My Memoirs, Vol. III, 1826 to 1830

by Alexandre Dumas

Madame Pl——, upon whom this strange experiment had just been made, was between sixty-four and sixty-five years of age; she had been a widow ten years and had suffered for two or three years from glandular swellings on the right breast. Doctor Chap—— was her medical adviser; he had practised magnetism for some time and found himself apt at it. He attempted to apply it to the cure of Madame Pl——, but the disorder had gone too far, and he decided to try if it might be possible to lessen her pain while the operation was being performed. Jules Cloquet was consulted, and it was proposed that he should operate on the sleeping patient. He consented, welcoming the opportunity of seeing for himself a phenomenon concerning which he was sceptical, and also, at the same time, glad to be able to spare the patient the suffering inevitably connected with one of the most painful of surgical operations. Doctor Chap—— magnetised Madame Pl—— and rendered the whole of her right side completely insensible to pain. The ablation of the breast began by an incision eleven inches long, followed by another nine inches long. By means of these two incisions they could get at several glands under the armpit, which were carefully dissected. During the operation, which lasted ten minutes, the patient gave no signs of sensibility. To use the surgeon's own words—

"It seemed as though he were operating on a dead body; save that, when the operation was over and the patient's wound was being bathed with a sponge, she twice cried out, without coming out of her state of trance, 'Be quick and finish, and do not tickle me like that!'"

When the operation was over, Madame Pl—— was brought out of her trance: she did not remember anything, had not felt any pain and showed profound astonishment that the operation was over. The dressing was done in the usual way, and the wound showed every symptom of quick healing. At the end of a week's time Madame Pl—— drove out in a carriage. The suppuration was decreased and the wound was making rapid progress towards healing, when, about the evening of the fifteenth day, the patient complained of feeling great oppression, and swellings began to show in the lower extremities.

All this is nothing but the simple truth: now comes in the marvellous. Madame Pl—— had a daughter who came from the country to nurse her mother. Dr. Chap——, having seen that she had a very clear mind, put her into a magnetic sleep and consulted her about her mother's condition. At the first attempt she made to see, her face grew troubled and tears rose to her eyes.

Then she announced that the peaceful but inevitable death of her mother would take place the next morning. When questioned upon the internal state of her mother's chest, she said that the right lung was quite dead, that it was empty, suppurating on the side nearest the lower portion of the spine and bathed in serous fluid; that the left lung was sound and alone supported life. As for the abdominal viscera, the liver, according to her, was whitish and wrinkled; but the intestines were sound.

These depositions were taken down in the presence of witnesses.

The next day, at the given hour, Madame Pl—— died. The autopsy was made in the presence of deputies from the Académie, and the state of the body was found to conform precisely with the description given by the mesmerised girl.

This was what was reported in the papers, stated in the official return, related to me and confirmed by Jules Cloquet himself, one day when we were talking together—before the discovery of chloroform—of the great mysteries of nature which baffle human intelligence. Later, when I was preparing my book Joseph Balsamo, being interested to fathom the often debated question of the power or impotence of magnetism, I decided to make some personal experiments, not relying upon those produced by foreigners interested in accrediting magnetism. So I studied magnetism first hand, and the result of my investigations was as follows:—

I was endowed with great magnetic powers, and this power, as a rule, took effect on two out of every three persons upon whom I experimented. Let me hasten to state that I never practised it except upon young girls or women. This power in connection with physical phenomena is incontestable. A woman who has once submitted to magnetic sleep is the slave of the man who sent her to sleep. Even after she has waked she remembers or forgets what passed during her sleep, according to the will of the magnetiser. She could be made to kill someone during her sleep and, if he willed that she should be totally ignorant of having committed her crime, she would never know anything about it. The mesmeriser can make his victim feel pain of any kind in any part; he has only to touch the place with the tip of his finger, the end of a stick, or the end of an iron rod. He can cause a sensation of warmth with ice, a sensation of cold with fire; he can cause drunkenness with a glass of water, or even with an empty glass. He can put an arm, a leg or the whole body into a state of catalepsy, and make it hard and rigid as a bar of iron or as soft and supple as a scarf. He can cause insensibility to the prick of a needle, to the blade of a bistoury or the smart of cautery.

I believe all these things come under the domain of physical phenomena. Even the brain can be impelled to such a pitch of excitement as to make an ordinary being a poet, a child of twelve possess the ideas, feelings and manner of expressing them of a person of twenty or twenty-five.