Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (27 page)

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 paranormal. 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.

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
).

Dupotet's demonstrations at University College Hospital (following a similar show at the Middlesex Hospital, at the invitation of Herbert Mayo) were not Elliotson's first exposure to the therapeutic possibilities of mesmerism: in May 1829 he had witnessed Richard Chenevix, a Paris pupil of the Abbé di Faria, at St Thomas's (where Elliotson had been working since 1817; he moved to University College Hospital in 1832), and his interest had been cautiously aroused. Nothing more came of this at the time, though, because Chenevix died and the climate in Britain, as we have seen, was such that there was little chance of coming across qualified magnetizers. But Dupotet soon swept aside Elliotson's caution, and Elliotson himself began to practise mesmerism at the hospital. Word of the results he was achieving spread fast throughout the medical community and London high society, but the practice aroused incredible hostility and invective. The story of the next few months reads like a soap opera of personal rancour.

Taking a step back, we can see that Elliotson's character was a major factor in the drama. He was an irritable man, quick to perceive or imagine a slight. For instance, within a year of the foundation of the Phrenological Society of London Elliotson had resigned in a huff and formed the London Phrenological Society (in March 1824). The
famous phrenologist George Combe, an Edinburgh lawyer, wrote to him in 1829: ‘Matters of very little moment appear to affect you as if they involved your whole existence.' Combe was undoubtedly right – but this remark also spelled the end of his long friendship with Elliotson. More to our purpose, Combe's remark can be seen as a foretaste of Elliotson's relationship with the authorities of University College Hospital and with Thomas Wakley, the editor of the newly founded but already influential
Lancet
, another of Elliotson's friends who felt himself forced in the name of science to turn against him. Until the crisis, Wakley had published the proceedings of Elliotson's London Phrenological Society, and Elliotson had been a regular contributor on a range of subjects.

Dupotet's experiments convinced Elliotson that mesmerism was a natural phenomenon with therapeutic potential particularly in diseases of the nervous system and to induce anaesthesia in surgical procedures. The
Lancet
reserved judgement, but in September 1837 published a substantial lecture by Elliotson on the subject and detailed accounts of various ward cases in which mesmerism had been applied successfully. Elliotson and Dupotet trained others, especially William Wood, who after Dupotet's departure became Elliotson's chief mesmerizer at the hospital, and his chief supporter in the debate against the hospital authorities. By 1838 Elliotson was devoting some of his time to public demonstrations, to the dismay of the hospital authorities. They were uncertain about the therapeutic value of the practice, but perfectly certain that opening up the hospital's theatres to members of the public was not acceptable.

For his experiments and demonstrations Elliotson made use of two of the hospital's charity patients, young Irish sisters called Elizabeth and Jane O'Key. The teenage sisters were inpatients of the hospital, diagnosed as suffering from epilepsy and ‘hysteria', which in this case meant that they were liable to fits, in which Jane, for instance, changed character from modest to aggressive. They were maidservants who had been brought to the hospital, one after the other, in the middle of 1837 by their doctor after he had read about Dupotet's experiments there and had tried mesmerism out on the sisters himself, with some success. He was encouraged to do so by the very nature of the fits, which ended in a restorative coma. The original idea, then, was that magnetic sleep would help the girls
quickly through the troubled phase of an attack and into peaceful sleep. Elliotson was also struck by the similarity between the apparent state of mind of the girls during one of their fits and that of a mesmeric subject; physically, it was reminiscent of the crises brought on by Mesmer and his followers, and the babbling, childish speech they came out with reminded him of somnambulistic talk. In January 1838 Elliotson decided to try to produce a fit artificially, by mesmerism, and was immediately successful. Both sisters proved good at manifesting all the familiar mesmeric phenomena – up to and including diagnosis of others, intro-vision (self-diagnosis) and clairvoyance (which Elliotson saw as hyperaesthesia).

On 10 May, in provocative defiance of the hospital authorities, who had already begun to ask him to curb his mesmeric activities, Elliotson demonstrated Elizabeth O'Key's powers to a wider public. Some, such as Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday, had seen it all before, since they had been invited to private displays, but this was the first time the broader scientific community was involved, and the banks of benches in the surgical theatre – a true theatre now – were packed. Elizabeth O'Key was put through her paces and the whole demonstration was a great success. The
Lancet
gave it a favourable review, commenting that O'Key could not have been faking, unless she were a consummate actress. Further displays followed throughout the summer, until all London was buzzing with talk of them, and the O'Keys had become celebrities equal to Elliotson himself. In later years ‘O'Key' became a slang term to refer, depending on the writer's proclivities, either to a clairvoyant or to a fraud.

Just like de Puységur's Victor, the O'Keys underwent a personality change when magnetized. As poor Irish maidservants, their usual modesty was to be preferred. But when mesmerized they often became on familiar terms with anyone around, joking with aristocratic members of the audience and making fun of Elliotson. Since supporters of mesmerism saw it as heralding the future of medicine (and in extreme cases the future development of the human mind towards a more holistic grasp of things), this ability it apparently had to release effrontery in the lower classes was immensely threatening to the educated upper classes who ruled the medical roost.

Elliotson's effrontery in defying the hospital authorities was equal to the O'Key's alternate personalities. The hospital tried to
undermine Elliotson's position by discharging Elizabeth O'Key, who was his best subject. Elliotson did not mince his words, but criticized his critics in the most strident terms. He kicked up such a fuss that the hospital ordered the complete cessation of the use of mesmerism in the wards. Throughout the debate, the issue was not the truth or falsity of mesmerism, but the prestige of the hospital: Elliotson, they felt, was bringing the institution into disgrace by advocating and using a disreputable practice. On Friday, 28 December 1838, despite considerable support from some of his colleagues and some of the students, Elliotson resigned from his official posts at both University College and the North London Hospital. He declared: ‘I shall never again enter either building.' He set up in mesmeric practice on his own – a brave move on the part of a man who had pulled himself up by his own abilities out of the lower middle class to rise to the top of his profession.

The hospital's hostility towards mesmerism was aided and abetted by Elliotson's former friend, Wakley. The
Lancet
had always taken a keen interest in Elliotson's work at the hospital, and its reports are very full and thorough. Most of them are too long to be reprinted, but here is a catalogue from a report of one of his lectures of 10 May 1838:

A severe case of periodic insanity, which had resisted all other treatment, was remarkably relieved by the operation of magnetism, on its second employment, and in a fortnight the patient was well. A child who had laboured under paraplegia and incontinence of urine during nine months, was perfectly cured by this agent. In a case of epilepsy in which a fit had occurred every day for nine months, the performance of magnetism at once arrested the fits, not one occurring during a month after its first application, and the patient went home well. In a case of delirium in a young woman who was subject to hysteria, … the patient, the second time that she was magnetised, became tranquil, and afterwards remained well. In a case of St. Vitus's dance, in which no other remedy was tried, magnetism effected
a cure. In conclusion he was enabled to state that a body of members of the Physiological Committee of the Royal Society had considered the subject to be one of such importance, that they had attended to witness its effects, and test its truth.