"Ever yours,
"F. W. N."
Harriet Martineau, sister of Dr. Martineau, was fifty-three years of age when Newman wrote to her brother about her illness. Practically for the whole of her life she had been more or less of an invalid. Even as a girl she suffered so much from deafness and wretched health, that she was hardly ever free from anxiety and depression. Nevertheless she did not let her ill-health prevent her from earning her livelihood by writing. Before she made her name by the publication of her stories on political economy, she experienced endless difficulties in her efforts to get publishers for her books. But no sooner had these stories appeared than her fame was assured, and money came in, so to speak, by handfuls, so that all financial troubles were altogether at an end.
From 1839 till 1844 she was so terribly out of health that no treatment produced any effect, until someone suggested that mesmerism should be tried, and this succeeded so well that she recovered a certain amount of strength and was able to go on with her writing. Nevertheless, that it did not wholly restore her health is evident from the fact that in 1855, when Newman was writing to her brother, he mentions her "formidable fainting fits" and daily pains in the head. "Her letter tells me," he says, "how very bad she is, that every day she feels shot in the head"; but he goes on to say that he does not despair of her better health because (as indeed her numerous books testify), her "body is so subject to her mind." It is, I think, necessary to remember that in 1844, when Miss Martineau tried mesmerism as a cure for her continued ill-health, mesmerism was practically taking its first steps in the English medical world. This science of healing, which began to be recognized in England about the middle of the eighteenth century, through the medium of the afterwards discredited Mesmer, has "in its day played many parts" and had more names than one. In the first instance it was called mesmerism, then animal magnetism, while to-day, when it has forced its way through incredulity, distrust, and opposition of all sorts, and come to the front in very truth, it faces us as a power which bids fair to be more and more with us as time goes on under the name of Hypnotism.
Perhaps few people remember the name of the man who really brought animal magnetism into prominence in the middle of the last century. Yet James Braid, the Scotch surgeon, who then lived at Manchester, and pursued with untiring thoroughness and perseverance his studies in the then little- known science, was really the shoulder that pushed hypnotism into our midst. It was Braid, indeed, who caused the name of "hypnotism" to eject that of "mesmerism" in England. He was never properly appreciated during his lifetime. But if he was not, he was only one of numerous examples which are always being brought up before our eyes (among those of our countrymen who have rendered their country signal services), who illustrate the famous English quotation, "Thus angels walked the earth unknown, and when they flew were recognized"
Braid, however, proved effectually that the mesmeric phenomena depend altogether on the physiological condition of the person operated on, and not on the power of the operator.
Dr. Martineau from Newman.
"7 P.V.E., "17th Feb., 1855.
"My dear Martineau,
"You will believe that the state of your sister's health gives me much concern. She has kindly written twice to me. The second letter tells of formidable fainting fits, which I cannot explain away; yet, as I told her in my reply to her first, her symptoms in general are so similar to my own that I cannot but hope her physician views them too seriously, and does her harm by it. I, on the whole, believe that my own heart is unsound organically (distended), but my experience certainly is that the less I attend to it in detail the better, though I must in prudence avoid impure air and other evils. Her second letter tells me as a decisive proof how very bad she is, that every day she feels shot in the head.
"Now this is exactly the symptom I have for nine months been struggling to subdue, and as my wife knows, I am, week by week, balancing whether to put myself under a doctor for it…. The spasm which distresses me comes at the crisis when I ought to go to sleep, and so wakes me up. I could not get rid of it even in the summer, on days on which I had least mental effort, and was in all other respects conscious of great vigour….