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 in
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.
Jackson was superseded by another, suggested and brought into use by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 strange
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 suspected 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.
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 the 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 days 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 nature 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. 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.
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 _Rapports 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. Cloquet replied “that he had
not dared; that the prejudice against mesmerism was so strong at Paris
that he probably would have lost his reputation and his income by so
doing.”
It has been mentioned that in ordinary trance the mind appears to gain
new powers. For a long time we had to trust to the chance turning up
of cases of spontaneous trance, in the experience of physicians of
observation, for any light we could hope would be thrown on those
extraordinary phenomena; now we possess around us, on every side,
adequate opportunities for completely elucidating these events, if we
please to employ them. The philosopher, when his speculations suggest a
new question to be put, can summon the attendance of a trance as easily
as the Jupiter of the Iliad summoned a dream; or, looking out for two
or three cases to which the induction of trance may be beneficial, the
physician may have in his house subjects for perpetual reference and
daily experiment.
A gentleman, with whom I, have long been well acquainted, for many
years chairman of the Quarter Sessions in a northern county, of which
during a late year he was high sheriff, has, like M. de Puységur,
amused some of his leisure hours, and benevolently done not a little
good, by taking the trouble of mesmerizing invalids, whom he has thus
restored to health. In constant correspondence with, and occasionally
having the pleasure of seeing this gentleman, I have learned from him
the common course in which the new powers of the mind, which belong to
trance, are developed under its artificial induction. The sketch which
I propose to give of this subject will be taken from his descriptions,
which, I should observe, tally in all essential points with what I meet
with in French and German authors. The little that I have myself seen
of the matter, I will mention preliminarily.
In some, instead of trance, a common fit of hysterics is produced; in
others, slight headache, and a sense of weight on the eyebrows, and
difficulty of raising the eyelids, supervene.
In one young woman, whom I saw mesmerised for the first time by
Dupotet, nothing resulted but a sense of pricking and tingling wherever
he pointed with his hand; and her arm, on one or two occasions, jumped
in the most natural and conclusive manner when, her eyes being covered,
he directed his outstretched finger to it.
A gentleman, about thirty years of age, when the mesmeriser held his
outstretched hands pointed to his head, experienced no disposition to
sleep; but in two or three minutes he began to shake his head and twist
his features about; at last, his head was jerked from side to side, and
forwards and backwards, with a violence that looked alarming. But he
said, when it was over, that the motion had not been unpleasant; that
he had moved in a sort voluntarily—although he could not refrain from
it. If the hands of the operator were pointed to his arm instead of
his head, the same violent jerks ensued, and gradually extended to the
whole body. I asked him to try to resist the influence, by holding his
arm out in strong muscular tension. This had the effect of retarding
the attack of the jerks, but, when it came on, it was more violent
than usual. I have lately seen another similar case. The seizure is
evidently a form of St. Veitz’s dance brought out by the operation of
the Od force. In neither of these two cases could trance be induced.
A servant of mine, aged about twenty-five, was mesmerized by
Lafontaine, for a full half-hour, and, no effect appearing to be
produced, I told him he might rise from the chair and leave us.
On getting up he looked uneasy, and said his arms were numb. They
were perfectly paralyzed from the elbows downwards, and numb to the
shoulders. This was the more satisfactory, that neither the man
himself, nor Lafontaine, nor the four or five spectators, expected
this result. The operator triumphantly drew a pin and stuck it into
the man’s hand, which bled, but had no feeling. Then heedlessly, to
show it gave pain, Lafontaine stuck the pin into the man’s thigh, whose
flashing eye, and half suppressed growl, denoted that the aggression
would certainly have been returned by another, had the arm which should
have done it not been really powerless. However, M. Lafontaine made
peace with the man, by restoring him the use and feeling of his arms.
This was done by dusting them, as it were, by quick transverse motions
of his extended hands. In five minutes nothing remained of the palsy
but a slight stiffness, which gradually wore off in the course of the
evening.
