Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (31 page)

Following his first successes, he turned the surgical side of his hospital into a kind of mesmeric factory. Since he found the process of mesmerizing patients very tiring and time-consuming, he turned that side over to trained native assistants, saving his energies for the actual operations. Over the next few years, the hospital performed, astonishingly, over 3,000 operations; just as importantly, Esdaile found that his post-operative death rate plummeted from 50 per cent (which was more or less normal for the time for serious operations) to 5 per cent. He explained this by arguing that a mesmerist passes vital energies on to the patient, and that these energies in turn mobilize the body's natural curative resources. More probably, it was due to the reduction in trauma consequent on the patients being for the first time genuinely anaesthetized.

Esdaile also devoted some of his time and energy to proselytizing. As well as using the Indian papers and journals to publicize his successes, he wrote a number of pamphlets and books. His work aroused some suspicion from the snobbish Anglo-Indian medical community, who thought that mesmerism smacked too much of native medicine. He was even accused of bribing his native patients: ‘You know what a Bengalee will do for a few pice,' said one correspondent to the
Englishman and Military Chronicle
for 29 May 1846. Others suggested that the patients were all impostors or hysterics liable to spontaneous anaesthesia. Esdaile's response to this kind of criticism was properly impatient: ‘Suffering humanity cannot afford to wait for the slow conviction of indolence and healthy indifference.' And so he asked the deputy governor, Sir Herbert Maddock, to convene a committee to assess his work.

The committee gave him a 70 per cent success rate after observing him at work on ten patients. They confirmed that in all these cases there was genuine trance (Esdaile employed some of the tricks of the showmen to prove trance), but were disturbed by cases where the patient writhed a bit, as if in pain. Esdaile dismissed these
as instinctive movements, but the committee wanted to see more tests: would it work on Europeans, for instance, as well as on lower forms of life? Was the post-operative death rate really as low as Esdaile claimed? Would being mesmerized make patients liable to nervous diseases later in life? Their hesitation seems to have been prompted as much as anything by the dubious reputation of mesmerism in general, but they did raise some valid worries. For instance, it took Esdaile so long to mesmerize some of his patients – he even found on occasion that he had to warm them up for several days beforehand – that the procedure was clearly useless for emergencies. But Maddock overruled their doubts and ordered that a mesmeric hospital be established in Calcutta for a trial year, starting in November 1846. Here Esdaile was required to test mesmerism's medical as well a surgical benefits, to find out whether race and class made any difference, and to report on his findings.

As well as continuing with his surgical work, then, Esdaile began to use hypnotherapy for a range of illnesses from deafness to epilepsy, via rheumatism and neuralgia, and even to treat some cases that were clearly psychological. He deliberately employed an open-door policy, presumably in order to spread the word: anyone could wander in off the streets and witness what was going on. His surgical successes continued, but the extension of his practice beyond them was regarded with suspicion; and it turned out to be impossible for him to experiment much on different races and classes, because neither the Indian upper castes nor the colonial British were prepared to enter a hospital which was largely staffed by native Indians. But he did manage successfully to treat a few Europeans there and at other hospitals which adopted the practice through Esdaile's influence.

The mesmeric hospital closed in January 1848, largely because the new deputy governor, Lord Dalhousie, promoted Esdaile beyond the sphere of hospital medicine, probably as a diplomatic way of ridding the community of this renegade. A dingy wing of another small hospital was turned over to mesmerism, but the practice soon went into decline, as a result of the introduction of chemical anaesthetics into India from Europe, and of continuing white doubts about the close interaction required in mesmerism between natives and themselves. Esdaile held an honorary position as the
superintendent of this reduced mesmeric hospital until he retired back to Scotland in 1851.

