That Devil's Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (original) (raw)
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Australian Journal of French Studies, 2016
In France ca. 1878-1890, hypnotism enjoyed unprecedented legitimacy and cultural authority, with literary interest flourishing alongside medico-scientific enquiry into the topic. In light of these dual conditions, this article examines how texts about hypnotism constituted their ideal reader, with a focus on the role of the reader's imagination. It firstly elucidates the ways scientific texts guided their ideal reader to suppress any imaginative response to hypnotic phenomena. If this served to neutralize potentially damaging interpretations of phenomena, it also placed constraints on scientific experimentation into hypnotism. Fictional studies of hypnotism raised the possibility, however, that it was valid to read accounts of hypnotic phenomena "like novels", that is, in an imaginative mode. The analysis, in this second part, centres on an episode from Jules Claretie's 1885 novel Jean Mornas, before finally exploring the implications for scientific enquiry of fluidity between scientific and literary ways of reading hypnotism. "Les phénomènes du sommeil provoqué ont aujourd'hui leur place dans la science", declared Gilbert Ballet of the Paris medical faculty in February 1887. 2 Under the circumstances, Ballet's non-specialist audience would have been likely to accept this statement. Not only did Ballet speak from a strong institutional position, but throughout the 1880s, hypnotism, as these phenomena were usually termed, enjoyed 1 I would like to thank Peter Cryle for advice and comments on early versions of this piece. Some of the research in this article was made possible through the support of the Kathleen Campbell-Brown Scholarship at the University of Queensland.
Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 2017
In fin-de-siècle France, hypnotism enjoyed an unprecedented level of medico-scientific legitimacy. Researchers studying hypnotism had nonetheless to manage relations between their new ‘science’ and its widely denigrated precursor, magnétisme animal , because too great a resemblance between the two could damage the reputation of ‘scientific’ hypnotism. They did so by engaging in the rhetorical activity of boundary-work. This paper analyses such demarcation strategies in major texts from the Salpêtrière and Nancy Schools – the rival groupings that dominated enquiry into hypnotism in the 1880s. Researchers from both Schools depicted magnétisme as ‘unscientific’ by emphasizing the magnetizers’ tendency to interpret phenomena in wondrous or supernatural terms. At the same time, they acknowledged and recuperated the ‘portions of truth’ hidden within the phantasmagoria of magnétisme ; these ‘portions’ function as positive facts in the texts on hypnotism, immutable markers of an underlying ...
Nervous Atmospheres:Parascientific Theories of the Mind & Hypnosis During the Victorian Era
Bakken Museum of the History of Electricity in Life, 2005
The following article was originally published on the website of the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, Minneapolis, after Marshall completed a research residency at the museum in September, 2005; https://thebakken.org/ My research at The Bakken contributed to my 2016 book Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot and other publications, notably my chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Performance and Science. Specifically, my research at the Bakken focused upon two issues: the relation of parascience to the practice of the French fin de siècle neurologist Dr Jean-Martin Charcot and his school, and the relation of Charcot’s school to developments in physiology after his death in 1893. My work particularly focused on issues related to how the theatrical viewing of the patient developed by Charcot and his peers tended to licence parascience and so confused the distinction between new sciences such as neurology and physiology, with Spiritism, magnetism, Mesmerism, homeopathy and so on. What follows here is an article for the non-specialist on the confusing, wondrous and often ambiguously scientific qualities of such popular fin de siècle practices as magnetism, Mesmerism and hypnotism. Should readers wish to draw on this material, I would be grateful if they might follow standard academic practice of appropriate citation and attribution.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2015
In 1880s France, hypnotism enjoyed unique medico-scientific legitimacy. This was in striking contrast to preceding decades when its precursor, magnétisme animal, was rejected by the medical/academic establishment as a disreputable, supernaturally tinged practice. Did the legitimation of hypnotism result from researchers repudiating any reference to the wondrous? Or did strands of magnetic thinking persist? This article interrogates the relations among hypnotism, magnétisme, and the domain of the wondrous through close analysis of scientific texts on hypnotism. In question is the notion that somnambulist subjects possessed hyperacute senses, enabling them to perceive usually imperceptible signs, and thus inadvertently to denature researchers' experiments (a phenomenon known as unconscious suggestion). The article explores researchers' uncritical and unanimous acceptance of these ideas, arguing that they originate in a holdover from magnétisme. This complicates our understanding of the continuities and discontinuities between science and a precursor "pseudo-science," and, more narrowly, of the notorious Salpêtrière-Nancy "battle" over hypnotism.
