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.
James Braid
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?
Since it cannot be doubted that the soul and the body can mutually act and react upon each other, it should follow, as a natural consequence, that if we can attain to any mode of intensifying the mental power, we should thus realise, in a corresponding degree, greater control over physical action. Now this is precisely what my processes do – they create no new faculties; but they give us greater control over the natural functions than we possess during the ordinary waking condition.
We can therefore occupy the mind with a healing suggestion to effect cures.
Braid was not the kind of person to stand still. Having moved already from a physiological theory of blood flow to a psychological theory of monoideism, in his latest work he was also prepared to abandon or modify monoideism. He distinguished the shallow and deep phases or layers of the trance state; the first he called ‘subhypnotic’ and claimed that it was this that the electro-biologists could produce; the second he called ‘double consciousness’, because he found his subjects to be dissociated (as we would now say) from their normal states. For instance, he got his subjects to learn a few sentences in a foreign language; when awake, they could no longer remember the sentences, but when hypnotized later they could again recall them.
Although some members of the medical profession found Braid's work more acceptable than they had Elliotson's, there was still far too much resistance for its importance to be widely appreciated. Animal magnetism or mesmerism had come to Britain from France and been transformed into hypnotism; but prophets are rarely welcomed or acknowledged in their home countries. In lingering dissatisfaction at the failure of his fellow physicians in Britain to recognize the importance of his discoveries, in 1860 Braid sent a paper to be read at the French Academy of Sciences. This galvanized a number of French psychologists, and it was once again France which led the field for many years.
Mesmerism and the Paranormal in Britain
The Victorian belief that hypnotized subjects had supernatural powers may be illustrated by an episode from the life of Sir Richard Burton, the traveller and diplomat (1821–90). Burton believed that he had a ‘gipsy’ soul, and that under hypnosis he could read people's minds. He was apparently a skilled mesmerizer, and claimed that he could hypnotize even at a distance, unless there was a stretch of water in between, which would presumably serve to absorb the magnetic rays between him and his subject. In particular, he used to mesmerize his wife, the aristocratic Isabel Arundell, and consult her about the future. On one occasion, in Brazil in the later 1860s, Burton was very ill, and there were no doctors available. Burton hypnotized Isabel to get a remedy from her while she was entranced.
But instead of answering his question about his illness, she became very troubled and foretold (accurately, as it turned out) the murder by poison of their cook by a jealous rival in love, which occurred some weeks later. Then she warned him not to trust ‘the man that you are going to take with you, because he is a scoundrel’. Since Richard intended to travel alone they could not make sense of this.
As it happened, however, Burton did end up with a companion – a man calling himself Sir Roger Tichborne – and he was a scoundrel! He was a common English sailor, who knew that Tichborne had been drowned at sea and was trying to cash in on Tichborne's inheritance.
This story is as intriguing as many similar stories from the time. It is hard to dismiss them all as fraudulent, but at the same time it is hard to believe them, because they threaten the comfortable world views we have constructed for ourselves. In the vast majority of cases, we would like to hear more details, to be certain that there was no possibility of cheating at the time, or of embellishment after the facts.
Alongside mesmeric performers such as Spencer Hall there were others who specialized in the so-called ‘higher’ phenomena, which were supposed to be the privilege of trance subjects who could enter the deepest states. In these states, their souls were assumed to separate from their bodies, so that they could see things at a distance – at a small distance if they performed tricks such as reading a book while blindfolded, at a greater distance if they described events and people's homes elsewhere in the country, and at incredible distances if they reported on the geography and inhabitants of other planets.
The two most famous such performers in Britain in the 1840s were the French Didier brothers, Alexis and Adolphe. Alexis was already famous in France before the brothers came over to England in 1844 with their mesmerist, J.B. Marcillet. Accounts of their performances were written up in the Zoist (for instance, in the July 1844 and January 1845 issues). Their feats are astonishing, but it has to be said that there were never any properly controlled tests of their abilities. Here, for example, are a couple of instances where there is room for doubt. Once a sceptic in the audience in a private house produced a book and asked Alexis to tell him the title. He had covered the title page with doubled paper so that it could not be read. Nevertheless Alexis soon told him the title, after placing the book on his chest, and then on the back of his head. Could he have surreptitiously read the title on the spine as he was moving it from his chest to his head? In another experiment, following the successful blindfolded reading of sentences from a book, the blindfold was removed. The book was opened at random, and Alexis was asked to read from ten pages further on. He did so – but he had the ‘habit’ of idly flicking through the leaves of the book.
The sceptical comments on these feats by Alexis Didier are taken from an exposé by Sir John Forbes. Here, to give the other side of the picture, is an account of one of Alexis's feats from the January 1845 Zoist:
His eyes were now open, and after a few minutes’ delay a sealed envelope was given him by a gentleman who had brought it with him, and could not divulge to any one present what it contained; after examining it some time, he said there were two words, but they might also pass for one; that they were French; he said if the gentleman who wrote it, and who, he said, was so firm an unbeliever that his influence affected him, would go into the next room, and whisper it to the lady of the house, and she would come and give him her hand he would be able to write the word for her. This being done, he wrote the word clairvoyance; she said he was wrong. ‘True,’ said he, ‘I ought to have written clairvoyant,’ and so corrected it. On opening the envelope, the word was found to be correct, written on a sheet of note paper, folded up.
The history of parapsychology has been beset by the claim by sensitives that the ‘vibes’ of sceptics in the audience put them off. This has often been used to excuse poor performance under laboratory conditions. Just as in this report Alexis asked a sceptic to leave the room, so he often failed in the company of sce
ptics, but he encouraged them to attend his séances and be the ones who wrote the words down.
The reading of words from inside securely sealed envelopes or packages was a special trick of Alexis's. He was also occasionally a very successful travelling clairvoyant, giving accurate descriptions of people's houses and their contents, for instance. But we hear only the conclusions to these séances: how long did he take? How many questions did he ask the house-owner? In other words, how much opportunity did he have to witness their pupils dilating, or other involuntary gestures, which are the clues still used today by stage magicians for ‘mind-reading’ tricks. Other than this hypothesis, we have to accept that Alexis and Adolphe, his younger brother, did possess remarkable paranormal abilities. There were, as even the Zoist admitted, a lot of frauds in the field of clairvoyance, using plainly inadequate blindfolds, for instance; but the Didier brothers do come off better than most.
As a kind of footnote, I will add that Hippolyte Bernheim and J. Milne Bramwell, two of the most prolific hypnotizers of the later nineteenth century, hypnotized literally thousands of people, and never found evidence of paranormal feats. You can make of this what you will. Sceptics will take it to be evidence that it is all fraudulent; others, more charitably, may be inclined to deny that it proves or disproves anything, except that only maybe one person in a million is truly gifted with paranormal powers. Bernheim and Bramwell just didn't come across such a person, or didn't set up their experiments in such a way as to encourage the manifestation of the higher phenomena. Braid, for his part, tried to be meticulously fair – unless it is right to detect irony in his words. In remarking that he himself had never been able to produce any of the paranormal phenomena that his predecessors had, he says:
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 26