By the middle of the 1850s, mesmerism was on the decline, not so much because the conservatives had won the war, as because of fresh medical discoveries in the field of surgical anaesthesia, which appeared to do away with the necessity of mesmerism in this respect. Until then this had been the greatest boon the mesmerists could offer – insensibility during surgical procedures, and before the introduction of ether in 1846 and chloroform in 1847, literally hundreds of pain-free operations had been performed in Europe and India. Curiously, the anaesthetic properties of some chemicals, such as nitrous oxide, had been known for some time, but there was a marked reluctance to employ them. Apart from the difficulty of finding the right dose, it was not at all clear at the time that insensibility was a desirable state. It was close to death; it was what happened after ingesting too much alcohol or opium; it seemed to undermine a person's free will altogether; it might lay women open to the sexual desires of an unscrupulous doctor.

While the doctors dithered, other mesmerists – not just Esdaile – were performing astonishing feats. I have already summarized the amputation of James Wombell's leg, which was widely publicized in one of Elliotson's books. Many members of the medical profession, however, suggested that Wombell was faking – that he had been conscious throughout the operation, and had colluded with the surgeon and mesmerist in pretending otherwise. The mesmerists just could not defeat this kind of stubborn hostility. It was considered to be evidence of Wombell's collusion that his other leg had not jerked automatically as the amputation was being performed; when, two years later, a woman underwent a similar amputation and her other leg
did
jerk, this was taken to show that she was still feeling pain! In 1850 the eminent physiologist Marshall Hall told the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society that Wombell had finally confessed to his cheating. Wombell denied it vehemently. Pressed for his evidence, Hall said that he had been told so by a person he trusted; this person in turn said that he had been told by an unimpeachable source. This hearsay was preferred over Wombell's denials.

By 1848 the Reverend George Sandby was able to count over 300 surgical operations performed painlessly in Britain alone under hypnosis –
and still the medical profession refused to consider it an authentic method. In the 1850s the Royal College of Physicians reviewed a public amputation of a gangrenous limb while the patient was under hypnotic anaesthesia. They simply discounted the phenomenon altogether. The
Lancet
concluded that the patient was an impostor who had been trained not to show pain. Another reviewer decided that the patient was a ‘hardened rogue', hired by for a fee by the surgeon. A remark in Elliotson's
Zoist
, addressed to the Council of Surgeons, says it all: you should blush, he said, for ‘your bigoted, your stupid, your cruel opposition to the reception of a mighty and all-important fact … How long will you refuse to spare a single wretched patient the pain of your instruments?' Indeed, in retrospect it is very hard to understand the surgeons' resistance. Here was the only effective way to induce full anaesthesia, to stop patients feeling sometimes agonizing pain – and they would have nothing to do with it.

In fact, it was the benign influence of mesmeric anaesthesia that hastened the introduction of chemical techniques into the surgeon's arsenal, since the infliction of pain during surgery began to be seen as something avoidable, not a necessary evil. But medical science's efforts were hampered by the relative inefficiency of the chemical agents in their arsenal to bring about the desired insensibility. Nitrous oxide, for instance, could dull the pain, or distract the patient, but it could not bring about complete unconsciousness, except in doses large enough to be dangerous. But then in 1846 the anaesthetic properties of ether were discovered in Boston. ‘Gentlemen,' said Robert Liston, the first British surgeon to make use of ether, on 21 December 1846, ‘the Yankee trick beats the French one.' Picking up on this implicit reference to mesmerism, when the English medical press announced the discovery, it was expressly contrasted with the fraudulent claims of mesmerism. Doctors soon found reasons other than rhetoric to compare ether favourably with mesmerism. For a start, while mesmeric anaesthesia was hit and miss, ether worked on everyone; and a mesmerist might have to work on a patient for several days in order to make him receptive to a deep enough trance, but ether worked in seconds. These benefits were seen as outweighing the fact that, in the beginning, ether killed a few patients, and
that it needed practice and skill to administer it in just the right dose. Many patients were in a state close to drunkenness, rather than being unconscious. But, hastened by official hostility to mesmerism, before long chemical anaesthetics had taken over and had prised the jewel out of mesmerism's crown.

