Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (28 page)

Some time that summer, however, sufficient doubts had entered Wakley's mind for him to set up a series of experiments at his house to test the genuineness of the O'Keys. The experiments took place in August. Elliotson first produced some powerful effects on Elizabeth O'Key by means of some ‘magnetized' nickel. Wakley asked whether he could do the same, but secretly the nickel was pocketed by a friend of his, Mr Clarke, and Wakley just made passes over the girl with lead in his hands, which Elliotson had assured him would have no effect whatsoever. Nothing happened until a Mr Herring, a stooge of Wakley's, said in a loud whisper, so that the girl could hear: ‘Take care. Don't apply the nickel too strongly.' At that point the girl displayed all the symptoms of a trance. Afterwards the girl left the room, and Wakley told Elliotson about the deception. The experiment was repeated, with the same results. Elliotson was puzzled, but confident that an explanation could be found. The next day further experiments were tried, and Jane O'Key consistently failed to detect or be influenced by wine glasses filled with water, or other objects, whether none of them had been magnetized, or one had, or all of them had. Her arm became paralysed by unmagnetized coins, while magnetized coins failed to produce any effect. Elliotson was clearly wriggling and finding excuses. He claimed, for instance, that even the lead induced a trance because the passes were made in the same place as the nickel had already been applied, reinvigorating the effects of the nickel.

A number of options were open to Elliotson. He could have joined Wakley in his repudiation of magnetism and apologized for having been misled for so long – but this was not likely. He could have abandoned the O'Keys in disgust, but persevered in his support for the benefits of mesmerism in general. Or he could have stubbornly persisted in believing that the O'Keys were genuine. This last course was the one he took. Along with the fact that he had staked his reputation on mesmerism, some of his stubbornness was no doubt due to the influence of his friend Townshend's book.
According to Townshend a mesmerized subject was incapable of lying. She occupied a pure, Platonic realm where Truth reigned and Deceit was banished. Some of it was also due to British class prejudice. The lower classes, from which the O'Keys definitely came, were closer to their animal natures, too naive and primitive to perpetuate such an elaborate fraud.

In a long editorial on 8 September Wakley announced:

Careful investigation and a consideration of all the experiments have convinced us that the phenomena are not real, and that animal magnetism is a delusion; we shall, therefore, lose no opportunity of extirpating an error, which in its nature, applications, and consequences is pernicious. How does the question stand? The existence of somnambulism, and catalepsy, and delirium, is admitted on all hands; and it is an elementary truth that one human being can affect another; that the whole system can be agitated in a great variety of ways, and driven into action voluntarily and involuntarily. But all these influences act through the senses; they are submitted to laws of distance, etc., and under the same circumstances, give rise to phenomena which only differ in intensity in different individuals. The mesmerists assert that the body can be influenced independently of the intellect, independently of anything that can excite the imagination; that in this respect it is like iron to the magnet, acted upon as an unconscious thing is acted upon, and thrown into mesmeric sleep, catalepsy, motion, delirium, by an unseen waive [
sic
] of the hand, a look, a sovereign grasped for a minute, or water in which the fingers have been dipped. Now, we never declared any of these things
impossible
, we never denied the possibility of
clairvoyance
,
allgemeine Klarheit
, or the prophetic power; but we demanded evidence adequate to the improbability of the alleged phenomena. And how great is that improbability!

And a week later Wakley went on:

The ‘science' of mesmerism, like the ‘science' of fortune-telling, will always carry on a precarious existence wherever there are clever girls, philosophic Bohemians, weak women, and weaker men, but it can no longer affront the common sense of the
medical profession, or dare to show its face in the scientific societies after the late exposure.

He then casts doubt on Mesmer and Dupotet, and praises the acting ability of the O'Keys. He suggests that they operated by detecting temperature differences in the metals and water which had been merely warmed by the hands supposed to magnetize them. When pasteboard was placed between Elliotson and Elizabeth, she could detect the shadows, whereas when a better blindfold was used, she got no results. He concludes: ‘O'Key [that is, Elizabeth, whom Wakley takes to be the ringleader], no doubt, in the first place pitied the believers panting for signs and wonders, which the slightest exertion of her will could produce; she desired to please and astonish her dear good friends.'

