Elizabeth Okey was a 17-year-old Victorian housemaid with a keen interest in men’s trousers. At least she was when she was under hypnosis – in her waking state Okey behaved like any respectable member of the servant classes. The man responsible for putting the girl into a trance was Dr John Elliotson, who also happened to have a thing about nether dressing. Rather than wear the black knee breeches and silk stockings expected of a professor of medicine at University College London, Elliotson opted instead for new-fangled trews. This flourish didn’t simply mark the young man out as a dandy, it also hinted at his willingness to cross the usual boundaries. Elliotson’s method of getting Okey into a trance was to make “passes” at her, waving his hands gently in front of her face, almost, but not quite, brushing her exquisite “Grecian features”.
All this sauciness was licensed by science. Okey was a charity patient at University College Hospital and suffered from “fits”, although whether this was actually epilepsy is anyone’s guess. By putting her into a mesmeric trance – named after the German Dr Mesmer who had devised the method – Elliotson found that, once the girl’s initial flightiness had passed, she settled into a fit-less calm that could last for weeks. This was gratifying to Elliotson, who was a decent, caring doctor with a mission to help the poor of Camden, who clustered around the doors of UCH desperate for relief.
But it was intellectually thrilling, too. That it was possible to control someone’s behaviour without laying a finger on them suggested the relationship between body and mind, let alone body and body, was far more porous than anyone had suspected. Along with a slew of other new practices including phrenology, acupuncture and forensic pathology, it now seemed possible to access a person’s inner world and even make it speak. It was no coincidence that Elliotson was a pioneer of the stethoscope, a contrivance that translated the secret gurgles and murmurs of the body into a legible account of its intimate workings.
Such a focus on the material aspects of human life was as unsettling as it was suggestive. Just as phrenology proposed that an individual’s character was the product of their brainscape – Elliotson’s pattern of head bumps declared that he had an inordinate “love of approbation” – mesmerism dislodged the notion of free will. In which case, wondered the many churchmen who looked askance at anything coming out of the “godless” UCL, where did that leave the soul? It was doubly worrying that so many of these fangles had started on the continent and, more particularly, had washed through France, a country that had recently got rid not only of God but also its own royal family.
This tang of all-round lawlessness was garnished by the carnival atmosphere that seemed to unfold whenever Elliotson, who had been taught mesmerism by a shadowy French baron, put someone under. His demonstrations in front of an invited audience of dignitaries came dangerously close to the hucksterism of a music hall show in which hypnotised punters were made to quack like ducks or sit on a stranger’s lap. Still, he could probably have ridden this out – he was quick to snap Okey back to propriety whenever she veered towards the topic of trousers – if he had kept a similarly firm hold on discipline behind the scenes. But Okey and her younger sister Jane, charmed by the unaccustomed attention, not to mention the three good meals a day that came with being inpatients, were now flexing their mesmeric muscles. They branched out into clairvoyance, forecasting when their fellow invalids would start to improve, and even enrolled a “negro” spirit guide to help them with the trickier cases. The world, or at the least the world of the wards at UCH, seemed to have turned itself inside out.
It was this proliferation of phenomenon that was Elliotson’s undoing. Instead of a series of measured scientific experiments to sort out which bits of mesmerism were dependable and which were febrile accretion, he showed himself ready to swallow the lot. Particularly damaging was his insistence that the trances were the result of something called “animal magnetism”. This wasn’t just about whether or not beasts could be hypnotised, although Elliotson’s parrot did obligingly fall backwards off its perch when put into a trance, but the possibility that mesmerism had a physical basis. Could it perhaps be the result of a magnetic fluid, not unlike the electrical charges that were currently giving up their secrets to Michael Faraday? In this case, Elliotson insisted, it should be perfectly possible to magnetise water or even bits of nickel, which could then be handed to someone to put them under.
In her earlier books, Wendy Moore did an excellent job of ferreting out overlooked medico-legal case histories from the early 19th century, digging deep into everyday unhappiness and domestic abuse. The Elliotson story, though, is a different beast entirely. As one of the first public scandals of Victoria’s young reign, it has received plenty of attention over the last 20 years. It’s not just the roustabout theatricality of the trances that draws scholars, but also the way mesmerism poured into popular consciousness through the novels of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and even George Eliot. In the description of Lady Dedlock stumbling “with eyes like almost as if she was blind” or the forgetful trance of Franklin Blake in The Moonstone, you can see the beginning of the doubled-consciousness that would reach its apogee at the end of the century with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, not to mention the case histories of Sigmund Freud.
In the circumstances, it becomes hard to see what Moore adds to this well-worked ground. Certainly it is not a sparkling narrative style. In her rendering, people clamour for “the hottest ticket in town”, that is when they aren’t climbing up the “slippery career ladder”. More troubling, though, is the way she flattens the terrain over which her hero travels. Notwithstanding his “bumpy” rides and “uphill struggles”, Elliotson is figured as a proto-modern, fighting the corrupt conservatism of a sclerotic medical establishment in his desire to deliver free, effective and painless healthcare to the people. True up to a point, yet the fact remains that he could cup and bleed and leech and dose with the best of the old fogeys, fancy new trousers notwithstanding. Far from being an age of clear-cut binaries, of margins and centres, of good and bad practice, the world of early Victorian medicine was a sticky web of competing claims from which no one, honourable or fraud, doctor or patient, gentleman or housemaid, could ever quite pull themselves clear.
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