RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Psychotherapy
elaborate apparatus consisting of an oak tub with a lid made in two pieces, and itself enclosed in another tub. Inside the tub were bottles filled with magnetized water and tightly corked. The magnetic influence was conducted to the bodies of the patients by means of rods and ropes. Mesmer was overwhelmed with the crowds that came for treatment, but was condemned by the medical profession as a quack. He challenged the faculty of medicine at Paris to select twenty-four patients, twelve to be treated by orthodox methods, twelve to be treated by animal magnetism, and compare results. The doctors treated his challenge with contempt, but in 1784 the government appointed two commissions to inquire into the claims of mesmerism. One was chosen from the faculty of medicine and one from the Royal Society. A few months after their appointment, both commissions reported. Bailly drew up the report of the faculty of medicine. The commission rejected Mesmer's doctrine of a healing fluid, on the ground that no adequate proof of the existence of such a fluid was given. The physiological effects of the treatment were ascribed to the power of imagination. With this finding the report of the Royal Society was in agreement. The reports of the commissions were marred by professional prejudice and lack of scientific insight. To attribute changes for the better in the health of sick persons to the power of imagination, and then to dismiss this agency, as though it were an unreality beneath the regard of scientific investigators, was to make a reality the effect of a,n unreality. They forgot that a psychological [actor able to produce permanent functional changes demanded searching scrutiny. Nor did the commissioners note the strange problem which emerged —that Mesmer the quack had been able to work cures which were impossible to his scientific contemporaries. As for Mesmer, the reports of the commissions were his death-blow. He retired from Paris and returned to Germany.
About ten years later, Alexandre Jacques Francois Bertrand gave a really scientific explanation of the mesmeric phenomena (Du rnagnetisme animal en France, Paris, 1826). He did not deny the genuineness of the alleged cures, but he 4. Bertrand maintained that the patients were
and healed not by virtue of a magnetic Elliotson. fluid, but because of their own suggestibility, their capacity for being influenced by the imposing procedures of Mesmer. This explanation, which is accepted to-day, was regarded with incredulity by the medical profession at that time. The truth is, that Mesmer's success had brought into the field a regiment of mysterious, spectacular showmen, who traveled all over Europe and brought discredit upon the whole subject by their fantastic tricks and absurd pretensions. Up till 1837 this state of matters continued. In that year Dr. John Elliotson (b. in London in 1791; studied at the University of Edinburgh, and at Jesus College, Cambridge; d. in London July 29, 1868) began original researches at University College, London. He soon achieved wonderful therapeutic results, though so much to the scandal of his colleagues that the authorities of the college
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hospital in 1838 forbade him to practise animal magnetism. Elliotson immediately resigned, much mortified at the insult. In 1846 he chose mesmerism for his subject as the Harveian orator. In the course of his address he showed how magnetism could prevent pain during surgical operations, produce sleep and ease in sickness, and cure many diseases which were not relieved by the ordinary methods (Numerous Cases of Surgical Operations in the Mesmeric State Without Pain, London, 1843). Although he shared some of the erroneous ideas of his time, there can be no doubt that he was devoted to truth and to the interests of humanity, and that he suffered persecution at the hands of prejudice and bigotry.
But the most important figure in the history of the subject is James Braid (b. at Rylaw House, Fifeshire, Scotland, c. 1795; was educated at the University of Edinburgh; d. at Manchester Mar. 25, 1860), who, in 1841, began his investigations into the nature of mesmeric phenom- 5. Braid, ena. Until his time it is to be noted Lie*bault, that the theories usually accepted in Bernheim, explanation of these phenomena were and Tuke. either that they were owing to a mysterious force or fluid, or to self-deception, or to wilful trickery. Braid attended his first mesmeric exhibitions under the influence of the last of these theories: he was anxious to discover how the trick was done. But he became convinced that the phenomena were real, and he determined to find out their physiological cause. In 1841 he gave to the public his view that mesmeric phenomena were purely subjective in character. He found that he could induce the mesmeric state by causing his patients to gaze steadily at some object and at the same time think of the object upon which they gazed. Thus he discovered that expectant attention was a necessary factor in mesmerism, or, as he now called it, hypnotism (Neurypnology; or, the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, London, 1843). He was, however, before his time. He was violently assailed by the old-school mesmerists and was regarded with suspicion by his medical brethren. Hugh MacNeile, an Evangelical divine of Liverpool and later dean of Ripon, charged him with producing his hypnotic effects through Satanic agency, and thereby much theological prejudice was excited against his work. After Braid's death in 1860, the subject, as far as Great Britain was concerned, fell into neglect. But in France a struggling physician, A. A. Li6bault, published a book (Du sommeil et des 6tats analogues, Nancy, 1866) in which he showed that hypnotism was a powerful curative agent, and once more demonstrated that the essence of it was suggestion. It is said that only a single copy of his book was sold. In 1882 Hippolyte Bernheim, a distinguished physician of Nancy, became interested in LiSbault's work, and published his famous work on suggestive therapeutics (Hypnotisme, suggestion et psychotherapie, France, 1890). Meantime, at Paris, at the Salp^triere, Dr. Jean Martin Charcot experimented in hypnotism, and founded a school of which Janet, Binet, and Fdre are brilliant representatives. Down to this time in England and in America, the movement which attracted so much
Psychotherapy Ptolemy