- That Devil's Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian popular imagination by William Hughes
William Hughes is an eminent scholar of the gothic, a writer, and an editor of many novels from Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Dracula (1897) as well as the influential journal, Gothic Studies. That Devil's Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian popular imagination is something of a departure, in that it only glancingly deals with two literary texts: in the introduction, Elizabeth Inchbald's play Animal Magnetism (first performed in 1788, but featuring here with Charles Dickens in the role of the Doctor in an 1848 production) and Paul Potter's phenomenally successful stage version of Trilby (1895) in the conclusion. This book is not, as one might expect, an account of the consistently gothicized or supernatural phenomenon of mesmerism, nor an exploration of the representations of trance states on stage and in fiction, for these topics, of course, have been extensively covered by others.
That Devil's Trick, instead, offers a gently revisionist account of the history of mesmerism as a medical practice on the disputed fringes of orthodoxy in England. Hughes's innovation is to steer largely clear of medical historical sources by studying his topic mainly through newspaper accounts. This produces some odd occlusions and distortions, but there are many fascinating primary materials recovered and overlooked figures put [End Page 106] back into circulation. This Devil's Trick is a striking indication of the ways in which digitized and searchable newspaper archives are changing the shape of historical research.
The book consists of three very long chapters, which creak slightly under the accumulated weight of primary materials. In the first, "The epoch of Mesmer," Hughes examines reports on the Parisian craze for Franz Anton Mesmer's animal magnetism treatments in the 1780s in order to add some more detail into a period considered by historians to be a preparatory stage before the mesmeric controversies in England properly began in the 1830s. Chapter 1 includes solid primary research, but its rhetoric strains a bit too hard to insist on an innovative revision of history. There has been much good work (none of it cited) on mesmeric displays in London in the 1810s and on the question of policing the boundaries of orthodox medicine at the very beginnings of medical professionalization, particularly with the associated claims of phrenology (Roger Cooter's work would have been helpful here). Hughes, instead, focuses on the British trend for Perkinism (an associated therapy using the allegedly curative properties of metal), and while this is fascinating material, it feels too narrowly empirical to do the work of contextualization.
This final example begins to reveal some of the strengths and weaknesses of the digital archive research method. Hughes includes some great discoveries from the pages of rarely consulted newspapers (including discussion of the brief career of the Irishman John Bonnoit de Mainaduc, the "English Mesmer," who died in 1789), but the theoretical scaffolding to hold it in place is lacking. The work of the so-called Edinburgh School in the history of science—research that focused so consistently on the contested fringe of medicine in the early nineteenth century—is not really on the radar of this study.
The second and third chapters are on "Medical magnetism" and "Surgical hypnotism" respectively, and they move through the more familiar stories of Professor John Elliotson (the University College professor and close friend of Charles Dickens, who was fired for his use of mesmerism on the wards of the newly established hospital), James Braid (the surgeon who coined the word hypnotism in 1841), and James Esdaile (the surgeon who established the first mesmeric infirmary in Calcutta in the 1840s). Strong sections include a detailed recovery of the importance of Baron Dupotet, the French practitioner who set up in Portman Square in London between 1837 and 1839 and also a consideration of the London Mesmeric Infirmary, founded by Elliotson and others in 1850, which treated patients until its dissolution in or around 1870. While...