Wakley certainly went overboard. Rather than concluding just that the O'Keys were frauds, he dismissed mesmerism as a whole. His attacks must have seemed devastating to Elliotson. And his former friend never looked back, but continued the barrage for some years. On 11 September 1841, for instance, he reprinted from
The Times
Elliotson's account of Elizabeth O'Key's power of foretelling death in a fellow patient at the hospital with regret that such an illustrious newspaper ‘should be polluted by such odious and disgusting trash'. On 29 October 1842 he said: ‘Mesmerism is too gross a humbug to admit any farther serious notice. We regard its abettors as quacks and impostors. They ought to be hooted out of professional society.' On 22 July 1848 he described mesmerism an ‘odious fraud', and so on. As an ironical aside, we should perhaps note that Wakley never abandoned his devotion to phrenology.

More insidiously, late in 1838 Wakley raised the spectre of sexual malpractice in relation to mesmerism by recounting a tale, current in France, that a mesmerist had seduced a woman – and not just a common woman, but the daughter of a wealthy banker. Wakley, however, no longer believed that there was any such phenomenon as the mesmeric trance, so he maintained that the girl was duped by her unscrupulous seducer into giving way to him. He now characterized mesmeric passes as ‘indecent assaults' and the men who visited hospital wards to witness Elliotson's displays as ‘libidinous'. His thunderous conclusion was:

Mesmerism, according to its advocates, acts most intensely on nervous and impressionable females. What father of a family, then, would admit even the shadow of a mesmeriser within his threshold? Who would expose his wife, or his sister, his daughter, or his orphan ward, to the contact of an animal magnetiser? If the
volition
of an ill-intentioned person be sufficient to prostrate his victim at his feet, should we not shun such pretenders more than lepers, or the uncleanest of the unclean? Assuredly the powers claimed by Mesmer will eventually prove their own ruin. In endeavouring to raise themselves above ordinary mortals, they lay claim to attributes and powers which must place them, forever, beyond the pale of civilized society.

The charge of sexual impropriety was attached more personally to Elliotson in an anonymous pamphlet published in 1842, called
Eyewitness, a Full Discovery of the Strange Practices of Dr Elliotson on the Bodies of His Female Patients
.

By the time of his resignation at the end of 1838, then, Elliotson was under attack from two directions within the medical establishment, and certain members of the religious community were joining in with accusations of witchcraft. Indeed, the persecution of Elliotson does smack of a witch-hunt, and in retrospect we want to ask why mesmerism aroused so much anger. It would be comfortable to believe that Elliotson's medical peers knew that mesmerism was false and attacked it as reputable scientists. The truth, however, is rarely so clear-cut:

Why has some knowledge been accepted by the medical community and other knowledge rejected? Most historians of medicine have assumed that knowledge-claims are eventually accepted if they correspond to scientific truth, and rejected if they do not … In this view, rational scepticism or misguided opposition sometimes prevails for a short period after the announcement of a discovery – the classic example being the resistance to Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood – but in time truth prevails. In contrast to the heroes of science, purveyors of false knowledge are usually portrayed as unscrupulous charlatans or befuddled eccentrics … If, however, one looks critically at why certain knowledge-claims were rejected
by nineteenth-century medical men, one discovers that there are other factors than objective truth or falsity that determine whether knowledge is accepted or rejected by medical men.

Elliotson never claimed that mesmerism was a panacea, but he did claim that it was a very important therapeutic tool for neurological disorders and as an anaesthetic. In due course he would cite scores of cases of patients suffering from hysteria, epilepsy, etc., who had been treated unsuccessfully time and time again by conventional methods such as bleeding and cupping, and who were then treated successfully in a short time by mesmerism. And its anaesthetic applications were remarkable. Why, then, was it not greeted with interest but with hostility?

