devoted herself explicitly to the study of alchemy, astrology and the Hermetic mysteries. In 1846 she published a short pamphlet on what she called Early Magnetism, explicitly identifying the universal fluid with the fundamental essences of alchemy. She saw alchemy, as its sixteenth-century practitioners did, as an experiment with the primal stuff of existence. The transformation of gold was simply a metaphor for the purification experienced in ecstasy and in particular during the mesmeric trance. In Early Magnetism she speaks of the magnetic trance as follows:

[It conjoins] the mind to its lost universality, and [allows] consciousness [to pass] regressively through its many phases […] to that long-forgotten life in reality […] passing behind the murky media of sense and fantasy [to behold reflections] in the brightened mirror of our own intelligence.¹⁷⁵

What we have here is a sort of indoor pantheism. With its emphasis upon higher forms of perception achieved by laying the five senses to sleep, the transcendental mesmerism of Townshend and Mary Anne South sounds remarkably like Wordsworth:

we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things.¹⁷⁶

Wordsworth paid no attention to mesmerism as such, but like the fluidists, he identified, albeit in a metaphorical sense, a spirit that rolled through all things. The mesmerists had simply conjured this mystical metaphor into a substantial reality.

It would be a mistake to assume, however, that all those who believed in the existence of a universal fluid were mystical spiritualists, or that all the nineteenth-century magnetists regarded themselves as the heirs of Plato and Paracelsus. In the 1830s and 1840s, another group of mesmerists appeared who turned the fluid theory to somewhat different ends. In order to show how this group came into existence, we must retrace our steps and show what happened to animal magnetism after its first appearance in England at the end of the eighteenth century.

Following the first magnetic craze, the vehemence of which should be seen in the context of some of the other millennial cults of the period – Joanna Southcott, Richard Brothers and so on – the interest subsided, and it is hard to find any significant mention of the subject until 1829. Presumably the war made it hard to bring evangelical reinforcement from the continent; in any case, its undeniable association with French radical thought would have made it politically suspect after 1793. Even so, it is hard to account for the long silence between 1815 and 1829. One can only suggest that the transcendental tone of mesmeric theory was at odds with English common sense, and that without the encouragement provided by a steady stream of charismatic foreign evangelists the English reverted to their characteristic indifference.

Meanwhile, the first significant revival began in 1829, as a result of five articles published in the London Medical and Physical Journal by Richard Chenevix.177 Chenevix was a chemist who had already earned a reputation on the basis of his work in inorganic chemistry. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society. It’s important to realize, though, that fellowship of the Royal Society is a much more impressive credential now than it was then. In fact, within a year after Chenevix’s articles, a group of English scientists, led by the mathematician Babbage, mounted a campaign in protest at the state of English science, pointing out, among other things, that the oddly mixed membership of the Royal Society reflected an alarming confusion of intellectual standards. In fact, the articles are undistinguished and simply repeat the well-known claims.

What makes them interesting is the way in which Chenevix identifies the discredited wonders of mesmerism with the equally incredible but nevertheless widely accepted phenomena of electricity and steam power:

In my remembrance, they have wondered at hydrogen and oxygen; at a dead frog jumping between two slips of metal; at gas-lights, and steam-boats; and now they wonder at all who wonder at those familiar themes. They would pity the wretch who would not instantly believe […] that the taste which his tongue perceives when placed between a piece of silver and a piece of zinc, has the same origin as the thunder which strikes his soul with awe.178

In the early nineteenth century, the cascade of new discoveries must have made it very hard to discriminate between facts and fantasies. In spite of the existence of the Royal Society, the scientific community had not yet incorporated itself to the point where it shared firm intellectual criteria for judging such matters. The next 15 years would see the establishment of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the publication of works like Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840) and Mill’s A System of Logic (1843), which helped to establish an intellectual foundation for science in general.

