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.
Elliotson Versus the Medical Establishment
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.
‘Quacks and Impostors’
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.
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 t
ime 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.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 23