History of hypnotism in Europe and the significance of place
Notes and Records: the Royal Society journal of the history of science
Since the 1990s a number of studies, such as Alan Gauld's A history of hypnotism, Alison Winter's Mesmerized, Daniel Pick's Svengali's web, Andreas Mayer's Sites of the unconscious and, most recently, William Hughes' That devil's trick, have elucidated the scientific as well as the popular cultures in which mesmeric and hypnotic practices thrived in the nineteenth century. 1 By the end of the nineteenth century-that is, the time on which the articles of this special issue focus-hypnotism was a common topic of medical, legal and public debate in several European countries. The therapeutic potential of hypnotic suggestion was balanced against the dangers of a mental state that made the individual a seemingly powerless subject of the hypnotizer's will and commands. Risks to individual and collective mental health, of sexual abuse of hypnotized persons, and of criminal suggestions were widely invoked whenever hypnotism was discussed. The 'magnetic' treatments by lay healers and the popular performances by stage hypnotists such as Donato (Alfred Edouard D'Hont) and Carl Hansen, who toured Europe, caused political concerns about public health and public order, leading to calls for the banning of hypnotic practices or for restricting their use to qualified medical men. Indeed, hypnotism appears to have been a practice around which a number of acute popular anxieties coalesced during the nineteenth century, including fears related to psychological contagion, crowds, race, class and gender. 2 In the scientific discourse, the pendulum of opinion had begun to swing from Jean-Martin Charcot's school at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, which interpreted hypnosis as an induced pathological state of the nervous system, to Hippolyte Bernheim's school at the University of Nancy, which saw it as a psychological state resulting from suggestion. In some instances, however, the idea of pathology was hard to dispel, often surviving as part of a dual model of hypnosis that could be used to promote the therapeutic benefits of medical hypnosis while simultaneously warning of the profound dangers of lay practice in this field. 3 When not engaged in the defence or promotion of their particular theory of hypnosis, both schools and their supporters across Europe also fought a rearguard action against their pre-scientific past, seeking to establish what separated hypnotism from animal magnetism. The six articles of this issue delve into the various conflicts highlighted by the wideranging debates around and responses to hypnotism. Above all, they give us the opportunity to consider the significance of 'place' in the historical hypnotism debates. We mean this in two regards. First, there has so far been relatively little research on these debates in Spain and Italy, and-with the exception of the contributions of Joseph Delboeuf 4-in Belgium. To use the vocabulary of the 'spatial turn' in the humanities, these debates allow us to follow processes of dissemination from the two rival centres of hypnotism, Paris and Nancy, to the 'periphery'. Of course, disseminators and propagators of hypnotism have been known before, especially through the long list of visitors to the
« Hypnosis: Panpsychism in Action » (2008)
"Hypnosis ranks amongst the most fundamental ideas that made the Victorian age. Together with progress, creativity, techno-science and industrialization, evolutionism and its by-product eugenism, and, last but not least, the emergent feminist movement, it gave a peculiar flavor to its main trait: the faith in the superiority (if not the superior rationality) of Western civilization and in its colonial duties."
Medical History, 2012
During the late nineteenth century, many British physicians rigorously experimented with hypnosis as a therapeutic practice. Despite mounting evidence attesting to its wide-ranging therapeutic uses publicised in the 1880s and 1890s, medical hypnosis remained highly controversial. After a decade and a half of extensive medical discussion and debate surrounding the adoption of hypnosis by mainstream medical professionals-including a thorough inquiry organised by the British Medical Association-it was decisively excluded from serious medical consideration by 1900. This essay examines the complex question of why hypnosis was excluded from professional medical practice by the end of the nineteenth century. Objections to its medical adoption rarely took issue with its supposed effectiveness in producing genuine therapeutic and anaesthetic results. Instead, critics' objections were centred upon a host of social and moral concerns regarding the patient's state of suggestibility and weakened 'will-power' while under the physician's hypnotic 'spell'. The problematic question of precisely how far hypnotic 'rapport' and suggestibility might depart from the Victorian liberal ideal of rational individual autonomy lay at the heart of these concerns. As this essay demonstrates, the hypnotism debate was characterised by a tension between physicians' attempts to balance their commitment to restore patients to health and pervasive middle-class concerns about the rapid and ongoing changes transforming British society at the turn of the century. On 28 March 1890, more than sixty leading British medical men gathered in a surgical theatre in Leeds to observe Dr J. Milne Bramwell operate on seven hypnotized patients. Audience members were both astonished and gratified that none of the patients-men and women of varying ages and suffering from different complaints-appeared to *
The fear of simulation: Scientific authority in late 19th-century French disputes over hypnotism
History of Science, 2015
This article interrogates the way/s in which rival schools studying hypnotism in late 19th-century France framed what counts as valid evidence for the purposes of science. Concern over the scientific reality of results is particularly situated in the notion of simulation (the faking of results); the respective approaches to simulation of the Salpêtrière and Nancy schools are analysed through close reading of key texts: Binet and Féré for the Salpêtrière, and Bernheim for Nancy. The article reveals a striking divergence between their scientific frames, which helps account for the bitterness of the schools’ disputes. It then explores Bernheim’s construction of scientific authority in more detail, for insights into the messiness entailed by theorizing hypnotism in psychical terms, while also attempting to retain scientific legitimacy. Indicative of this messiness, it is argued, is the way in which Bernheim’s (apparently inconsistent) approach draws on multiple epistemic frames.
Hypnosis Reconsidered, Resituated, and Redefined
Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2012
The two-hundred-year history of hypnosis and its predecessor, animal magnetism, is replete with stories of unusual phenomena. Perhaps surprisingly, a close reading of that history reveals that investigators and students of hypnosis have been unable to achieve an agreed-upon definition of their subject matter. Because of this failure to describe the essential nature of hypnosis, they resorted to lists of hypnotic phenomena as a means for confirming the presence of a hypnotic state in clinical and experimental situations. However, identification and enumeration of hypnotic phenomena proved to be problematic. The content of these lists varied from era to era and from practitioner to practitioner, and the selection of phenomena seemed to be an arbitrary process. With no agreed-upon definition and no definitive list of phenomena that would apply to hypnosis and hypnosis alone, there was no way to ensure that the "hypnosis" that was being studied in clinical and experimental work was identical from one case to the next. This article offers a definition of hypnosis that is not based on lists of phenomena.