Mesmerism.—Use of chloroform—History of Mesmer—The true nature and extent of his discovery—Its applications to medicine and surgery—Various effects produced by mesmeric manipulations—Hysteric seizures—St. Veitz’s dance—Nervous paralysis—Catochus—Initiatory trance—The order in which the higher trance phenomena are afterwards generally drawn out.

Can no further use be made of the facts and principles we have thus seen verified and established, than to explain a class of delusions which prevailed in times of ignorance? The powers which we have seen successfully employed to shake the nerves and unsettle the mind in154 the service of superstition, can they not be skilfully turned to some purpose beneficial to society?

A satisfactory answer to the question may be found in the invention of ether-inhalation, and in the history of mesmerism. The witch narcotized her pupils in order to produce in them delusive visions; the surgeon stupefies his patient to annul the pain of an operation. The fanatic preacher excites convulsions and trance in his auditory as evidence of the working of the Holy Spirit; Mesmer produced the same effects in his patients as a means of curing disease.

It occurred to Mr. Jackson, a chemist of the United States, that it might be possible harmlessly to stupefy a patient through the inhalation of the vapour of sulphuric ether, to such an extent that a surgical operation would be unfelt by him. He communicated the idea to Mr. Morton, a dentist, who carried it into execution with the happiest results. The patient became insensible; a tooth was extracted; no pain seemed felt at the time, or was remembered afterwards, and no ill consequences followed. Led by the report of this success, in the course of the autumn of 1846, Messrs. Bigelow, Warren, and Heywood, ventured to employ the same means in surgical operations of a more serious description. The results obtained on these occasions were not less satisfactory than the first had been. Since then, in England, France, and Germany, the same interesting experiment has been repeated many hundred times, and the adoption of this, or of a parallel method, has become general in surgery.

I withdraw from the present Letter a sketch which I had made from the “report” of Dr. Heyfelder, of the phenomena of etherization; for a year had barely elapsed, when the narcotizing agent recommended by Mr. Jackson155 was superseded by another, suggested and brought into use by Professor Simpson of Edinburgh. The inhalation of chloroform is found to be more rapid, uniform, and certain in its effects, and compassable in a simpler manner, than the inhalation of ether. Its brief phenomena are wound up by the production of stupor; they are remotely comparable to those produced by alcohol. Alas! the time is passed when I enjoyed the means of looking through, and forming a practical judgment upon discoveries like the present. Not the less, however, do I hail the advent of this as a boon to the art of surgery. The conception was original, bold and reasonable; its execution neat and scientific; its success wonderful. It established in the year 1847, to the satisfaction of the public and of the medical profession, that the exclusion of pain from surgical operations is a practicable idea, and the attempt to realize it a legitimate pursuit.

Then, what is Mesmerism?

The object of the inventor of the art was to cure diseases through the influence of a new force brought by him to bear upon the human frame.

Talent, for philosophy or business, is the power of seeing what is yet hidden from others. As the eyes of some animals are fitted to see best in the dark, so the mental vision of some original minds prefers exercising itself on obscure and occult subjects. Whoever indulges this turn will certainly pass for a charlatan; most likely he will prove one. Mesmer had it, and indulged it, in a high degree. The body of science which I have unfolded in the preceding Letters was wholly unknown in his time, (he was born in 1734;) but he was led by his wayward instinct to grope after it in the dark, and he seized and brought to upper light fragmentary elements of strange156 capabilities, which he strove to interpret and to use. He had early displayed a bias towards the mystical. When a student at Vienna, (he was by birth a Swiss,) his principal study was astrology. He sought in the stars a force which, extending throughout space, might influence the beings living upon our planet. In the year 1766 he published his lucubrations. In attempting to identify his imaginary force, Mesmer first supposed it to be electricity. Afterwards, about the year 1773, he adopted the idea that it must be magnetism. So at Vienna, from 1773 to 1775, he employed the practice of stroking diseased parts of the body with magnets. But in 1776, happening to be upon a tour, he fell in with a mystical monk of the name of Gassner, who was then occupied in curing the Prince-Bishop of Ratisbon of blindness, by exorcism. Then Mesmer observed that, without magnets, Gassner produced much the same effects on the living body which he had produced with them. The fact was not lost upon him: he threw aside his magnets, and operated mostly afterwards with the hand alone. It appears that he was often successful in curing disease, or that his patients not only experienced sensible effects from his procedures, but frequently recovered from their complaints. But in 1777, his reputation, which must have always hung upon a very slender thread, broke down through a failure in the case of the musician Paradies. So Mesmer left Vienna, and in the following year betook himself to Paris. There he obtained a success which quickly drew upon him the indignation, perhaps the jealousy, of the Faculty, who failed not to stigmatize him as a charlatan. They exclaimed against him for practising an art which he would not divulge; and when he offered to display it, averred that he threw difficulties in the way of their investigations. Perhaps he suspected157 them of want of fairness in their inquiries; perhaps he was really unwilling to part with his secret. He refused an offer from the Government of 20,000 francs if he would disclose it; but he communicated freely to individuals, under a pledge of secrecy, all he knew for a hundred louis. His practice itself gave most support to the allegations against him. His patients were received with an air of mystery and studied effect. The apartment, hung with mirrors, was dimly lighted. A profound silence was observed, broken only by strains of music, which occasionally floated through the rooms. The patients were seated round a sort of vat, which contained a heterogeneous mixture of chemical ingredients. With this, and with each other, they were placed in relation by means of cords, or jointed rods, or by holding hands; and among them slowly and mysteriously moved Mesmer himself, affecting one by a touch, another by a look, a third by passes with his hand, a fourth by pointing with a rod.

