Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, August 1847

LETTER VII—OBJECTS TO BE GAINED THROUGH THE ARTIFICIAL INDUCTION OF TRANCE

DEAR ARCHY,—I am tempted to write you a letter more than I had originally intended,—a supplementary and final one.

The powers which we have seen employed to shake the nerves and unsettle the mind in the service of superstition,—can they be turned to no useful purpose?

To answer this question, I will give you a brief account of the two most vigorous attempts which have been made to turn the elements we have been considering to a profitable end. I have in my thoughts the invention of ether-inhalation and the induction of trance in mesmerism. The witch narcotised her pupils in order to produce in them delusive visions; the surgeon stupifies his patient to prevent the pain of an operation being felt. The fanatic preacher excites convulsions and trance in his auditory to persuade them that they are visited by the Holy Spirit; Mesmer produced the same effects as a means of curing disease.

Let us first look into the simpler problem of ether-inhalation.

It occurred to Mr Jackson, a chemist in the United States, that it might be possible, and unattended with risk, so to stupify a patient with the vapour of sulphuric ether that he might undergo a surgical operation without suffering. He communicated the idea to Mr Morton, a dentist, who carried it into execution with the happiest results. The patient became unconscious,—a tooth was extracted;—no sign of pain escaped at the time;—there was no recollection of suffering afterwards. Led by the report of this success, in the course of the autumn of 1846, Messrs Bigelow, Warren, and Heywood ventured to employ the same means in surgical operations of a more serious description. The results obtained on these occasions were not less satisfactory than the first had been. Since then, in England, France, and Germany, this interesting experiment has been repeated in numberless cases, and its general success may be considered to be established.

The effects produced by the inhalation of the vapour of sulphuric ether, present a superficial resemblance to those produced by exposure to carbonic acid; but they are more closely analogous to the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide; and they may be compared and contrasted with those of opium and alcoholic liquors. But the patient is neither in the state of asphyxia, nor is he narcotised, nor drunk. The effects produced are peculiar, and deserve a name of their own.

To give you a distinct idea of the ordinary phenomena of etherisation, I will cite three or four instances from a report on this subject by Dr Heyfelder, Knight, professor of medicine, and director of the surgical clinic at Erlangen.

Dr Heyfelder himself, a strong and healthy man, after inhaling the vapour of ether for a minute, experienced an agreeable warmth in his whole person; after the second minute, he felt a disposition to cough, and diminution of ordinary sensibility. Then an impression supervened that some great change was about to take place within him. At the expiration of the third minute, he lost sensibility and consciousness. In this state he remained two minutes. The pulse was unaffected. Upon coming to himself, he felt a general sense of exhaustion, with weakness of the back and knees. For the remainder of the day he walked unsteadily, and his mind was confused.

A. T., aged thirty-six, a tall strong servant-maid, after inhaling for seventeen minutes, became unconscious, and appeared not to feel a trifling wound with a surgical needle. In a minute consciousness returned. She laughed immoderately, spoke of an agreeable feeling of warmth, and said she had had pleasant dreams. The pulse was slower, the breathing deeper, during the inhalation. The same person upon inhaling, on another occasion, with a better apparatus, became insensible after two minutes. The eyes appeared red and suffused; a carious tooth was then extracted, which caused her to moan slightly. On returning to herself she complained of giddiness, but said she had experienced none but agreeable feelings. She had no idea that the tooth had been extracted.

K. A., aged twenty-nine, upon beginning the inhalation, showed signs of excitement, but in nine minutes lay relaxed like a corpse. A tooth was extracted. Two minutes afterwards she awoke, moaning and disturbed. She stated that she had not felt the extraction of the tooth, but she had heard it.

C. S., aged twenty-two, a strong and healthy young man, a student of surgery, on commencing the inhalation, coughed, and there was a flow of saliva and of tears. In three and a half minutes the skin appeared insensible to pain. Consciousness remained perfect and undisturbed. The skin was warm; the eyes were open; the hearing as usual; the speech, however, was difficult. This state continued eighteen minutes, during which, at his request, two teeth with large fangs were extracted. He held himself perfectly still. He said, afterwards, that he felt the application of the instrument, but was sensible of no pain, during the extraction of the teeth.

