Obviously, Mesmer, having treated his patients, could not prove that they would not have recovered if he had not treated them; so his critics had a strong position. But, on the other hand, neither can an orthodox doctor prove that his cures are due to his treatment. If it is vis medicatrix naturæ in one case, it may be the same in the other.
Modern medicine is more and more coming to this conclusion—is abandoning drugging as it abandoned bleeding and cautery, and is leaving the patient to nature. This is a significant fact.
But there is good reason to believe that Mesmer’s treatment was a real factor in his cures, for in many cases the patient had been treated by orthodox methods for years without effect. Perhaps, as the doctors said, it was “only the recuperative force of Nature”, but if the doctors could not set that force to work, and Mesmer somehow could, he is just as much entitled to the credit of the cure as if he had done it by bleeding or drugging. However, by one sort of persecution or another, he was driven out of Paris, and more or less discredited. After a visit to England, he retired to Switzerland, where he lived in obscurity until his death in 1815.
The method was kept alive by various disciples, such as the Marquis de Puységur, Dupotet, Deleuze, and many more, but in an amateurish sort of way. The first-named found that in one of his patients he could induce a trance state which showed peculiar features. In trance, the man knew all that he knew when awake, but when awake he knew nothing of what had happened in trance. This second condition thus seemed to be equivalent to an enlargement of personality.
Both in England and France the medical side came to the front again, in the hands of Braid (a Manchester surgeon who first used the term “hypnotism”, from Greek hypnos, sleep, and whose book Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep was published in 1843), Liébeault, Bernheim, Elliotson, and Esdaile.
Elliotson and Esdaile still believed in a magnetic effluence, but the idea was given up by Braid and the “Nancy school” (the investigators who followed the lines of Liébeault of Nancy), for it was found that patients could be hypnotised without passes or strokings or any manipulation. Braid told his patients to gaze fixedly at a bright object, e.g., his lancet. Liébeault produced sleep by talking soothingly or commandingly filling the patient’s mind with the idea of sleep. In some cases it was found that patients could hypnotise themselves by an effort of will (this was confirmed more recently by Dr Wingfield’s experiments with athletic undergraduates at Cambridge), and this disposed of the hitherto supposedly necessary “magnetic effluence” from the operator.
The most modern opinion is pretty much the same. Dr Tuckey, who learnt his method from Liébeault himself, and who practised for twenty years in the West End of London, is convinced that the whole thing is suggestion. So is Dr Bramwell, who shares with Dr Tuckey the leading position among hypnotic practitioners in England. The latter, it may be remarked, was the first qualified medical man to write an important book on the subject in English, after Braid.
The tendency now is to give suggestions without attempting to induce actual trance. It is found with many patients that if they will make their minds passive and receptive, listening to the doctor’s suggestions in an absent-minded sort of way, those suggestions—that the health shall improve and the specified symptoms disappear—are carried out. The explanation of this is “wrapped in mystery”. No one knows exactly how it comes about. But it seems to be somewhat thus:
The complicated happenings within our bodies, such as the chemical phenomena known as digestion and the physical phenomena such as blood circulation and contraction of involuntary muscles, seem to imply intelligence, though that intelligence is not part of the conscious mind, for we do not consciously direct the processes. They go on all the same—for example—when we are asleep. Presumably, then, there is a mental Something in us, which never sleeps, and which runs the organic machinery. If we could get at this Something, and give it instructions, a part of the machinery which is working wrongly might get attended to and put right. Unfortunately, the ordinary consciousness is in the way. We cannot get at the mechanic in the mill, because we have to go through the office, and the managing director keeps us talking.
Well, in hypnotic trance, or even in the preoccupied “absent-minded” state, we get past the managing director—who is asleep or attending to something else—into the mill. We get at the man who really attends to the machinery. We get past the normal consciousness, and can give our orders to the “subconscious” or “subliminal”—which means “below the threshold”. In Myers’ phrase, suggestion is a “successful appeal to the subliminal self”, but exactly how it comes about, and why the patient usually cannot do it for himself but has to have the suggestion administered by a doctor, we do not know.