Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  Dickens's first recorded contact with mesmerism took place in January 1838, when he and his illustrator, George Cruikshank, met Elliotson and watched him work with Elizabeth O'Key. The two became friends, and Dickens returned again and again to watch demonstrations by Elliotson and his associates at University College Hospital. Between 1839 and 1844 the two men met frequently, and Elliotson also introduced Dickens to Townshend in 1840. Dickens refused to be hypnotized himself, because he didn't want to lose control, but he was prepared to try his hand as a mesmerizer and first did so during a lecture tour of the States in 1842, in Pittsburgh. His subject was his wife Catherine (Kate):

  And speaking of magnetism, let me tell you that the other night at Pittsburgh, there being present only Mr Q. and the portrait-painter, Kate sat down, laughing, for me to try my hand upon her. I had been holding forth upon the subject rather luminously, and asserting that I thought I could exercise the influence, but had never tried. In six minutes, I magnetized her into hysterics, and then into the magnetic sleep. I tried again next night, and she fell into the slumber in little more than two minutes … I can wake her with perfect ease; but I confess (not being prepared for anything so sudden and complete), I was on the first occasion rather alarmed.

  He pronounced it an ‘extraordinary success’, and on returning to London he practised on a wider circle of friends and relatives, chiefly for display and entertainment, but also occasionally to calm someone's nerves and get them to relax.

  In 1844 –5 Dickens and his family were on an extended visit to Italy. In Genoa they met and became close friends with the banker Emile de la Rue and his family. Madame de la Rue (born Augusta Granet) suffered from a range of symptoms typical of the hysterical Victorian upper-class woman: she had a nervous tic, headaches, insomnia, and occasional convulsions and catalepsy. Dickens recognized the type from Elliotson's demonstrations and realized that her symptoms were psychosomatic and could be helped by hypnotism. He undertook to mesmerize her, and started treatment on 23 December 1844. While she was in a trance, he used to get her to talk about her fears, fantasies and dreams through free association. To the dismay of both Emile and Catherine, Dickens and Madame de la Rue built up a very intense relationship, which was aided by the undoubted improvement of Augusta's health. She was certainly strongly dependent on Dickens, but Dickens was so absorbed that he was just as dependent on her too. One of the main aspects he enjoyed was the struggle with the Phantom, a projection of Augusta's fears who frequently put in an appearance in their sessions and tried to undermine Dickens's therapeutic work.

  Dickens was never one to tackle anything half-heartedly, and his confidence and energy were inexhaustible, while, for her part, Augusta's needs were insatiable. The mutual dependency was such that even when they were apart (Catherine, by now thoroughly jealous, insisted on a tour of the rest of Italy), they had an appointment at 11 o'clock each day, when Dickens undertook to concentrate on her for an hour; she obligingly went into a trance at that time, but tended to relapse while Dickens was away, until they were reunited in Rome later in April and travelled together back to Genoa. The whole business was undoubtedly one of the factors leading to the breakdown of Dickens's marriage with Catherine. Long before Freud gave it the name of ‘transference’, Victorian amateur psychologists were aware of (and deeply concerned about) the phenomenon of attraction between operator and subject, which was a natural extension of a magnetic theory. They were at pains to argue that it was like the love of a child for a parent, rather than sexual attraction. It manifested (as in the case of Dickens and Madame de la Rue) most commonly in the subject suffering from anxiety when she felt that the operator's attention was not focused on her.

  After Dickens's return to London in June 1845, the bond between him and his patient was weakened, and although they met and corresponded occasionally over the subsequent years, the intensity was gone for ever. Madame de la Rue continued to be unwell. Dickens offered to restart the treatment, but she refused, because she knew he could not be her full-time doctor, and she preferred to suffer rather than have a merely temporary improvement followed by relapse. After this episode with the banker's wife, Dickens never again found the opportunity to mesmerize another person, but he retained a theoretical interest in the subject. Mesmerism had seemed to offer hope of true self-knowledge – that is, knowledge of the source of one's life-energy; but eventually he concluded that while it could reveal problems, it could not finally cure them. His interest in the subject remained strong, if somewhat extra-curricular; for instance, in 1850 he both stage-managed and took the leading role in a private showing of Mrs Inchbald's eighteenth-century farce Animal Magnetism, at Knebworth House, home of the Bulwer-Lyttons.