W. S., aged nineteen, a strong and healthy young man, a law-student, after inhaling the ether-vapour a minute, began to move his arms about, struck his knees, stamped with his feet, laughed. In three minutes the laughter and excitement had increased. The eyes rolled, he sprang up, talked volubly; the pulse was strong and frequent. In seven minutes he breathed deeply, the eyelids closed, the pulse sank. In eight minutes he began to snore, but heard when called to. In nine minutes the eyes were suffused; the optic axes were directed upwards and outwards. At the end of twelve minutes a tooth was extracted, when he uttered an exclamation and laughed. On his return to himself, he said that he had felt the laceration, or tear, but had experienced no pain. He thought he had been at a carousal.

If I add to these sketches that the patient sometimes becomes pale, sometimes flushed,—that the pupils of the eyes are generally dilated and fixed, sometimes natural and fixed, sometimes contracted,—that violent excitement sometimes manifests itself attended with the persistence or even exaltation of the ordinary sensibility,—that sometimes hysteric fits are brought on; sometimes a state resembling common intoxication,—you will have had the means of forming a sufficiently exact and comprehensive idea of the features of etherisation.

Then, if we exclude the cases in which excitement, instead of collapse, is induced, and, in general, cases complicated with disorder of the head or chest, it appears that the inhalation of ether is not attended with questionable or injurious consequences; and that it places the patient in a condition in which the performance of a surgical operation may be prudently contemplated. If the operation require any length of time,—from thirty to forty minutes, for instance,—the state of insensibility may be safely maintained, by causing the inhalation to be resumed as often as its effects begin to wear off. In minor cases of surgery, in which union of the wound by adhesion is necessary to the success of the operation—in harelip, for instance—an exacter comparison is, perhaps, requisite than has yet been made of the relative results obtained on etherised and non-etherised patients. In graver cases, some of which always end fatally, symptoms, again, may occasionally supervene, or continue from the time of the operation, which are directly attributable to the etherisation. But, in all probability, the entire proportion of recoveries in etherised cases will be found to be increased, through the injurious effects being averted which are produced by fear and suffering. There is every reason to expect that a saving of human life will be thus realised,—an advantage over and above the deliverance from pain and terror.

So the invention of etherisation deserves to be rated as a signal benefit to humanity. Nor is it to be lost sight of, that the invention is quite in its infancy; and that any sound objections which may, at present, be raised against it, are not unlikely to be obviated through the modifications and improvements of which it is no doubt susceptible. The amount of success already obtained, may further be deemed sufficient to make us secure that the object of extinguishing the sufferings of surgery will never again be lost sight of by the medical profession and the public. One item, partial indeed, but a tolerably severe one, in the catalogue of the physical ills to which flesh is heir, is thus so far in a fair way of being got rid of.

The method of Mesmer was an attempt to cure bodily disease by making a forcible impression on the nerves. And no doubt can be entertained that many of his patients were the better for the violent succussion of the system which his developed practice put them through.

But mesmerism contained two things,—a bold empirical practice and a mystical theory. Mesmer strove, by the latter, to explain the effects which his practice produced. An odd fate his method and his theory will have had. His method was considered, by many of his contemporaries, as of solid importance; his theory was for the most part ridiculed as that of a half-crazed enthusiast and impostor. Now, no reasonable person can regard his practice in any other light than as a rough and hazardous experiment. But his theory, in the mean time, is ceasing to be absurd; for it admits of being represented as a very respectable anticipation of Von Reichenbach's recent discoveries.