Occasionally partial tonic spasm (improperly termed catalepsy, for
it is of the nature of catochus, and the rigidity attending it is
absolute) supervenes as the only consequence of mesmerising a limb.
This result, which is not less alarming to the patient who has not been
led to expect it than the preceding, may be got rid of in the same
way. If you point with your fingers to the rigid muscles, or again, as
it were, dust the limb with brisk transverse passes, or breathe upon
it, the stiffness is thawed and disappears. Trance is seldom induced
by mesmeric passes without more or less partial muscular rigidity of
this kind supervening; it always yields to the means which have been
mentioned.
Genuine and ordinary trance I have seen produced by the same
manipulations in from three minutes to half-an-hour. The patient’s
eyelids have dropped, he has appeared on the point of sleeping, but
he has not sunk back upon his chair; then he has continued to sit
upright—seemingly perfectly insensible to the loudest sounds, or the
acutest and most startling impressions on the sense of touch. The pulse
is commonly a little increased in frequency; the breathing is sometimes
heavier than usual.
Occasionally, as in Victor’s case, the patient quickly and
spontaneously emerges from the state of trance-sleep into trance
half-waking—a rapidity of development which I am persuaded occurs much
more frequently among the French than with the English or Germans.
English patients, especially, for the most part require a long course
of education, many sittings, to have the same powers drawn out. And
these are by far the most interesting cases. I will describe, from Mr.
Williamson’s account, the course he has usually followed in developing
his patient’s powers, and the order in which they have manifested
themselves.
On the first day, perhaps, nothing can be elicited. But after some
minutes, the stupor seems, as it were, less embarrassing to the
patient, who appears less heavily slumbrous, and breathes lighter
again: or it may be the reverse, particularly if the patient is
epileptic; after a little, the breathing may be deeper, the state one
of less composure. Pointing with the hands to the pit of the stomach,
laying the hands upon the shoulders, and slowly moving them along
the arms down to the hands, the whole with the utmost quietude and
composure on the part of the operator, will dispel this oppression.
And the interest of the first sitting is confined to the process of
awakening the patient, which is one of the most marvellous phenomena
of the whole. The operator lays his two thumbs on the space between
the eyebrows, and as it were vigorously smooths or irons the eyebrows,
rubbing them from within outwards seven or eight times. Upon this, the
patient probably raises his head and his eyebrows, and draws a deeper
breath, as if he would yawn; he is half awake, and blowing upon the
eyelids, or the repetition of the previous operation, or dusting the
forehead by smart transverse wavings of the hand, or blowing upon it,
causes the patient’s countenance to become animated; the eyelids open,
he looks about him, recognises you, and begins to speak. If any feeling
of heaviness remains, any weight or pain of the forehead, another
repetition of the same manipulations sets all right. And yet this
patient would not have been awakened if a gun had been fired at his
ear, or his arm had been cut off.
At the next sitting, or the next to that, the living statue begins to
wake in its tranced life. The operator holds one hand over the opposite
hand of his patient, and makes as if he would draw the patient’s
hand upwards, raising his own with short successive jerks, yet not
too abrupt. Then the patient’s hand begins to follow his; and, often
having ascended some inches, stops in the air catochally. This fixed
state is always relieved by transverse brushings with the hand, or by
breathing in addition, on the rigid limb. And it is most curious to see
the whole bodily frame, over which spasmodic rigidness may have crept,
thus thawed joint by joint. Then the first effect shown commonly is
this motion, the patient’s hand following the operator’s. At the same
sitting he begins to hear, and there is intelligence in his countenance
when the operator pronounces his name: perhaps his lips move, and he
begins to answer pertinently, as in ordinary sleep-walking. But he
hears the operator alone best, and him even in a whisper. _Your_ voice,
if you shout, he does not hear: unless you take the operator’s hand,
and then he hears _you_ too. In general, however, now the proximity of
others seems in some way to be sensible to him; and he appears uneasy
when they crowd close upon him. It seems that the force of the relation
between the operator and his patient naturally goes on increasing, as
the powers of the sleep-walker are developed; but that this is not
necessarily the case, and depends upon its being encouraged by much
commerce between them, and the exclusion of others from joining in this
trance-communion.