What followed is easily conceivable from the scenes referred to in my last letter as witnessed at religious revivals. One person became hysterical, then another; one was seized with catalepsy; others with convulsions; some with palpitations of the heart, perspirations, and other bodily disturbances. These effects, however various and different, went all by the name of “salutary crisis.” The method was supposed to provoke in the sick person exactly the kind of action propitious to his recovery. And it may easily be imagined that many a patient found himself the better after a course of this rude empiricism, and that the effect made by these events passing daily in Paris must have been very considerable. To the ignorant the scene was full of wonderment.

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To ourselves, regarding it from our present vantage-ground, it presents no marvellous characters. The phenomena were the same which we have been recently contemplating—a group of disorders of the nervous system. The causes which were present are not less familiar to us, nor their capability of producing such effects; they were—mental excitement, here consisting in raised expectation and fear; the contagiousness of hysteria, convulsions, and trance, its force increased by the numbers and close-packing of the patients; the Od force, developed by the chemical action in the charged caldron, developed by each of the excited bodies around, its action first favoured by the absolute stillness observed, then by the increasing sensibility of the patients as their nerves became more and more shaken. It is remarkable that Jussieu—the most competent judge in the commission of inquiry into the truth of mesmerism, set on foot at Paris in 1784, of which Franklin was a member, and which condemned mesmerism as an imposture—was so struck with what he saw, that he strongly recommended the subject to the attention and study of physicians. His objections were against the theory alone. He laid it down in the separate report which he gave in, that no physical cause had been proved to be in operation beyond animal heat! curiously overlooking the fact that common heat would not produce the effects observed; and, therefore, that the latter must have been owing to that something which animal heat, or the radiating warmth of a living body, contains, in addition to common heat. That something we now know, but only since 1845, to be the Od force.

The Od force is so new, so young in science, that Mesmer’s reputation has not yet been credited with the159 honour thence reflected upon it. I will not say that Mesmer’s astral force was a distinct anticipation of Von Reichenbach’s discovery, which was noways suggested by the former, and was from first to last an effort of inductive observation. But the guess of the mystic had certainly a most happy parallelism to the truth, which a different sort of mind tracked in the same field; for the Od force reaches us even from the stars, and the sun and the fixed stars are Od-negative; and the planets and the moon Od-positive. It is unnecessary to follow Mesmer through his minor performances. The relief sometimes obtained by stroking diseased parts with the hand—that is, the effects obtained through the local action of Od—had been before proclaimed by Dr. Greatrex, whose pretensions had had no less an advocate than the Honourable Robert Boyle. The extraordinary tales of Mesmer’s personal power over individuals are probably part exaggeration, part real results of his confidence and skill in the use of the means he wielded. Mesmer died in 1815.

Among his pupils, when at the zenith of his fame, was the Marquis de Puységur. Returning from serving at the siege of Gibraltar, this young officer found mesmerism the mode at Paris, and appears to have become, for no other reason, one of the initiated. At the end of a course of instruction, he professed himself to be no wiser than when it began; and he ridiculed the credulity of his brothers, who were stanch adherents of the new doctrine. However, he did not forget his lesson; and on going the same spring to his estate at Besancy, near Soissons, he took occasion to mesmerize the daughter of his agent and another young person, for the toothache, and they declared themselves, in a few minutes, cured. This questionable success was sufficient to lead M. de Puységur, a few days160 after, to try his hand on a young peasant of the name of Victor, who was suffering with a severe fluxion on his chest. What was M. de Puységur’s surprise, when, at the end of a few minutes, Victor went off into a kind of tranquil sleep, without crisis or convulsion, and in that sleep began to gesticulate and talk, and enter into his private affairs. Then he became sad; and M. de Puységur tried mentally to inspire him with cheerful thoughts; he hummed a lively tune to himself inaudibly, and immediately Victor began to sing the air. Victor remained asleep for an hour, and awoke composed, with his symptoms mitigated.

The case of Victor revolutionized the art of mesmerism. The large part of his life, in which M. de Puységur had nothing to do but to follow this vein of inquiry, was occupied in practising and advocating a gentle manipulation to produce sleep, in preference to the more exciting means which led to the violent crises in Mesmer’s art. I have no plea for telling how M. de Puységur served in the first French revolutionary armies; how he quitted the service in disgust; how narrowly he escaped the guillotine; how he lived in retirement afterwards, benevolently endeavouring to do good to his sick neighbours by means of mesmerism; how he survived the Restoration; and how, finally, he died of a cold caught by serving in the encampment at Rheims, at the coronation of Charles X.