Mesmer, a native of Switzerland, was born in 1734. He became a student at Vienna, where his turn for the mystical led him to the studies of alchemy and astrology. In the year 1766, he published a treatise on the influence of the planets upon the human frame. It contains the idea that a force extends throughout space through which the stars can affect the body. In attempting to identify this force, Mesmer first supposed it to be electricity. Afterwards, about the year 1773, he adopted the belief that it must be ordinary magnetism. So at Vienna, from 1773 to 1775, he employed the practice of stroking diseased parts of the body with magnets. But, in 1776, making a tour in Bavaria and Switzerland, he fell in with the notorious Father Gassner, who had at that time undertaken the cure of the blind prince-bishop of Ratisbon by exorcism. Then Mesmer observed that, without employing magnets, Gassner obtained very much the same kind of effects upon the human body which he had produced with their aid. The fact was not lost upon him. He threw away his magnets, and henceforth operated with the hand alone. In 1777, his reputation a little damaged by a failure in the case of the musician Paradies, Mesmer left Vienna, and the following year betook himself to Paris. The great success which he obtained there drew upon him the indignation and jealousy of the faculty, who did not scruple to brand him with the stigma of charlatanism. They averred that he threw difficulties in the way of a satisfactory examination of his method; but perhaps he had reason to suspect want of fairness in the proposed inquiry. He refused, from the government, an offer of twenty thousand francs to divulge his method; but he was ready to explain it, it is true, under a pledge of secresy, to individuals for one hundred louis. But his practice itself gave most support to the allegations against him. His patients were received and treated with an air of mystery and studied effect. The apartment, hung on every side with mirrors, was dimly lighted. A profound silence was observed, broken only by strains of music, which occasionally floated through the rooms. The patients were arranged around a large vessel, which contained a heterogeneous mixture of chemical ingredients. With this and with each other, they were placed in relation, by holding cords or jointed rods; and among them moved slowly and mysteriously Mesmer himself, affecting one by a touch, another by a look, a third by continued stroking with the hand, a fourth by pointing at him with a rod.

What followed is easily conceivable from the scenes referred to in my last letter, which are witnessed at religious revivals. One person became hysterical, then another; one was seized with catalepsy, then others; some with convulsions; some with palpitations of the heart, perspirations, and other bodily disturbances. These effects, however various and different, went all by the name of "salutary crises." The method was supposed to produce, in the sick person, exactly the kind of action propitious to his recovery. And it may easily be imagined that many patients found themselves better after a course of this rude empiricism; and that the impression made by these events, passing daily in Paris, must have been very considerable. To the ignorant the scene was full of wonderment.

To ourselves, regarding it from our present vantage-ground, it contains absolutely nothing of the marvellous. We discern the means which were in operation, and which are theoretically sufficient to produce the result. Those means consisted in,—first, high-wrought expectation and excited fancy, enough alone to set some of the most excitable into fits;—secondly, the contagious power of nervous disorder to cause the like disorder in others, a power augmenting with the number of persons infected;—thirdly, the physical influence upon the body of the Od force discovered by Von Reichenbach, which is produced in abundance by chemical decomposition, which can be communicated to, and conveyed by inanimate conductors, and which finally emanates with great vivacity from the subtle chemistry of the living human frame itself. The reality of this third cause you must allow me to take for granted without farther explanation. Von Reichenbach's papers, the credit of which is guaranteed by their publication in Liebig and Wöhler's Annals of Chemistry, have been now some time translated into English, and are in the hands of most English readers.

It is remarkable that Jussieu, the most competent judge in the commission which, in 1784 condemned mesmerism as a scientific imposition, was so much struck with the effects he witnessed, that he recommended the subject, nevertheless, to the farther investigation of medical men. His objections were to the theory. He laid it down, in the separate report which he made, that the only physical cause in operation was animal heat; curiously overlooking the point, that common heat was not capable of doing the same things, and that, therefore, the effects must be owing to the agency of that something else which animal heat contained in addition to common heat.

It is unnecessary to follow Mesmer through his minor performances. The relief sometimes obtained by stroking diseased parts with the hand had before been proclaimed by Dr Greatorex, whose pretensions had no less an advocate than the Honourable Robert Boyle. The extraordinary tales of Mesmer's immediate and instantaneous personal power over individuals are probably part exaggeration, part the real result of his confidence and practice in the use of the means he wielded. Mesmer died in 1815.

