Mesmerized

From Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (pp. 165-167, 172-174)

(Posted March 5, 1999 · Issue 49)

As Winter tells us, mesmerism came on the scene at a time when the medical profession was struggling to separate "doctors" from "quacks" - no easy task, since even trained professionals were often perceived as causing as much harm as good. So when the controversial technique of mesmerism was touted as a safe form of anesthesia, most doctors found themselves in a quandary: was this a real, valid method of pain relief, or was it a gimmick, the endorsement of which would land one in the quack category?

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The Invention of Anesthesia

As the itinerant mesmerists made their way across the country, doctors throughout Britain were confronted by physiological feats they could not match, found hard to contest, and could not explain, especially after mesmerism's anesthetic properties became known. A single, very well publicized surgical operation in November 1842 put mesmeric anesthesia into the public eye. Although this was not the first time mesmerism had been used as a surgical anesthetic, even in 1840s Britain, [1] it was the first to attain intense national publicity, perhaps because both the mesmerist and the surgeon were British, and well-respected in the community of Ollerton, near Nottingham, where the operation took place.

This case was an amputation of the leg at the thigh of one J. Wombell, a forty-two-year-old Nottinghamshire laborer "of calm and quiet temperament." The mesmerist, William Topham, was a barrister of the Middle Temple and the surgeon, W. Squire Ward, ran the Ollerton Infirmary near Nottingham. In the days before the operation, Topham placed Wombell into repeated states of diminished pain and deeper sleep. During the surgery he manifested none of the usual signs of pain except for a low "moaning." This sound was not influenced by the course of the operation; it did not change, and Wombell did not stir, when Ward cut the major nerve to the spine (the sciatic). Afterwards Wombell claimed to have felt no pain, though he did say he had "once, felt as if I heard a kind of crunching." [2] He recovered and lived for thirty years." [3]

Most modern readers will find it inconceivable that someone might pretend to feel nothing in such circumstances, but doctors fought violently over just this issue: was Wombell faking? Some claimed that he had colluded with the mesmerist and surgeon, and in fact had been fully conscious. That is, he had felt all the pain of the amputation but had used what muscles remained in that leg to hold it still even when the knife cut through the sciatic nerve. [4] If we are to make sense of what might seem an extraordinary line of argument, it will be useful to reconstruct the contemporary significance of the possibility of suspending sensation.

Since the 1790s at least, a wide range of drugs, gases, vapors, and techniques could suspend sensation, but until the 1840s, it seems that no one thought to use them for the suspension of pain in surgery. It is hard to imagine that doctors considered the possibility of using chemicals to suspend surgical pain for half a century but held back from doing so because they were afraid of harming the patient, because they were far more daring in experimenting with chemical cures on charity patients in hospitals. They could easily have experimented with anesthesia in the teaching hospitals. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of powerful chemicals into therapeutic treatment, many of which are ranked as poisons when used in lower doses than those used at the time for therapeutic purposes. Nor can one find an explanation in the thought that the patients themselves either were not familiar with these chemicals or could not get access to them. The perception- and consciousness-altering effects of ether and nitrous oxide routinely figured in shows at music halls and popular scientific displays. A great proportion of individuals had seen the effects of chemicals like ether, alcohol, laudanum, opium, and nitrous oxide, and had access to them.

It is extraordinary, on the face of it, that fifty years should have passed before nitrous oxide was routinely used in surgery. To understand why this should before have been so, we need to begin with a rather obvious point: that sensation and insensibility had a significance in the early nineteenth century that was very different from their status after anesthesia became routine. The connection to surgery, once made and demonstrated, was obvious, but making this connection was not trivial. Otherwise, surgical anesthesia would have been developed in the late eighteenth century, when natural philosophers were most interested in developing different kinds of gases and vapors and documenting their effects on the body. Instead, the deliberate suspension of pain during surgery came as an afterthought in early Victorian mesmeric research, occurring to doctors years after they noted and debated mesmeric insensibility; and even after mesmeric anesthesia was developed, four years passed before the first official cases of chemical anesthesia.

What may be even more surprising to modern readers is that doctors' initial reaction to mesmeric anesthesia was not universal enthusiasm at the thought of suspending pain. Some were actually horrified by the idea. One medical editor protested that the idea of one person producing insensibility in another was too terrible even to admit into consideration. If pain could really be suspended, he threatened, "the teeth could be pulled from one's head" without one even realizing it. [5] It was not the state of insensibility as such that was horrifying, of course, since alcohol and opium could dull pain and remove consciousness. But these were not dispensed by someone else; they were voluntarily consumed by the individual affected. It was the thought that one person could remove from others their sensitivity to their surroundings that was disturbing: it was an intolerable violation of the individual's agency. Recall that it was hard for doctors attending public demonstrations to believe that patients had been placed in an insensible state. Part of the moral outrage they displayed may have been directed at the supposed condition itself as well as the possibility of fraud. The horrors of the hypothetical scenario the editor laid before his readers further accentuate the difference in bodily sensibility between the 1830s and the late twentieth century.

