In the summer of 1838, the most fashionable ticket in London was not for the theatre. It was for the lecture theatre of a hospital, where one of the country’s most eminent physicians was putting two teenage sisters into a trance in front of packed audiences of doctors, aristocrats and writers.
Within months he had resigned in disgrace. The affair shaped how British medicine saw hypnosis for a century.
The doctor
John Elliotson was Professor of Medicine at University College London and a founder of its hospital. He was no crank. He was an innovator who had championed the stethoscope when colleagues thought it a foreign fad, and he was one of the best-known physicians in the country.
He was also drawn to new ideas, among them mesmerism, the practice descended from Franz Mesmer’s “animal magnetism,” which claimed that an invisible force could be passed from operator to patient to produce trance and cure illness.
The sisters
In April 1837, two sisters were admitted to Elliotson’s hospital: Elizabeth Okey, aged 17, and Jane, aged 15. They were being treated for epilepsy.
Elliotson began mesmerising them and found them remarkably responsive. In trance, the quiet housemaids became bold and witty, teased distinguished visitors, appeared insensible to pain, and seemed to diagnose other patients.
From May 1838 he gave public demonstrations in the hospital’s lecture theatre. They drew huge crowds.
The test
Not everyone was impressed. Thomas Wakley was the founder and editor of The Lancet, a radical journal that campaigned against quackery, and had until then been a friend and supporter of Elliotson.
In August 1838, Wakley tested the sisters at his own house in front of witnesses. Elliotson claimed that certain metals and “mesmerised” water carried the mesmeric influence and would send the girls into trance, while other substances would not.
Wakley arranged matters so that the sisters could not know which was which. They failed to tell the difference consistently. They reacted when they believed a mesmerised object was being used, whether or not it was.
Wakley declared the sisters impostors and mesmerism a fallacy, and The Lancet attacked Elliotson for years afterwards.
What the test actually showed
Seen from today, Wakley’s experiment echoes the French royal commission of 1784. It showed that the response depended on what the subject believed, not on any physical force. That disproves the magnetic theory.
It did not prove that the sisters were deliberately faking, nor that nothing real was happening. A response driven by expectation is exactly what suggestion is. Wakley had run a good experiment and drawn too strong a conclusion; Elliotson had observed something real and attached it to a false explanation.
The fall
On 27 December 1838, the Council of University College resolved to prevent the practice of mesmerism in the hospital. Elliotson resigned all his appointments at once.
He did not give up. In 1843 he co-founded The Zoist, a journal devoted to mesmerism and phrenology, which ran for over a decade. It published, among much else, reports of surgical operations performed painlessly on mesmerised patients, including the work of James Esdaile in India. Elliotson also helped establish a mesmeric infirmary in London.
Dickens
One friend stayed loyal throughout: Charles Dickens. The novelist attended the demonstrations, was fascinated, and asked Elliotson to be godfather to one of his children.
Dickens learned the technique himself. In 1842, on his American tour, he mesmerised his wife Catherine, and went on to practise on family and friends. Traces of mesmerism have been found throughout his fiction.
Why it matters
- It tied hypnosis to scandal. For generations of British doctors, mesmerism meant Elliotson’s disgrace.
- It cleared the way for Braid. A few years later, the Manchester surgeon James Braid rejected the magnetic theory, explained the phenomena through attention and suggestion, and gave hypnotism its name.
- Chemical anaesthesia arrived in the 1840s, removing the most practical reason for doctors to persevere with trance.
- It shows a recurring pattern: real effects, a wrong theory, a showman’s presentation, and a backlash that throws out the effects with the theory.
It took until 1955 for the British Medical Association to endorse the medical use of hypnosis.
The bottom line
Elliotson was wrong about magnetism and right that something worth studying was going on. Wakley was right about magnetism and wrong to dismiss the rest. The truth lay between them, and it took another century to find it.
Next in the series: Hypnosis for Fear of Flying
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.