‘A Compelling Power’: When Mesmerism Came to America

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From The New York Review of Books:

Cynthia Gleason, a weaver at a Rhode Island textile mill, went into her first trance in the fall of 1836. According to her mesmerist, a French sugar planter and amateur “animal magnetist” named Charles Poyen, she had been suffering for years from a mysterious illness; he called it “a very serious and troublesome complaint of the stomach” in one account and “a complicated nervous and functional disease” in another. For months Poyen had been giving lectures insisting that mesmerists like himself had mastered a technique for putting people in somnambulistic trances, curing their diseases, and managing their minds. When Gleason’s physician called him in to make magnetic “passes” over her body with his hands, Poyen wrote in his dubiously self-serving memoirs, she said she’d “defy anyone to put her to sleep in this manner.” But after twenty-five minutes, “her eyes grew dim and her lids fell heavily down.”

The next day, he reported, she said she felt better. Her sessions attracted more and more local interest; within a week, Poyen was putting her to sleep in front of groups of “distinguished gentlemen” and challenging the spectators to wake her up. (In Providence, they rang “a large tavern bell” next to her ear, put “a bottle of ammoniacal gas” under her nose, and shot a pistol “within five feet of her head.”) By February Poyen and Gleason had gone on tour, giving more private lectures and three public performances. He claimed, unpersuasively, that she refused “any pecuniary reward” except room, board, and “the means of satisfying the strict necessities of life.”

Before long, the mesmerism they exhibited had become the object of fevered speculation and imitation across New England and New York. Gleason could make oracular announcements from within her trance states; physicians started asking her to diagnose difficult cases. “This power is also the most constant and certain we have observed in her,” Poyen wrote. “Out of nearly 200 patients, of all descriptions, she has examined within eight or nine months, I have known but two or three failures.” He himself was rarely in good health and claimed that, at one point, Gleason had given a precise summary of his nervous disorders, including a suggested treatment. Moments like those, the literary scholar Emily Ogden argues, suggested that the rapport could go two ways: “In the case of Gleason’s diagnosis of Poyen, who controlled whom?”

Control is a coveted possession in Credulity, Ogden’s illuminating recent study of American mesmerism. The mesmerists and skeptics she studies all seem to want it; at any rate, they want to consider themselves rational and self-possessed enough not to fall under anyone else’s. During this brief, strange moment between 1836 and the late 1850s, mesmerizing another person—or seeing someone get mesmerized, or denouncing mesmerists as charlatans—became a way of stockpiling control for one’s own use.

. . . .

Mesmerism was a belated import. In the late 1770s, the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer claimed to have discovered an invisible vital substance that coursed through his patients’ bodies. In one formulation, according to the historian Jessica Riskin, it became “a fluid from the stars that flowed into a northern pole in the human head and out of a southern one at the feet.” At his clinic in Paris, he promised to cure a wide range of illnesses by clearing up blockages to the movement of the magnetic fluid; one notice mentioned “dropsy, paralysis, gout, scurvy, blindness,” and “accidental deafness.” Everything about his salon “was designed to produce a crisis in the patient,” the historian Robert Darnton wrote in his Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968):

Heavy carpets, weird, astrological wall-decorations, and drawn curtains shut him off from the outside world and muffled the occasional words, screams, and bursts of hysterical laughter that broke the habitual heavy silence… Every so often fellow patients collapsed, writhing on the floor, and were carried by Antoine, the mesmerist-valet, into the crisis room; and if his spine still failed to tingle, his hands to tremble, his hypochondria to quiver, Mesmer himself would approach, dressed in a lilac taffeta robe, and drill fluid into the patient from his hands, his imperial eye, and his mesmerized wand.

In 1784 a commission, of which Benjamin Franklin was one of the chairs, issued a withering report about Mesmer that denied the existence of the magnetic fluid and emphasized his patients’ credulity.

Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books

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