  As I have already said, many British intellectuals in the nineteenth century dabbled or expressed some kind of interest in mesmerism. If Dickens took things further than, say, Charlotte Brontë (who allowed herself to be mesmerized once only), that is due to the intensity of his nature. Dickens told Catherine that his commitment to mesmerism, to exploring the nature of power, to asserting his will and his personality, to testing deeply the possibilities of all kinds of human relationships, was inseparable from his art and his life. ‘The intense pursuit of any idea,’ he said, ‘that takes complete possession of me, is one of the qualities that makes me different – sometimes for good; sometimes I dare say for evil – from other men.’

  The Affair of Harriet Martineau

  The cause of mesmerism in Britain was enormously boosted by the famous illness and even more famous cure of Harriet Martineau, a social activist and popular writer who was at the centre of literary Britain in the early Victorian period. She shared with Dickens the kind of passionate nature that forced her to extremes of enthusiasm, but was far less reticent than he was about trumpeting her involvement with mesmerism to the public at large. Although mesmerism had acquired a word-of-mouth reputation for its medical efficacy, and under pressure from their patients doctors were beginning to make use of it, Martineau's fame guaranteed enormous exposure to the issues.

  She suffered from severe abdominal pains and constipation, over-frequent menstruation accompanied by unusual discharges, and nervous pains which eventually prevented her from walking or standing up. Her gynaecological problems developed until there was a solid substance of some kind protruding from her vagina. (Did she have a prolapsed uterus? Uterine polypi? After her death, she was found to have a huge ovarian cyst.) Standard medical treatment, which involved the additional pain of regular applications of iodine to the affected part, proved to be no help, and this once active woman, who had travelled extensively in the United States, for instance, took to her bed in Tynemouth, in north-east England. She continued to write, when she could, and indeed was one of those writers who think that an account of her illness will be of interest to the general public. In this case it was, but chiefly because of her remarkable cure.

  Medical science was baffled by her illness (which was perhaps psychosomatic, since she also suffered from bouts of self-doubt), and she was convinced it was incurable. Her friend, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the writer of occult mysteries, suggested that she consult a somnambule. By serendipity, several other friends wrote at much the same time (early in 1844) with the same suggestion, or at least drawing her attention to the increasingly popular phenomenon of mesmerism. Not that this was Harriet's first contact with the subject: she had met Elliotson in the 1830s in London, friends of hers had been mesmerized, one of her brothers-in-law had incorporated it into his medical practice, and as a dissenter she would have been attracted to their progressive radicalism. Anyway, she contacted Spencer Hall, the famous mesmeric showman and champion of the common people, and he brought her some relief, but she found him ‘simpleminded’ and turned first to her maid, who imitated the hand passes she had seen Hall performing. Finally, she ended up in the hands of Mrs Montague Wynyard, who became a kind of companion, and within a few weeks this formidable woman had cured Harriet of all her ills. Not only that, but sh
e had also hypnotized Jane Arrowsmith, the nineteen-year-old niece of Harriet's landlady, who proved to be clairvoyant and a medium, and came through with spiritual doctrines of a high order. Since it seemed unthinkable to Harriet that such an uneducated girl could on her own have invented such stuff, she was more than ever convinced of the truth of mesmerism. When mesmerized she too occasionally felt herself to be transported to another realm.