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 the course of instruction, he professed himself to be no wiser than when he began; and he ridiculed the credulity and the faith 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 Basancy, near Soissons, he took occasion to mesmerise the daughter of his agent, and another young person, for the toothach, who 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 upon the 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 revolutionised the art of mesmerism. The large part of his life in which M. Puységur had nothing to do but to follow this vein of inquiry, was occupied in practising and advocating a gentle manipulation to induce sleep, in preference to the more violent crises. I have no plea for telling you 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 mesmerism; how he survived the Restoration; and how, finally, he died of a cold caught by serving again in the encampment at Rheims to assist as an old militaire at the sacre of Charles X.

For he had, to use the phrase of the moment, 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 produced the same effect, but he had passed it over unheeded, as one only of the numerous forms of salutary crisis; nor that M. de Puységur himself estimated, or that the knowledge had then been brought together which would have enabled him to estimate, the value, or the real nature and meaning, of the step which he had made. To himself he appeared to be largely extending the domain of mesmerism, of which he had, in truth, discovered and gone beyond the limits.

The state which he had so promptly and fortunately induced in Victor, was neither more nor less than common trance—the commonest form, perhaps, of the great family of nervous disorders, to which ordinary sleep-walking belongs, and of which I have already sketched the divisions and relations in the fifth letter of this series. All that remains, combining originality and value, of Mesmer's art, is, that it furnishes the surest method of inducing this particular condition of the system. Employed with collateral means calculated to shake the nerves and excite the imagination, mesmerism causes the same variety of convulsive and violent seizures which extremes of fanatical frenzy excite; when it is employed in a gentle form and manner, with accessaries that only soothe and tranquillise, the most plain and unpretending form of trance quietly steps upon the scene.

Perhaps you will wonder that I seem to attach so much importance to the power which mesmerism offers us, of producing at pleasure mere ordinary trance; and, unluckily, it is easy to overrate that importance; because, for any plan we are yet in possession of, the induction of trance, through mesmerism, is, in truth, a very uncertain and capricious affair. It is but a limited number of persons who can be affected by mesmerism; and the good to be obtained from the process is proportionately limited.

The first object to which artificial induction of trance may be turned, is the cure or alleviation of certain forms of disease.

It has been mentioned that in many so-called cataleptic cases, a condition of violent spasm is constantly present, except when the patient falls into an alternative state of trance. The spontaneous supervention of trance relieves the spasm.

I mentioned, too, in the fifth letter of this series, the case of Henry Engelbrecht, who, after a life of asceticism, and a week of nearly total abstinence, fell into a death-trance. On waking from it, he felt refreshed and stronger.

These results are quite intelligible. In trance, the nervous system is put out of gear. The strain of its functions is suspended. Now, perhaps for the first time since birth, the nervous system, a part or the whole, experiences entire repose. The effect of this must be as soothing to it, as is to a diseased joint the disposing it in a relaxed position on a pillow. In this state of profound rest, it is natural that the nervous system should recruit its forces; that if previously weak and irritable, it should emerge from the trance stronger and more composed; that the induction of trance many days repeated, and maintained daily an hour or more, should finally enable the nerves to recover any extent of mere loss of tone, with its dependent morbid excitability, and to shake off various forms of disorder dependent upon that cause. So might it be expected, that epilepsy, that hysteric and cataleptic fits, that nervous palsy, that tic-doloreux, when caused by no structural impairment of organ, should get weak under the use of this means—other means, of course, not being thereby excluded, which peculiar features of individual cases render advisable. And experience justifies this reasonable anticipation. And it is found practically that, for purely nervous disorders, the artificial induction of trance is, generally speaking, the most efficient remedy. Nay, in cases of a more serious complexion, where organic disease exists, some unnecessary suffering and superfluous nervous irritability may be thus allayed and discarded. Even more may be said in favour of the availability of this practice. There are few diseases of any kind, and of other parts, in which the nervous system does not, primarily or secondarily, become implicated. And so far does disease in general contain an element which often may be reached and modified with salutary effect, through the means I am now advocating. When the prejudices of medical men against the artificial induction of trance have subsided, and its sanative agency has been fairly tried, and diligently studied, there is no doubt it will take a high rank among the resources of medicine.