Among his pupils, when at the zenith of his fame, was the Marquis de Puységur. Returning from serving at the siege of Gibraltar, this young officer found mesmerism the mode at Paris, and appears to have become, for no other reason, one of the initiated. At the end of a course of instruction, he professed himself to be no wiser than when it began; and he ridiculed the credulity of his brothers, who were stanch adherents of the new doctrine. However, he did not forget his lesson; and on going the same spring to his estate at Besancy, near Soissons, he took occasion to mesmerize the daughter of his agent and another young person, for the toothache, and they declared themselves, in a few minutes, cured. This questionable success was sufficient to lead M. de Puységur, a few days after, to try his hand on a young peasant of the name of Victor, who was suffering with a severe fluxion on his chest. What was M. de Puységur’s surprise, when, at the end of a few minutes, Victor went off into a kind of tranquil sleep, without crisis or convulsion, and in that sleep began to gesticulate and talk, and enter into his private affairs. Then he became sad; and M. de Puységur tried mentally to inspire him with cheerful thoughts; he hummed a lively tune to himself inaudibly, and immediately Victor began to sing the air. Victor remained asleep for an hour, and awoke composed, with his symptoms mitigated.
The case of Victor revolutionized the art of mesmerism. The large part of his life, in which M. de Puységur had nothing to do but to follow this vein of inquiry, was occupied in practising and advocating a gentle manipulation to produce sleep, in preference to the more exciting means which led to the violent crises in Mesmer’s art. I have no plea for telling how M. de Puységur served in the first French revolutionary armies; how he quitted the service in disgust; how narrowly he escaped the guillotine; how he lived in retirement afterwards, benevolently endeavouring to do good to his sick neighbours by means of mesmerism; how he survived the Restoration; and how, finally, he died of a cold caught by serving in the encampment at Rheims, at the coronation of Charles X.
For he had fulfilled his mission the day that he put Victor to sleep. He had made a vast stride in advance of his teacher. Not but that Mesmer must frequently have induced the same condition; but he had passed it by unheeded as one only of numerous equivalent forms of salutary crises; or that M. de Puységur himself estimated, or had the means of estimating, the real nature and value of the step which he had made. To himself he appeared to be winning a larger domain for mesmerism, when in fact he had emerged into an independent field, into which mesmerism happened to have a gate.
The state which he had induced in Victor was common trance, the initiatory sleep, followed by half-waking. He had obtained this result by using the Od force with quietness and gentleness, leaving out the exciting mental agencies to which the mixture of violent seizures in Mesmer’s practice is attributable. The gentler method has been adopted and practised by the successors of M. de Puységur, by Deleuze, Bertrand, Georget, Rostan, Foissac, Elliotson, and others. To Dr. Elliotson, the most successful probably, certainly the most scientific employer of the practice of mesmerism, the credit is due of having introduced its use into England: the credit,—for it required no little moral courage to encounter the storm of opposition with which his honest zeal in the advocacy of an unpopular practical truth was met. It is but fair to add, that though his theory has been superseded, and his method changed, to Mesmer belongs the merit of having first tracked out and realized this path of discovery. The golden medal is his.
The modern practice of mesmerism contemplates two objects: one, the application of the Od force to produce local effects; the other, its employment to induce trance. In the present slight sketch I shall say nothing on the first subject; but let me describe how trance is induced. It is to be observed, that attention to certain conditions favours very much the success of the experiment. The room should not be too light; very few persons should be present; the patient and the operator should be quiet, tranquil, and composed; the patient should be fasting. The operator has then only to sit down before the patient, who is likewise sitting with his hands resting on his knees, and gently closed, with the thumbs upwards. The operator then lays his hands half-open upon the patient’s, pressing the thumbs against those of the patient, as it were taking thumbs: this is a more convenient attitude than taking hands in the ordinary way. The operator and patient have then only to sit still. An Od-current is established; and if the patient is susceptible, he will soon become drowsy, and perhaps be entranced at the first sitting. Instead of this, the two hands of the operator may be held horizontally with the fingers pointed to the patient’s forehead, and either maintained in this position, or brought downwards in frequent passes opposite to the patient’s face, shoulders, arms; the points of the fingers being held as near the patient as possible without touching.
