2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

metals such as nickel; Elliotson would
magnetize a glass of water or a nickel disc,
contact with which would then produce
mesmeric effects. At his home in Bedford
Square, Wakley put this to the test. In one
experiment, involving Elliotson and the
inevitable Elizabeth Okey, Wakley substituted
unmagnetized discs of another metal for
magnetized nickel ones without it making a
scrap of difference. Lancet editorials
thundered against quackery, and immoral
quackery at that. Wakley hammered home
that mesmerists exploited the excitability of
young females, that mesmerism was no less
than indecent assault (examples were cited of
mesmerisers ravishing unconscious
‘patients’) and heads of families were urged
to look to their womenfolk: ‘What father of a
family would admit even the shadow of a
mesmeriser within his threshold? Who
would expose his wife, or his sister, his
daughter, or his orphan ward, to the contact
of an animal magnetiser?’ For Elliotson’s
hospital to allow mesmerism into its wards,
with wealthy and libidinous men invited to
watch women subject to magnetic
suspension of all restraint, was a breach of
every principle of professional propriety.
Enough was enough: on 28 December
1838 Elliotson was forced to resign from the
DICKENS AND JESUS I Jesus College Annual Report 2012 47
Hospital and his Professorship; thenceforth
‘dead to true medical science’, as a
commentator put it. But this was by no
means the last of Elliotson – his lucrative
private practice remained (in which, he used
both mesmerism and standard medical skills
and treatments), and he continued to defend
the mesmeric cause. The Harveian Oration he
delivered to the Royal College of Physicians
in 1846 was a lengthy enumeration of the
many instances over the centuries of
blinkered opposition to new ideas; the
resistance to mesmerism being, on a par with
the resistance met by Harvey’s account of the
circulation of blood. In 1843 he founded The
Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology &
Mesmerism, and Their Application to Human
Welfare which carried reports of mesmeric
cures and rebuttals of mesmerism’s critics;
and in 1849 he opened the London Mesmeric
Infirmary, ‘for the treatment of Epilepsy,
Deafness, Rheumatism, and other diseases in
which the ordinary means have failed’. He
continued his private demonstrations and
there were few, indeed, in the literary and
artistic circles of the day who were not
brought in one way or another into contact
with Elliotson and mesmerism. The bestselling
novelist Frances Trollope, mother of
Anthony, was reported ‘a thorough-going
mesmerist, constantly at Dr Elliotson’s’;
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was attracted but
also repulsed, fearing ‘the subjection of the
will & vital powers of one individual to those
of another’ (a fear expressed in Robert
Browning’s poem ‘Mesmerism’, in which a
woman is irresistibly in thrall to the force of
a man using mesmerism to draw her to him).
To many writers Elliotson became doctor and
friend. He was called in when Anthony
Trollope lay in a state that defied other
physicians; despite Elizabeth Okey being
taken into the sick room and seeing ‘Jack’,
Anthony recovered. When Thackeray came
down with cholera and high fever and was
deemed unlikely to live, Forster swiftly
summoned Elliotson to save him. Thackeray
gratefully introduced him into Pendennis, the
novel he was then writing, as Dr
Goodenough who ‘subjugates’ a similar fever
threatening the life of the novel’s eponymous
hero. Pendennis, moreover, was dedicated to