The flood of new discoveries in chemistry and electromagnetism made it easy for a tender-minded figure like Chenevix to claim that the facts of animal magnetism were on a par with those made known by Volta, Faraday and others. Curiously enough, Faraday was one of the men invited to witness Chenevix’s mesmeric séances: he dismissed what he saw, just as he later rejected the claims of the table-turning spiritualists. In fact, it was partly due to his experiences in these areas that he insisted on the importance of improving the quality of scientific education and of thereby protecting the illiterate susceptibilities of the general public from the ravages of mysticism.

Another witness was John Elliotson, a physician shortly to be appointed as Professor of Medicine at the newly-founded Hospital of University College London. This was the first intimation of Elliotson’s interest in a subject with which he was to be controversially associated for the next 30 years. Born in 1791 and educated at Edinburgh and later at Cambridge, he had an illustrious career, and although his reputation was somewhat eclipsed by his subsequent association with animal magnetism, he was so highly respected as a physician that he was accorded the honour of the Harveian Oration in 1846, eight years after his humiliating resignation from the University College Hospital. His early interest in the subject of sleep and trance is shown by the rapid enlargement of the chapter on the subject in his successive editions of Blumenbach’s Physiology.179

Of course, Elliotson was not alone in this. During the early years of the nineteenth century many authorities had become interested in the nature of sleep and in the related subjects of trance, reverie and somnambulism. However, in 1829 Elliotson expressed no more than a guarded interest in animal magnetism as such, and it was not until 1837 that he became an enthusiast. Once again, the change coincides with the arrival of a French evangelist – the Baron Dupotet de Sennevoy, one of Mesmer’s apostolic successors. For some reason, Dupotet’s public demonstrations fired Elliotson’s imagination, and with the Baron’s help he undertook the magnetic treatment of patients within the wards of University College Hospital. Fortunately, Elliotson’s casebooks have been preserved, so that it is possible to trace the growth of his mesmeric conversion. One by one, patients are switched from conventional therapy to that of magnetic sleep, induced by passes made by the hand in front of the subject’s face. But in almost every case the patients appear to suffer from what would now be classified as hysterical or functional illness. The most dramatic example of this is the case of two sisters, Elizabeth and Jane O’Key, who were admitted to the wards for the treatment of fits. With Dupotet’s assistance, the girls were put into a magnetic trance, and in the first instance at least, appeared to undergo remission of their symptoms. The improvement was short-lived – not because the treatment was ineffectual exactly, but because it was to the advantage of both practitioner and patient to maintain a self-repeating cycle of complaint and treatment. This doesn’t mean that there was any conspiracy or collusion between Elliotson and the O’Keys. Unconsciously, however, patient and practitioner satisfied complementary needs by their association in the magnetic relationship, and, in order to sustain this mutual dependence, the notion of cure gradually gave way to one of interminable treatment.

As with Charcot’s famous patients at the Salpâtrière, the hysterical sisters flourished under the special attention which their behaviour in trance excited. As the custodian of a dramatic medical phenomenon, it would not have been in Elliotson’s interests to cure and then discharge his colourful patients. Inevitably, therefore, the O’Keys became conditioned to show the signs which provoked Elliotson’s approving curiosity, until, by means of an unspoken pact, patient and physician were locked inseparably together. The next stage was equally predictable in terms of what we now know about patient-doctor relationships. Whilst in the trance, the sisters began to acquire some of the transcendental abilities associated with clairvoyant mesmerism. According to the reports, they were able to visualize their own innards, and, as the trance deepened, their clairvoyance extended to the interiors of other patients. Before long, Elliotson was steering them around the wards, where they claimed to be able to diagnose the state of other patients’ organs.180 In this respect, the course of events closely follows the career pattern of the shaman, in which, as Professor Ioan Lewis has shown, a phase of involuntary possession, during which the subject is treated as a sufferer, is followed by a phase of repeated voluntary possession, at which point the subject graduates in the eyes of those around to the status of a shaman capable of supernatural vision or insight.

