2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

46 DICKENS AND JESUS I Jesus College Annual Report 2012
however, he had made his professional mark
and had a private practice bringing in a very
large annual income. Yet the Elliotson
Dickens came to know in the late 1830s at the
time of the success of Pickwick Papers was now
taking innovation too far: he had espoused
the cause of mesmerism. The creation of the
Viennese society doctor Franz Mesmer in the
latter half of the nineteenth century,
mesmerism involved belief in the existence of
a universally distributed, highly rarefied fluid.
Suffused by this fluid, the human body
suffers from blockages of its ebb and flow,
from imbalance in its circulation through the
body and between body and world.
Mesmerism as a practice, treated the
resulting disorders by intervening to
redistribute the fluid, thereby correcting
imbalance, removing blockages, and
re-establishing harmony. This the
practitioner did by channelling magnetic
fluid from his own body to that of the person
treated, either by touching the affected areas
or by having the person touch things
previously magnetized, or simply by making
gestures – so many ‘passes’ – with the hands.
That all this had nothing to do with any fluid
but rather with forms of hypnotic suggestion,
with the power of the mind over the body,
was only tentatively beginning to be
understood.
In 1837, Elliotson attended demonstrations
of mesmerism in London by a
French practitioner and was enthusiastic as
to its possibilities. So much so that he began
to use it in his hospital wards, himself acting
as mesmeriser. He also gave public
demonstrations, designed to show
mesmerism’s powers and combat the
ignorance of its critics. The demonstrations,
first in the wards themselves and then in the
hospital’s lecture theatre, were attended by a
public that was not confined to medical
practitioners and students; peers of the
realm, bishops, MPs, writers, artists could be
seen in attendance, Dickens among them. In
these demonstrations, as well as in sessions
held in his Conduit Street home, Elliotson
used some of his hospital patients, notably
two young sisters who had been admitted for
epileptic symptoms and were now Elliotson’s
star turns: Jane and Elizabeth Okey.
Mesmerised, the sisters went into
convulsions, fell into somnambulistic states,
became insensitive to pain, did ‘sleep
writing’, and much more. On one occasion
Elizabeth babbled of a man jumping naked
out of bed; on another she plumped herself
on a peer’s lap and tried to run her hand up
his trousers. She was apparently sensitive to
the magnetic condition of the patients
around her and believed by Elliotson to
possess prognostic powers. She would see
‘Jack’, ‘the angel of death’, hovering over
other patients. Disregarding all propriety,
Elliotson took her at dusk into the men’s
wards to get her predictions as to how the
patients there would fare.
Scandal was inevitable. The hospital
authorities were outraged at this bringing of
the hospital into disrepute – unscientific
theories, irregular methods, and potential, if
not actual, immorality, involving practices on
young women put into a state where they lost
control over their actions. The scandal was
fuelled by the Lancet. Founded in 1823 by the
radical ex-surgeon Thomas Wakley, now MP
for Finsbury, the journal was not the
altogether respectable journal of today. It had
gained its success by pirating lectures given
by the hospital teachers, thereby saving
students the fees they would have to pay to
attend them (6 guineas for a course, 6d a
week for the journal). The journal’s
fundamental aim was medical reform and
Wakley pulled no punches in his attacks on
the medical establishment – an annual
lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons was
merely ‘the usual twaddle uttered on such
occasions’, the leading London surgeons
themselves were referred to as ‘the bats’ on
account of their blindness and the damage
done by their claws (Wakley was hot on
bungled operations).
Naturally mesmerism attracted Wakley’s
critical attention. Relatively open-minded
reports of the demonstrations appeared in
1837, but by the following year Wakley had
taken up the topic with his usual vigour,
setting up experimental trials to test the
theory and expose the practice. Mesmerists
believed that the magnetic fluid could be
transmitted through certain especially
receptive conductors – water, for instance, or