It is easy, theoretically, to explain the beneficial results which follow from the daily induction of trance for an hour or so, in various forms of disorder of the nervous system,—in epilepsy,—in tic-doloreux,—in nervous palsy, and the like. As long as the state of trance is maintained, so long is the nervous system in a state of repose. It is more or less completely put out of gear. It experiences the same relief which a sprained joint feels when you dispose it in a relaxed position on a pillow. A chance is thus given to the strained nerves of recovering their tone of health; and it is wonderful how many cases of nervous disorder get well at once through these simple means. As it is certain that there is no disease in which the nervous system is not primarily or secondarily implicated, it is impossible to foresee what will prove the limit to the beneficial application of mesmerism in medical practice.
In operative surgery the art is not less available. In trance the patient is insensible, and a limb may be removed without the operation exciting disturbance of any kind. And what is equally important, in all the after-treatment, at every dressing, the process of mesmerizing may be resorted to again, with no possible disadvantage, but being rather soothing and useful to the patient, independently of the extinction of the dread and suffering of pain. The first instance in which an operation was performed on a patient in this state was the celebrated case of Madame Plantin. It occurred twenty years ago. The lady was sixty-four years of age, and laboured under scirrhus of the breast. She was prepared for the operation by M. Chapélain, who on several successive days threw her into trance by the ordinary mesmeric manipulations. She was then like an ordinary sleep-walker, and would converse with indifference about the contemplated operation, the idea of which, when she was in her natural state, filled her with terror. The operation of removing the diseased breast was performed at Paris on the 12th of April, 1829, by M. Jules Cloquet; it lasted from ten to twelve minutes. During the whole of this time the patient, in her trance, conversed calmly with M. Cloquet, and exhibited not the slightest sign of suffering. Her expression of countenance did not change; nor was the voice, the breathing, or the pulse at all affected. After the wound was dressed, the patient was awakened from the trance, when on learning that the operation was over, and seeing her children round her, Madame Plantin was affected with considerable emotion, whereupon M. Chapélain, to compose her, put her back into the state of trance.
I copy the above particulars from Dr. Foissac’s Rapports et Discussions de l’Académie Royale de Médecine sur le Magnetism Animal.—Paris, 1833. My friend, Dr. Warren, of Boston, informed me that, being at Paris, he had asked M. Jules Cloquet if the story were true. M. Cloquet answered, “Perfectly.” “Then why,” said Dr. Warren, “have you not repeated the practice?” M. Cloquet replied “that he had not dared; that the prejudice against mesmerism was so strong at Paris that he probably would have lost his reputation and his income by so doing.”
It has been mentioned that in ordinary trance the mind appears to gain new powers. For a long time we had to trust to the chance turning up of cases of spontaneous trance, in the experience of physicians of observation, for any light we could hope would be thrown on those extraordinary phenomena; now we possess around us, on every side, adequate opportunities for completely elucidating these events, if we please to employ them. The philosopher, when his speculations suggest a new question to be put, can summon the attendance of a trance as easily as the Jupiter of the Iliad summoned a dream; or, looking out for two or three cases to which the induction of trance may be beneficial, the physician may have in his house subjects for perpetual reference and daily experiment.
A gentleman, with whom I, have long been well acquainted, for many years chairman of the Quarter Sessions in a northern county, of which during a late year he was high sheriff, has, like M. de Puységur, amused some of his leisure hours, and benevolently done not a little good, by taking the trouble of mesmerizing invalids, whom he has thus restored to health. In constant correspondence with, and occasionally having the pleasure of seeing this gentleman, I have learned from him the common course in which the new powers of the mind, which belong to trance, are developed under its artificial induction. The sketch which I propose to give of this subject will be taken from his descriptions, which, I should observe, tally in all essential points with what I meet with in French and German authors. The little that I have myself seen of the matter, I will mention preliminarily.