It is interesting to note that the O’Key sisters were not altogether unfamiliar with visionary experiences. In his memoir of Professor Elliotson, the then assistant editor of the Lancet pointed out that the girls had previously been members of Edward Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church in Regent Square.¹⁸¹ The services of this sect were characterized by ecstatic interventions from the congregation, interventions in which the witness spoke in strange tongues – the so-called glossolalia. It is evident that the sisters were susceptible to hysterical fits of one sort or another, and unconsciously acquired the ability to enact them within a social context which assigned special importance to such behaviour. Naturally, the behaviour was subtly modulated in order to conform to the ideological requirements of the two sets of situation: in Regent Square they were Pentecostal prophets, whereas in Gower Street they became mesmeric shamans. Thus, as Professor Lewis points out, ‘The link between affliction and its cure as the royal road to the assumption of the shamanistic vocation is plain enough.’¹⁸² And in the case of the O’Key girls the course of events bears out his further thesis that such occurrences are frequently associated with socially unfortunate females, for whom the gradual assumption of prophetic power represents a fire-escape from a situation of intolerable social alienation. One is reminded once again of the miserable Miss Southcott.

By the spring of 1838, Elliotson was completely intoxicated by the situation, and the wards were in an uproar. He had become his own evangelist and was soon holding huge publicly-attended séances in the lecture theatre of the hospital. Fashionable London came in droves and he now set out to prove that the O’Keys were endowed with the ability to pick out mesmerically-magnetized coins and to see through walls.183

By this time the hospital authorities had become so outraged that they appealed to the Council of the College, who insisted that Elliotson break off the practice of animal magnetism and discharge the O’Keys.¹⁸⁴ Elliotson refused to obey, and resigned. During the last few months of the controversy he was ruthlessly mocked and criticized in the editorial columns of the recently-founded Lancet. Oddly enough, the author responsible for these attacks was a close personal friend of Elliotson, Thomas Wakley, a pioneer in medical journalism and a hard-headed radical who was obviously nauseated by the confused mysticism which he had detected beneath Elliotson’s apparent materialism.¹⁸⁵ The point is that Elliotson was claiming the discovery of a new physical principle. Unlike his Neoplatonist friend Townshend, for whom the mesmeric phenomena bore witness to the existence of a transcendental reality beyond that of the physical senses, Elliotson insisted that animal magnetism merely extended the frontiers of physical reality to include a principle which operated according to the Laws of Newton. Like his successor William Crookes, Elliotson was claiming the existence of a previously unacknowledged force in nature. Wakley, however, was not impressed, and after a humiliating experiment which Wakley insisted on conducting at his own house, he showed to his own – and I think one must admit to our – satisfaction that the O’Keys’ powers could all be accounted for in terms of the traditional five senses.

After his resignation from UCH, Elliotson did not retire hurt. He continued a prosperous practice and remained respected throughout the profession. His honesty had never been called into question. It is apparent from Thackeray’s portrait of him in Pendennis (1848) that he struck those who knew him as a man of considerable intellectual stature, and his intellectual stature was matched by his warmth and compassion.¹⁸⁶ Throughout the 1840s he edited and largely wrote a periodical called the Zoist, subtitled ‘A Journal of Cerebral Physiology & Mesmerism and their Application to Human Welfare.’ In Elliotson’s opinion, the study of the brain had stood still for at least 15 years, largely as a result of the obstinate refusal of the medical establishment to acknowledge the new science of mesmerism.

Other scientists agreed that the study of the brain had come to a standstill. In 1831, Sir David Brewster insisted that

While new sciences have been created, and every other branch of knowledge has made the most extensive acquisitions, the philosophy of mind has almost remained stationary. […] It has made no advances, and the whole of this extensive field, where experiment and observation might be so fitly and profitably employed, lies at this moment an uncultivated waste.187

According to Elliotson, the situation could only be repaired by paying serious attention to the phenomena of mesmerism. He forecast that the fruits of such research ‘may transcend in value and utility all that man has yet dared to hope for from science.’¹⁸⁸ The pages of the Zoist are filled with accounts of animal magnetism used to effect dramatic cures and as an effective anaesthetic.