First, it needs to be noted that the hostility was not universal. The prolonged and personal attack on Elliotson by the
Lancet
was certainly an assault by the medical establishment, but the establishment was divided. The
Medical Times
, a rival to the
Lancet
, continued to print papers and letters on the therapeutic benefits of mesmerism, but this was as much as anything to spite Wakley. In fact, the
Medical Times
was in the minority, and Wakley was not alone in his attacks on Elliotson and mesmerism. The eminent physician Sir John Forbes (1787–1861), FRS and physician to the Queen's Household, whose attitude towards mesmerism was usually quite generous, launched an attack in the April 1839 issue of the
British and Foreign Medical Review
, saying that medicine had been afflicted by ‘paroxysms of credulity'. Mesmerizers were either charlatans, or the dupes of unscrupulous people, or unscrupulous people themselves, or highly principled fanatics. He clearly had Elliotson in mind for the last category.

Mesmerism undoubtedly did constitute a challenge and a threat to medical men. This was a critical period in the history of medicine; for the first time, there was the prospect of professional standards and guidelines being put in place to guarantee quality. Medical men had a poor reputation as drunkards, womanizers and grave-robbers, and so a reform movement had arisen to correct these weaknesses. It was proposed that there should be a single supervisory body which would register all medical practitioners, standardization of medical education, and criminal sanctions against unlicensed practitioners. In
other words, the medical profession, as a profession, was still young and vulnerable, and resented the fact that mesmerism fell outside this three-pronged reforming attack. The charge of ‘quackery' was liberally sprayed around – it was not only mesmerists who were stuck with this label. Basically, a ‘quack' was anyone who claimed to be able to cure something without understanding the reasons why his cure worked. Mesmerism was especially threatening, then, precisely because it came with a grand theory, which challenged the exclusivity of medicine's claim to knowledge. The only response was to dismiss mesmerism as fraudulent. Oddly, though, some physicians added that any successful mesmeric cures were the result of the patient's imagination: ‘It is a measure of the commitment of orthodox medical men to a purely somatic explanation of disease that they could consider mesmerism a hoax if they were convinced that it worked through the imagination, regardless of its efficacy,' remarks historian Terry Parssinen, drily.

Mesmerism was also a challenge because its practitioners could set up shop without years of special training and formal education. So, for instance, the
London Medical Gazette
for 23 August 1844 didn't spare the scorn in saying that mesmerism ‘admits the humblest and most insignificant, unrestrictedly for a time, into the society of the proud and lofty; it enables the veriest dunderheads to go hand in hand, as “philosophical inquirers” (forsooth!) with men of the highest scientific repute!' The problem here was partly that mesmerism arrived in Britain tarred with the brush of being occult and foreign; it seemed to be similar to faith healing and other magical practices from which Victorian doctors were trying to distance themselves. The ranks of the ‘proud and lofty' could never be sullied by such healers.

Finally, let's not forget the profit motive. Many affluent patients were attracted to mesmerism (and other medical ‘heresies' such as homeopathy and hydropathy). Orthodox doctors therefore lost income – and counter-attacked by calling mesmerists unprincipled mercenaries.

In a reprise of what happened in Mesmer's Paris, Britain in the 1840s found that mesmerism could not be confined. It was certainly not eliminated, as Wakley and others wished, by the suppression of Elliotson. Nor was London, the capital city, so easily able to dictate to the provinces what they should and should not know. Mesmerism was spread through the country by itinerant lecturers and showmen. Despised by the authorities, it was easy for anyone to learn and understand; it was a small act of rebellion to espouse it, and it was taken up by sufficient numbers for it to return and take the metropolis by storm. Elliotson was emboldened to return to the fray with the founding of the
Zoist
, ‘A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism, and Their Application to Human Welfare'. The journal ran from 1843 to 1856 and was one of the longest-lasting of the many attempts enthusiasts made to found such journals. It remains one of the most important sources of information and case histories.

The journal had a clear crusading purpose, which also gave Elliotson the opportunity to continue his attacks on his critics, past and present. In the first issue Elliotson looked forward to the time when the value of mesmerism would be universally recognized, and declared: