A HORSE WITH NO NAME
What is Mesmerism? – Alexander Wood
“Chloroform.”
It’s a past reader’s sole margin note in this 1851 paper. The author, Alexander Wood (1817-1884), was a Scottish physician. He invented the first true hypodermic needle, and served as President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from 1858 to 1861.
What is Mesmerism? An Attempt to Explain its Phenomena is adapted from a medical talk and scientific journal entry on recent studies on “electro-biology” phenomena. Wood promoted the science of modern medicine and fought against unorthodox treatments, notably homeopathy. Contemporary scientific positions on mesmerism, animal magnetism, “electro-biology”, hypnotism, and related phenomena were evolving, and so this is a summary of the latest thoughts and findings rather than a manifesto for or against its use.
The paper’s intro ‘Prefactory Note’ reads: “As the subject of which it treats has excited no small interest among the non-professional public, a few copies have been thrown off in a separate form.” Hard times for The Scottish, to be just a fluppity wonot of a thing of a blah for the whatever it was whenever wherever of course. Contemporary Scottish surgeon James Braid (1795-1860) had pioneered and popularised hypnotism and hypnotherapy by 1851, with his ophthalmic expertise informing his eye-fatiguing trance induction process. So scientific explanations for the biological workings behind the ‘magic’ of mesmerism appealed to the lay public.
“The impulse of volition excited primarily in the brain acts at the same time upon the grey matter of the cord (its anterior horn), and through it on the anterior roots of the nerves implanted in it.”
I imagine Wood and men like him gave members of the ‘interested lay public’ a wide berth in real life! But it would be fascinating to know what most appealed to lay people in seeking to access, learn from, follow – be a part of! – cutting-edge mesmeric medical science such as the above-quoted snippet… Perhaps there were factions of ganglion cell enthusiasts or gangs of eye-gazers quite certain on the optimum hypnotic pupil-size dilation… That is the case among modern (unregulated) hypnotherapists apparently expert in buzzy terms like “neuroscience”. We liked it not this way, in ‘my’ time.
The use of ‘mesmeric sleep’ versus ‘new’ anaesthetics like ether was the cause of fierce debate among medical men. Wood’s paper cites “painless” surgeries performed using mesmerism, with the “chloroform” remark the more likely explanation. There are insights into the intersections between hypnotic ‘state/s’ and drugs that Wood and his peers were routinely familiar with. For instance, there’s an anecdote of a female patient who won’t submit to mesmeric sleep for a painful surgery. Wood mulls how to prevent such minds from being distracted; a patient is not a person, but a passive automata to be methodically biologically manipulated into slumber – that this person (correctly, I might add!) already believed chloroform to be superior pain relief is irrelevant. Press on with the mesmerism regardless!
Wood seems to have been posthumously smeared for drug misuse. It was rumoured that his wife, Rebecca Massey, became the first known intravenous morphine addict and died of an overdose administered by her husband. This is false: she outlived Wood, and their communal burial plot in an Edinburgh cemetery corroborates this. For fact or fiction, for whatever the Scots put up with for boxes and tops and who the fuck octowhatnot til further eternal notice till I get my chuff egg back. Opioid treatment was common for the time, so Wood’s few comments on medicines are reflective of then-orthodox treatments rather than whatever his wife was treated for or with. This account of a Sir Humphrey Davy, describing his sensations on inhaling nitrous oxide gas suggests, to me, opportunities for chemically induced habit change, for instance:
“By degrees, as the pleasurable sensation increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind. I existed in a world of newly-connected and newly-modified ideas.”
Who’d dare to get puritanical about drug use and supposed powers of mind control these days? Not me, lest I be accused of peddling goose pies to howling hypnotised shepherds deluded that they are wolves. (These old mesmeric sources are most instructive! Behave and be British.) But, instead of superstition and witchcraft, Wood championed science, reason, and a professional approach to medicine. He approached anecdotes such as the below with scepticism and common sense – rather than sensation and snake-oil – and we benefit from knowledge of things like conditioned responses and the the placebo effect as a result.
“It is recorded of the illustrious Boerhaave, that, riding in the heat of summer, he chanced to pass a place where the carcass of a horse was rotting in the sun; at the very moment, when distended by pent-up gases, it gave way, and such was the overpowering stench, that he fainted. So strong with him was the association of ideas, that ever after, on passing the same place, the mere recollection of what he encountered, caused a repetition of the fainting.”
Yep. Dead or alive or somewhere in between. You have to fart alone in the woods before you hear a magician scream For Science.