For he had fulfilled his mission the day that he put Victor to sleep. He had made a vast stride in advance of his teacher. Not but that Mesmer must frequently have induced the same condition; but he had passed it by unheeded as one only of numerous equivalent forms of salutary crises; or that M. de Puységur himself estimated, or had the means of estimating, the real nature161 and value of the step which he had made. To himself he appeared to be winning a larger domain for mesmerism, when in fact he had emerged into an independent field, into which mesmerism happened to have a gate.

The state which he had induced in Victor was common trance, the initiatory sleep, followed by half-waking. He had obtained this result by using the Od force with quietness and gentleness, leaving out the exciting mental agencies to which the mixture of violent seizures in Mesmer’s practice is attributable. The gentler method has been adopted and practised by the successors of M. de Puységur, by Deleuze, Bertrand, Georget, Rostan, Foissac, Elliotson, and others. To Dr. Elliotson, the most successful probably, certainly the most scientific employer of the practice of mesmerism, the credit is due of having introduced its use into England: the credit,—for it required no little moral courage to encounter the storm of opposition with which his honest zeal in the advocacy of an unpopular practical truth was met. It is but fair to add, that though his theory has been superseded, and his method changed, to Mesmer belongs the merit of having first tracked out and realized this path of discovery. The golden medal is his.

The modern practice of mesmerism contemplates two objects: one, the application of the Od force to produce local effects; the other, its employment to induce trance. In the present slight sketch I shall say nothing on the first subject; but let me describe how trance is induced. It is to be observed, that attention to certain conditions favours very much the success of the experiment. The room should not be too light; very few persons should be present; the patient and the operator should be quiet, tranquil, and composed; the patient should be fasting.162 The operator has then only to sit down before the patient, who is likewise sitting with his hands resting on his knees, and gently closed, with the thumbs upwards. The operator then lays his hands half-open upon the patient’s, pressing the thumbs against those of the patient, as it were taking thumbs: this is a more convenient attitude than taking hands in the ordinary way. The operator and patient have then only to sit still. An Od-current is established; and if the patient is susceptible, he will soon become drowsy, and perhaps be entranced at the first sitting. Instead of this, the two hands of the operator may be held horizontally with the fingers pointed to the patient’s forehead, and either maintained in this position, or brought downwards in frequent passes opposite to the patient’s face, shoulders, arms; the points of the fingers being held as near the patient as possible without touching.

It is easy, theoretically, to explain the beneficial results which follow from the daily induction of trance for an hour or so, in various forms of disorder of the nervous system,—in epilepsy,—in tic-doloreux,—in nervous palsy, and the like. As long as the state of trance is maintained, so long is the nervous system in a state of repose. It is more or less completely put out of gear. It experiences the same relief which a sprained joint feels when you dispose it in a relaxed position on a pillow. A chance is thus given to the strained nerves of recovering their tone of health; and it is wonderful how many cases of nervous disorder get well at once through these simple means. As it is certain that there is no disease in which the nervous system is not primarily or secondarily implicated, it is impossible to foresee what will prove the limit to the beneficial application of mesmerism in medical practice.

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In operative surgery the art is not less available. In trance the patient is insensible, and a limb may be removed without the operation exciting disturbance of any kind. And what is equally important, in all the after-treatment, at every dressing, the process of mesmerizing may be resorted to again, with no possible disadvantage, but being rather soothing and useful to the patient, independently of the extinction of the dread and suffering of pain. The first instance in which an operation was performed on a patient in this state was the celebrated case of Madame Plantin. It occurred twenty years ago. The lady was sixty-four years of age, and laboured under scirrhus of the breast. She was prepared for the operation by M. Chapélain, who on several successive days threw her into trance by the ordinary mesmeric manipulations. She was then like an ordinary sleep-walker, and would converse with indifference about the contemplated operation, the idea of which, when she was in her natural state, filled her with terror. The operation of removing the diseased breast was performed at Paris on the 12th of April, 1829, by M. Jules Cloquet; it lasted from ten to twelve minutes. During the whole of this time the patient, in her trance, conversed calmly with M. Cloquet, and exhibited not the slightest sign of suffering. Her expression of countenance did not change; nor was the voice, the breathing, or the pulse at all affected. After the wound was dressed, the patient was awakened from the trance, when on learning that the operation was over, and seeing her children round her, Madame Plantin was affected with considerable emotion, whereupon M. Chapélain, to compose her, put her back into the state of trance.

I copy the above particulars from Dr. Foissac’s Rap164ports et Discussions de l’Académie Royale de Médecine sur le Magnetism Animal.—Paris, 1833. My friend, Dr. Warren, of Boston, informed me that, being at Paris, he had asked M. Jules Cloquet if the story were true. M. Cloquet answered, “Perfectly.” “Then why,” said Dr. Warren, “have you not repeated the practice?” M............