There is no way of knowing whether the patients of such horrified doctors would have reacted similarly if the connection between the production of insensibility and its potential use in surgery had been presented to them (to any greater degree than the partial numbness imparted by alcohol), or whether, instead, they would eagerly have seized upon it. One is bound to suspect the latter, but in any case, it is certain that patients, like doctors, did not make the connections that would have given them the choice.

Ambivalent Supporters

The campaign for anesthesia soon won cautious encouragement from some doctors and natural philosophers. Indeed, one mesmeric tract that emphasized the "household" benefits of mesmerism and mesmeric anesthesia was welcomed by William Robert Grove, president of the Royal Society, who had attended some experiments. He supported the view that the "simple" effects of mesmerism such as anesthesia were real, though he dismissed the "proofs" of clairvoyance. [6] John Forbes, founder and editor of the British and Foreign Medical Review, argued along the same lines. The "simple" mesmeric effects - those resembling sleep and other naturally occurring phenomena - were unfeigned. Indeed, mesmeric anesthesia might become a great boon to mesmerism, if it were not proved false. In the meantime he urged doctors to evaluate mesmerism - not to ignore it. [7] And the mesmerists, "even those of the highest class, the members of the medical profession," needed to eschew the "extraordinary" phenomena, which he thought were clever frauds. [8] Forbes did not wish to drive mesmerism beyond the fringe of scientific inquiry, where he felt it existed at the moment, but to pull it into the mainstream of scientific attention, where its merits could be appraised.

Another cautious proponent was the surgeon John Chatto. He wrote to the London Medical Gazette to urge that mesmerism be taken up by the "profession," who could train themselves on poor patients. He warned that the rich would soon demand to be mesmerized. Surgeons would then find themselves in the dangerous position of training themselves on their most valued patients, as they struggled to catch up with their nonmedical rivals: "it seems a far more gracious circumstance that [mesmerism] should spontaneously originate with the profession, than that it should be forced upon us by the pressure of public opinion. The only difference arising from the delay shall be, that the experiment must be commenced with a different class of persons." [9] While poor patients could not demand anesthesia, the "wealthy and informed" would "naturally" insist on it. Of course, this ominous specter of market forces applied only to anesthesia, not to the wilder forms of mesmerism. Mesmerism's "ultra-pretensions," such as clairvoyance, should never be allowed within the halls of a London hospital.

Although the mesmerists had several supporters among important physicians, surgeons, and natural philosophers, it was still unclear whether the mesmerist could coexist with the surgeon - both powerful performers unused to sharing a stage. Elliotson's brand of mesmerism, like his style of practicing medicine, was theatrical. The role of the mesmerist as master of the theater represented a potential conflict with the other, more established masters of theater, surgeons. If mesmerism were to succeed in British hospitals as a surgeon's tool, it would have to become a backroom activity, performed behind the scenes. Like the scientific work of Faraday, which took place in a basement laboratory before being displayed before audiences at the Royal Institution, the production of the mesmeric trance would have to disappear. [10] It remained to be seen whether British mesmerists could produce the magnetic spectacle in private.

By late 1846 mesmeric anesthesia was on the brink of gaining acceptance among medical constituencies that had long resisted mesmerism. A colonial surgeon had gained government support for his mesmeric practice, in which he used mesmeric anesthesia to perform hitherto impossible operations. British doctors, who thought of India as a laboratory for the development of new social, scientific, and medical innovations, found the Indian trials easier to believe. One claimed that Indian subjects were "scarcely intelligent enough" to have been able to pretend their invulnerability to pain. [11] Another important event was John Elliotson's Harveian Oration in the Royal College of Physicians. According to the rules of the college the youngest fellow who had not previously had the opportunity gave the oration. In 1846 this gave Elliotson the podium. He used Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood as an example of how discoveries with revolutionary implications could initially meet with incredulity and resistance; mesmerism's critics were likened to Harvey's misguided opponents. [12] Meanwhile, the London Mesmeric Infirmary had collected its first round of subscriptions, and rented prominent new rooms in Bedford Square (facing off, as it were, with Thomas Wakley's home and headquarters). One exasperated Lancet correspondent rhymed his prognosis for mesmerized medicine.

Away with the Hall and away with the College;
Away with chirurgico-medical knowledge!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No more shall we hear the afflicted complain -
Operations will give more of pleasure than pain;
And ladies will smile, in their mesmerized trance,
As the pains of their uterine efforts advance!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And whilst sceptics their agonized vigils are keeping,
[Mesmer's] disciples will through their efforts be sleeping. [13]

Alison Winter is associate professor of history in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences of the California Institute of Technology.

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