And now the patient—beginning to wake in trance, hearing and answering
the questions of the operator, moving each limb, or rising even, as the
operator’s hand is raised to draw him into obedient following—enters
into a new relation with his mesmeriser. He _adopts sympathetically
every voluntary movement of the other_. When the latter rises from
his chair, _he_ rises; when he sits down, _he_ sits down: if he bows,
_he_ bows; if he makes a grimace, _he_ makes the same. Yet his eyes are
closed. He certainly does not see. His mind has interpenetrated to a
small extent the nervous system of the operator; and is in relation
with his voluntary nerves and the anterior half of his cranio-spinal
chord. (These are the organs by which the impulse to voluntary motion
is conveyed and originated.) Further into the other’s being he has
not yet got. So he does not _what the other thinks of, or wishes him
to do_: but only what the other either does, or goes through the
mental part of doing. So Victor sang the air which M. de Puységur only
mentally hummed.
The next strange phenomenon marks that the mind of the entranced
patient has interpenetrated the nervous system of the other _a step
farther_, and is in relation besides with the posterior half of the
cranio-spinal chord and its nerves. For now the entranced person, who
has no feeling, or taste, or smell of his own, _feels, tastes, and
smells every thing that is made to tell on the senses of the operator_.
If mustard or sugar be put in his own mouth, he seems not to know that
they are there; if mustard is placed on the tongue of the operator, the
entranced person expresses great disgust, and tries as if to spit it
out. The same with bodily pain. If you pluck a hair from the operator’s
head, the other complains of the pain you give _him_.
To state in the closest way what has happened: The phenomena of
sympathetic motion and sympathetic sensation thus displayed are
exactly such as might be expected to follow, if the mind or conscious
principle of the entranced person were brought into relation with
the cranio-spinal chord of the operator and its nerves, and with no
farther portion of his nervous system. Later, it will be seen, the
interpenetration can extend farther.
But, before this happens, a new phenomenon manifests itself, not of a
sympathetic character. The operator contrives to wake the entranced
person to the knowledge that he possesses new faculties. _He develops
in him new organs of sensation_, or rather helps to hasten his
recognition of their possession.
It is to be observed, however, that several who can be entranced cannot
be brought as far as the present step. Others make a tantalizing
half-advance towards reaching it _thus_, and then stop. They are
asked,—“Do you see any thing?” After some days, at length they answer
“Yes.” “What?” “A light.” “Where is the light?” Then they intimate its
place to be either before them, or to one side, or above or behind
them. And they describe the colour of the light, which is commonly
yellowish. And each day it is pointed to in the same direction, and is
seen equally whether the room be light or dark. Their eyes in the mean
time are closed. And here with many the phenomenon stops. Others in
this light now begin to discern objects held in the direction in which
they see it. The range of this new visual organ, and the conditions
under which it acts, are different in different instances. Sometimes
the object must be close, sometimes it is best seen at a short
distance; but seen it is. The following experiment, which is decisive,
was made at my suggestion: A gentleman standing behind the entranced
person held behind him a pack of cards, from which he drew several in
succession, and, without seeing them himself, presented them to the new
visual organ of the patient. In each case she named the card right.
The degree of light suited to this new mode of vision is variable:
sometimes bright daylight is best; sometimes they prefer a moderate
light. Some distinguish figure and colour when the room is so dark that
the bystanders can distinguish neither.
These observations, which are, however, only in conformity with similar
evidence from many other quarters, I give on the authority of Mr. J. W.
Williamson of Wickham, the gentleman to whom I have before alluded.