  Harriet was an enthusiastic convert, and being a writer, she decided that she had to write about it. She chose the popular magazine the Athenaeum, despite its sceptical editor (in September 1838 the magazine had covered the Wakley–Elliotson controversy and come down firmly on the side of Wakley, considering that he had killed mesmerism stone dead), because she wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible, and not just preach to the choir. Her six ‘Letters on Mesmerism’, published in November and December 1844, proved to be a great attraction, and boosted the fortunes not only of the magazine, but also of mesmerism in general, which became the most talked-about subject of the day. Even Prince Albert, the queen's beloved husband, remarked, on hearing of the controversy and the dismissal of mesmerism by the orthodox medical community, that medical men were conducting themselves improperly in refusing to investigate the topic. Martineau's letters were published in book form early in 1845, and in the preface she looked forward to a day, in the not-too-distant future, when mesmerists would cure half the illness in the land. The first edition of the book sold out in four days, and in the Zoist Elliotson crowed: ‘The subject which the critic, a few months since, would not condescend to notice, has been elevated to a commanding position. It is the topic with which the daily papers and the weekly periodicals are filled … The immediate cause of all this activity is the publication of the case of Miss Martineau.’

  There was a backlash. To Harriet's disgust the editor of the Athenaeum published a series of anonymous and highly critical letters; the Lancet, of course, renewed its attacks; Jane Carlyle took Harriet's devotion to mesmerism to be conclusive proof of her insanity; the reviewer of Letters on Mesmerism in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal treated it as yet another case of female weak-mindedness (‘She becomes nervous, fanciful, feeble in body and imbecile in mind, – also common occurrences …’). But the genie was now well and truly out of the bottle.

  James Esdaile and Mesmeric Surgery

  One of the recurring topics in the pages of the Zoist was mesmeric anaesthesia, confirmed through numerous case histories; in particular, Elliotson gave plenty of space to the extraordinary work of a surgeon working in British India, James Esdaile (1808–59), originally from Scotland.

  It would be hard to fit Esdaile into the mould of a modern hero: he was as liable to colonial prejudices as any European in India in the 1840s, and operated on his patients with little regard for the then unknown phenomenon of post-operative trauma. Witnesses were amazed at the nonchalance with which he might simply stab down into a tumour to see how deep it was. He tended to see his successes with native patients as helped by their animal-like passivity and awe of the European, and by their confusion of mesmerism with their own native mumbo-jumbo. Mesmerism was seen by him and others as another way of proving the superiority of European culture to native culture. But for all that, the work he performed was truly amazing.

  In 1845 Esdaile was responsible for the Hooghly hospital near Calcutta, and he found himself dealing with a painful problem endemic to the region. Due to filiarisis transmitted by mosquitoes, many men suffered from hydroceles of the scrotum – tumours which grew enormous as bodily fluids accumulated in the scrotal sac. The operation to deal with this condition was so painful that patients put it off for years and years, so that Esdaile was faced with many severely enlarged tumours, one weighing as much as 103lbs (over 46kgs), which was more or less the natural body weight of the patient as well. I'm sure that any man reading this is by now cringing in sympathy. Esdaile needed to find a way to win his patients’ confidence, so that they would allow the operation to take place. He turned to mesmerism, and immediately found it astonishingly effective. He was a meticulous recorder of his work and so we have good information about his procedures. Some of his descriptions of scrotal operations are not for the squeamish. Here is one from his 1846 book Mesmerism in India:

  Oct. 25 – Gooroochuan Shah, a shop-keeper, aged 40. He has got a ‘monster tumour’, which prevents him from moving; its great weight, and his having used it for a writing-desk for many years, has pressed it into its present shape. His pulse is weak, and his feet oedoematous, which will make it very hazardous to attempt its removal … He became insensible on the fourth day of mesmerizing … Two men held up the tumour in a sheet, pulling it forward at the same time, and, in the presence of Mr Bennet, I removed it by a circular incision, expedition being his only safety. The rush of venous blood was great, but fortunately soon arrested; and, after tying the last vessel, … he awoke. The loss of blood had been so great that he immediately fell into a fainting state … On recovering he said that he awoke while the mattress was being pulled back, and that nothing had disturbed him. The tumour weighed eighty pounds, and is probably the largest ever removed from the human body. I think it extremely likely that if the circulation had been hurried by pain and struggling, or if shock to the system had been increased by bodily and mental anguish, the man would have bled to death, or never have rallied from the effects of the operation. But the sudden loss of blood was all he had to contend against; and, though in so weak a condition, he has surmounted this, and gone on very well.

  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 proc
edure 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.