One of the problems with the contempt in which the medical establishment held mesmerism after the Elliotson affair is that other work in the area became tarred with the same brush of fraud and eccentricity. This was particularly unfortunate in the case of the theories of James Braid (1795–1860), because he laid the foundations for a sane and scientific study of hypnotism, free of the grandiose metaphysical schemes of animal magnetism. But from his fellow doctors he received the usual snide treatment of rejected papers and of both overt and covert criticism.

Braid was a Scotsman, born in Fife, and with a medical degree from Edinburgh. On 13 November 1841, by which time he was living in Manchester, he took in a show by Charles de Lafontaine. He went out of simple curiosity, sure that he would find it a load of rubbish, and in fact was loud in his accusations of humbuggery after the show. Lafontaine invited him and his fellow critics from the medical community to examine his female somnambule, and Braid came away convinced that there was something worth researching. He was one of those provincial researchers who would not have his work dictated by the whims of the medical establishment in London. Scorned equally by both Elliotson (who stubbornly stuck to his magnetic, physicalist views and called Braid ‘a most vain and swaggering mechanic') and Wakley of the
Lancet
, he used the pages of the
Medical Times
to announce his results. As a result of his experiments, he quickly found that he could reproduce many of the phenomena of mesmerism in his subjects simply by getting them
to fix their gaze on an object. One of the first such objects he used was a cork with a shiny plated top in a wine bottle; usually he used his lancet case.

Magnetic mesmerism had survived the attacks and counterevidence of Faria and Bertrand in France, but the
coup de grâce
came from Braid. Braid demonstrated time and again that mere fixation on a small, bright object could produce the state previously known as mesmeric somnambulism, but which Braid preferred to call ‘hypnotism'. The hand passes of a mesmerist were quite unnecessary (though Braid himself occasionally used them to inspire confidence in a patient), nothing even closely resembling magnetic fluid was involved, and indeed anyone can hypnotize himself, Braid asserted, by staring at the kind of object he described. In his 1843 book
Neurypnology
he listed and described the cures he had effected through hypnosis, and they parallel the successes of mesmerism. Braid came to the realization that the mesmerists had accidentally stumbled on to something of supreme importance.

Why was Braid effective where Faria and Bertrand were not? Because he was meticulous, plainly a medical man not a showman, a lucid writer, sober, cautious and unconcerned with paranormal and exotic phenomena (which he either found no evidence for, or attributed to hyperaesthesia). Moreover (although in this respect I would hesitate to say he differed from Bertrand), he based his views on observation and experiment, rather than on preconceived theories. Indeed, he was somewhat inclined towards a form of mechanical materialism, and at first attributed the cures he achieved under hypnosis to changes brought about in the deeper trance state to the blood flow of the body. Later, however, he was prepared to acknowledge that concentrated attention and imagination played some part in the cures, as did the implanting of suggestions. He also exploded the myth that under hypnosis a subject could be made to break his or her moral code: if anyone had listened to him, female fears about rape would have been laid to rest. In any case, much of the taint of mesmerism was removed by Braid's development of it into hypnotism. In hypnotism, no close proximity with a mesmerist was required, the passes with their sexual overtones were no longer necessary, and the theory of emanations passing from one person to another by will power was made redundant.

Braid's
later, more psychologically oriented writings prefigured much of the psychotherapeutic work of the later nineteenth century. All the various procedures for inducing a trance are designed, he saw, solely to promote the state of single-mindedness, with everything else passing into oblivion. In later years, he found that he could induce fixation simply by talking to his subjects, and could hypnotize blind people just as effectively as those with sight, and so he totally abandoned his earlier physiological theory, according to which it was fixation of the gaze affecting the blood flow from the eyes to the rest of the body that induced a kind of narcotic state.

Arguing that the hypnotized subject becomes occupied by a single idea to the exclusion of others – for which he coined the word ‘monoideism' – he appreciated that it might be possible to treat certain cases of monomania and hysteria by replacing the idea on which sufferers were fixated with another, more life-affirming idea. This is what we nowadays call ‘reframing'. The mind, Braid argued, obviously has an effect on the body. If we salivate at the mere thought of food, what else might we not be able to do?