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Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain

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This excellent book contains many fascinating threads, interwoven skillfully to produce a most satisfying reading experience. It is certainly a good history of altered states of consciousness obtained by interpersonal communication. The Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer borrowed the notion of "animal magnetism" (science was infatuated with magnets in those days) and went about effecting cures by touching patients with a glass wand in an abracadabra setting. The phenomenon took his name ("mesmerism") until the Scott James Braid started calling it "hypnotism" based on the Greek name for sleep. As should be expected, Victorian mesmerism/hypnotism bares little resemblance to modern medical hypnosis.

It is also a story of the origins of modern anesthesia: the only known general and dental anesthetics available until the 1840's were alcohol and opium. Anesthetic gases, such as ether and nitrous oxide, had been known since the 1790's, but no one had thought about applying them to block the excruciating agonies that attended surgical interventions in those days. This neglect in blocking pain was due, in part, to the medical profession's ambivalence about the eradication of pain; an ambivalence not entirely lost to this day. For example, when a patient by the name of J. Wombell (age 42) had a leg amputated at the thigh while in a mesmeric trance, he remained quiet and cooperative and had no memory of pain afterwards. He lived another 30 years. The case was given enormous publicity throughout Britain, but doctors were not convinced. Many believed there was collusion between the surgeon and the patient; that Mr. Wombell had been fully awake during the surgery and had been just pretending to have felt no pain.

Finally, it is a history of Victorian medical science and its wobbly foundations. Elliotson, who was responsible for introducing the stethoscope to Britain (for which he was much criticized) took up the practice of mesmerism and eventually had to resign his university post after a series of "experiments" in which it appeared that his patients were faking their altered states of consciousness. The work of Esdaile, a Scottish surgeon working mesmerically with native patients in Calcutta is given a well deserved full chapter.

The book is not forbiddingly esoteric. Its language and concepts are accesible to reasonably well educated readers. Those with interests in psychiatry, or psychology, or sociology, or history, or all things Victorian, will enjoy the work. A mediocre index detracts from perfection; but an excellent bibliography returned this reader's good feelings about the book.

Alison Winter has written a thorough , well-researched look at mesmerism in Victorian Britain that is actually a thorough look at Victorian Britain through the concept of mesmerism. It was amazing to see how mesmerism touched on such Victorian concepts as gender relations, the emergence of science and medicine as a profession, and class relations. The chapters on mesmerism and colonial India, and the effect of the idea on mesmerism in changing the image of the homebound invalid were the most fascinating. All the famous characters from this period appear somewhere in this vast study. The metaphor seemed to stretch a little thin when reading and politics were added to the mesmerisic mix near the end of the book, although this was nevertheless very interesting. A good book that makes me interested to read more about this time period in Britain.