The following accidental features, attending the manifestation of
transposed senses, were further observed by Mr. Williamson:—
In most of the persons in whom Mr. Williamson has brought out
transposed vision, the faculty has been located in a small surface of
the scalp behind the left ear; and to see objects well, the patient
has held them at the distance of five or six inches from and opposite
to this spot. One young woman, who had been temporarily set aside
under affliction for the loss of a relative, on the experiments being
resumed, saw from all parts of the head, but confusedly, a broken and
incomplete picture. On a subsequent day, she saw with the right side of
her head. Afterwards the visual sense returned to its first place.
In one young person, the new sentient organ was on the top of her head,
and to see objects she required them to be brought into contact with
it. Once that she had a rheumatic cold and tenderness of the scalp, she
said, when entranced, putting her hand to the crown of her head, that
the cold had made her eyes sore.
One person saw objects best when placed behind her at the distance of
seven or eight feet.
The governess in a neighbouring family was mesmerised for
tic-doloureux. In seven sittings she was cured. At the second sitting,
in her trance she exhibited displaced sensation. She could read with
her finger-ends; her way was to hold the book open against her chest,
the back of the book towards her, with one hand; then she passed a
finger of the other hand slowly over each word, to read it.
The part-physical character of these phenomena is shown by an
observation of Dr. Petetin’s on the first of his cataleptic patients.
At the time that the patient heard with the pit of her stomach, he
found that if with the fingers of one, say the left hand, he touched
the pit of her stomach, and whispered to the fingers of his right hand,
the patient heard him; but if the left hand was removed to the smallest
possible distance from the patient, the contact being interrupted, she
no longer heard him. Then he made a chain of seven persons, holding
each other’s hands. The nearest to the patient was her sister, who
touched the pit of her stomach; at the other end was Dr. Petetin, who
whispered to his fingers, and was heard. A cane was then introduced
as part of the circuit—the patient still heard; but if a stick of
sealing-wax, or a glass rod, was substituted for it, or if one of the
party wore silk gloves, the patient could no longer hear Dr. Petetin.
Without close observation, what is physical in the phenomena which
have thus engaged us is liable to be overlooked; and the bystander
may class them as examples of lucidity, which they are not. Organic
co-operation may be traced in them all. Thus, among Mr. Williamson’s
earlier experiments, he tried, sitting before the entranced person,
(who had shown no lucidity,) by imaging strongly to himself a white
horse, to force the image into her mind. When, being awakened, she had
left the room, on her way she said to her fellow-servant, “What was it
master said to me about a white horse? I am sure he said something.”
Mr. Williamson, on learning the maid’s remark, supposed his mental
operation had been successful. But the same experiment, when repeated,
mostly failed. At last he found out why: It only succeeded when, in
his mental urgency, he half made in his own throat the motions of
the sounds that expressed the mental image. Then, and then only, the
patient caught it. For her mind could not read his thoughts, but as
yet had penetrated the inferior part of the nervous system only, the
cranio-spinal cord; and, being there, had adopted sympathetically the
voluntary impulses that were there performed; so she half-moved the
muscles of her own vocal organs to express the idea, and from that—its
imperfect expression—received it into her thoughts. No doubt the
phenomenon of Victor’s singing the words to M. de Puységur’s mentally
hummed air was the same with the above, and not one of mesmeric
lucidity, the subject which we are now approaching.
But I pause;—and go no further.
For my object in these Letters, generally, has been to establish
principles. And the phenomena of lucidity developed in artificial
trance have been only the same as, and have not been as yet made more
of than, the lucidity of catalepsy. No further principle has yet
emerged from their study; and my special object in this Letter has been
to persuade the opponents of mesmerism to do it justice; and I think I
am most likely to attain my end by not attempting to prove too much.
So that nothing remains for me to do, but to observe the form in which
these Letters were originally shaped, in recollection of the pleasant
hours which the residence of your family at Boppard, during the winter
of 1844-5, caused me, and to say finally,
DEAR ARCHY, Farewell.