Given that Elliotson’s assumptions are false or even meaningless, it is important to see what he made of them. He was convinced that the universal fluid existed, and that through its agency the brain could be brought to a state of unprecedented activity. If this heightened activity could be somehow perpetuated beyond the period of the trance, it might be possible to use cerebral physiology as a means for improving the moral and intellectual capacities of the human race. The millennial vistas were unlimited. ‘Who,’ says Elliotson, ‘does not catch a glance of a mighty engine for man’s regeneration, vast in its power and unlimited in its application, rivalling in morals the effects of steam in mechanics.’¹⁸⁹ In spite of editorial avowals, he was not really interested in descriptive physiology as such. What fascinated him was the possibility of engineering the improvement of society on the largest possible scale. Not through political upheaval, or by any of the radical manoeuvres which so alarmed the anxious liberals of the 1840s, but by improving the intellectual and moral faculties of the whole population. Before he became associated with mesmerism, Elliotson had been associated with Brougham’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, with the foundation of Mechanics’ Institutes, and with all those movements whereby it was hoped that social misery would be alleviated through the peaceful cultivation of the mind. In the light of these interests, the possibilities of mesmerism would obviously have been very intriguing. In place of the slow spread of useful and improving knowledge, improvements could now be pumped into society at high speed.

According to him, cerebral physiology indicated that certain people were predestined to exhibit socially unacceptable behaviour. They were victims of their own brains. But Elliotson, confirmed phrenologist and President of the London Phrenological Society, thought that it was possible to predict such tendencies by inspecting a man’s skull. By combining the diagnostic finesse of phrenology with the cerebral influence of mesmerism, Elliotson supposed that criminal behaviour might be nipped in the bud. Once the location of the constructive instincts had been defined, these could be encouraged to the point where their heightened activity would outweigh any tendencies towards theft or murder. Prisons would be replaced by preventive clinics run on phreno-mesmeric lines.

Elliotson’s utopian materialism found an echo in the work of Harriet Martineau. For someone devoted as she was to Comtean positivism – she was responsible for the first English translation of Comte – the utopian programme of mesmerism would have held an obvious appeal.190 Miss Martineau arrived at her interest through the personal joy of a mesmeric cure. In 1839, while travelling abroad, this odd Unitarian blue-stocking suffered what sounds like a profound nervous depression, combined with a prolapsed uterus, which, as she wrote, consigned her ‘to a life passed between my bed and my sofa.’¹⁹¹ Lord Lytton recommended the use of mesmerism, and after a consultation with Spencer Hall, a travelling magnetist, she experienced the following: ‘Something [diffused] itself through the atmosphere, – not like smoke, nor steam, nor haze – but most like a clear twilight, closing in from the windows and down from the ceiling and in which one object after another melted away.’¹⁹² She added: ‘[An] improved composure of nerves and spirit has followed upon every mesmeric exhilaration.’¹⁹³ She wrote five long letters to the Athenaeum and these were published as a single volume, entitled Letters on Mesmerism (1844).¹⁹⁴ She became interested in the wider implications of animal magnetism, and, like Elliotson, Townshend and the others, emphasized its moral virtues: ‘As far as I have any means of judging, the highest faculties are seen in their utmost perfection during the mesmeric sleep.’¹⁹⁵

Nearly all mesmeric propaganda lays the same emphasis on the high spiritual tone achieved during the trance, and while this idea was partly introduced in order to offset the frequent accusations of immoral misuse of the new power, it is certain that the English mesmerists of the nineteenth century invested the subject with their highest spiritual hopes as they searched for certainties in a changing world. Hope springs eternal, it seems, and people are still searching. There is little to choose between Mesmer’s magnetic bucket and Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box: both rely on the notion that the universe is animated by a form of spiritual energy, whose exploitation will cure all.