![]() On December 27, 1838, the Council of the University College passed a resolution to ban the practice of mesmerism or animal magnetism from the hospital, leading to the resignation of John Elliotson. By September of that year, Elliotson’s friend Wakley had turned on him, and The Lancet published editorials denouncing mesmerism after the failed testing of two famous patients at Elliotson’s home in Bedford Square in August. 5 This came to a head at a meeting of the Medical Committee of the Hospital in June of 1838, which resulted in a resolution to stop the public demonstrations. 6 This led to some jealousy amongst his peers, and an opposition movement was led by the famous surgeon Robert Liston, who by then was head of surgery at University College Hospital. Elliotson published his results in The Lancet, launching mesmerism into the minds of the nineteenth century British medical establishment.ĭemonstrations were held in the University College Hospital lecture theater, attracting large crowds and some famous visitors, including Michael Faraday and Charles Dickens. While there, he invited yet another practitioner of mesmerism, the French Baron Jules Dupotet, to demonstrate his techniques on patients. In the first edition, Wakley pledged to seek to end “mystery and concealment” in medicine in order to “detect and expose the impositions of ignorant practitioners.” 6 Elliotson’s success came in part from The Lancet publishing his lectures, which led to his appointment as professor at the new University College Hospital. One of Elliotson’s close friends, Thomas Wakley, had started a medical journal called The Lancet just a few years earlier, with the mission to expose and denounce quackery. Thomas Hospital, the results of which were published in the London Medical and Physical Journal. This caught the attention of the English physician John Elliotson, who arranged for Chenevix to try it out on patients in St. In that same year, an Irishman known simply as Chenevix brought mesmerism from Paris to London, where he gave several demonstrations of the technique. She remained in a “mesmeric state” for two days, and upon waking had no recollection of the surgery. The operation took ten to twelve minutes, during which the patient showed no signs of discomfort. While there were reports of mesmerism being used to control pain in a clinical setting, the first reported use of mesmerism in surgery occurred in Paris on April 12, 1829, when the surgeon Jules Cloquet removed a tumor from the breast of a sixty-four-year-old woman, Madame Plantin. 3ĭespite “animal magnetism” being thoroughly discredited in Paris by a Royal Commission set up by King Louis XVI in 1784, 1 its popularity persisted, with a revival occurring in Britain in the 1840s. This was summed up in Mesmer’s statement “there is only one disease and one cure.” 2 By manipulating this secret fluid, Mesmer could put patients in a state of peaceful sedation, which was likely an example of clinical hypnosis. 1 This theory postulated that magnets could control the fluid’s influence on disease, as improper flow or congestion was felt to be the cause of illness. Mesmerism is named after its founder, the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who described his theory of “animal magnetism” in the late eighteenth century, claiming that a universal fluid was the determinant of all health. The eminent British surgeon, Robert Liston, after performing the first operation under ether in Europe, made reference to it with his famous line, “This Yankee dodge, gentlemen, beats mesmerism hollow.” But one of the strangest methods had a brief moment of fame in the middle of the nineteenth century, and was in fact in direct competition with ether. However, before that day in October, 1846 in Boston where ether was used publicly for the first time, surgeons did attempt to alleviate the suffering of their patients through a number of ways, including herbal concoctions, alcohol, and opium. ![]() ![]() The modern era of surgery is often thought to have begun with the introduction of ether, allowing surgeons to operate on insensible patients, and do more than ever before. A Practitioner of Mesmerism using Animal Magnetism
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