Mesmer died in obscurity on the 5th of March, in the year 1815.
Animal magnetism, under the name of mesmerism, has been made familiar of late years to the ears of English people, if not to their understandings, by the zealous and indiscreet advocacy which its absurdities have met with in London and our other great cities. It is true that the disciples have outrun their master—that Mesmer has been out-mesmerized; but the same criticisms which have been here made on the system of the arch-charlatan may be applied to the vagaries of his successors, whether they be dupes or rogues. To electro-biologists, spirit-rappers, and table-turners the same arguments must be used as we employ to mesmerists. They must be instructed that phenomena are not to be referred to magnetic influence, simply because it is difficult to account for them; that it is especially foolish to set them down to such a cause, when they are manifestly the product of another power; and that all the wonders which form the stock of their conversation, and fill the pages of the Zoist, are to be attributed, not to a lately discovered agency, but to nervous susceptibility, imagination, and bodily temperament, aroused by certain well-known stimulants.
They will doubtless be disinclined to embrace this explanation of their marvels, and will argue that it is much more likely that a table is made by ten or twelve gentlemen and ladies to turn rapidly round, without the application of muscular force, than that these ladies and gentlemen should delude themselves into an erroneous belief that such a phenomenon has been produced. To disabuse them of such an opinion, they must be instructed in the wondrous and strangely delicate mechanism of the human intellect and affections. And after such enlightenment they must be hopelessly dull or perverse if they do not see that the metaphysical explanation of "their cases" is not only the true one, but that it opens up to view far more astonishing features in the constitution of man than any that are dreamt of in the vain philosophy of mesmerism. It is humiliating to think that these remarks should be an appropriate comment on the silliness of the so-called educated classes of the nineteenth century. That they are out of place, none can advance, when one of the most popular pulpit orators of London has not hesitated to commit to print, in a work of religious pretensions, the almost blasphemous suggestion that table-turning is a phenomenon consequent upon the first out-poured drops of "the seventh vial" having reached the earth.
CHAPTER XVI.
MAKE WAY FOR THE LADIES!
"For in all times, in the opinion of the multitude, witches and old women and impostors have had a competition with physicians. And what followeth? Even this, that physicians say to themselves, as Solomon expresseth it upon a higher occasion, 'If it befall to me as befalleth to the fools, why should I labour to be more wise?'"—Lord Bacon's Advancement of Learning.
It is time to say something about the ladies as physicians. Once they were the chief practitioners of medicine; and even to recent times had a monopoly of that branch of art over which Dr. Locock presides. The question has lately been agitated whether certain divisions of remedial industry ought not again to be set aside for them; and the patronage afforded to the lady who (in spite of the ridicule thrown on her, and the rejection of her advances by various medical schools to which she applied for admission as a student), managed to obtain a course of medical instruction at one of the London schools, and practised for a brief time in London previous to her departure for a locality more suited to her operations, would seem to indicate that public feeling is not averse to the thought of employing—under certain conditions and for certain purposes—female physicians.
Of the many doctresses who have flourished in England during the last 200 years, only a few have left any memorial of their actions behind them. Of the wise women (a class of practitioners, by-the-by, still to be found in many rural villages and in certain parts of London) in whom our ancestors had as much confidence as we of the present generation have in the members of the College of Physicians, we question if twoscore, including Margaret Kennix and Mrs. Woodhouse, of the Elizabethan era, could be rescued from oblivion. Some of them wrote books, and so, by putting their names "in print," have a slight hold on posthumous reputation. Two of them are immortalized by mention in the records of the "Philosophical Transactions for 1694." These ladies were Mrs. Sarah Hastings and Mrs. French. The curious may refer to the account there given of the ladies' skill; and also, for further particulars relative to Sarah Hastings, a glance may be given to M. de la Cross's "Memoirs for the Ingenious," published in the month of July, 1693. We do not care to transcribe the passages into our own pages; though, now that it is the fashion to treat all the unpleasant details of nursing as matters of romance, we presume there is nothing in the cases mentioned calculated to shock public delicacy.