Marketplace of the Marvelous (27 page)

Poyen embarked on a lecture tour of New England soon after he landed. He did little to transform the theory he had first learned in Europe. Poyen believed that Puységur's discovery of the somnambulistic state was the most important scientific discovery of animal magnetism, and perhaps the most important in all of science. Larding his lectures with medical magic tricks, Poyen demonstrated the magnetic state of consciousness to awestruck audiences. He hired a clairvoyant who could supposedly read the thoughts of audience members as well as the contents of sealed envelopes while under a mesmeric trance. Colonel William Stone, editor of the
New York Commercial Advertiser
, admitted to his “times of laughing at animal magnetism,” but after seeing Poyen, Stone changed his mind. Mesmerism had to be seen to be believed. “Nothing hitherto published upon that subject, is so wonderful by far, as the facts of which we were witness,” declared Stone. After witnessing a blind girl under trance read a sealed letter at a demonstration in Providence, Rhode Island, Stone hailed mesmerism as “not only marvellous [sic] in our eyes, but absolutely astounding.”
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During his lectures, Poyen picked volunteers from the audience to undergo trances. They sat onstage while Poyen waved his arms over and around them to heighten the activity of their internal animal magnetism. Poyen usually succeeded in hypnotizing about half of his volunteers. Loud hand clapping and jars of ammonia passed under their noses failed to evoke even the slightest response or nose twitch. To the audience, these volunteers appeared to have withdrawn completely from the physical world. Crowds thronged to see family and friends transformed before their eyes.
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“The gossip of the city is of Animal Magnetism,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson to his brother William on January 13, 1837. “Three weeks ago I went to see the magnetic sleep & saw the wonder.”
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The trance subjects themselves, like Poyen's own medium Cynthia Gleason, became featured players in the performances. Poyen's exhibitions proved to be great
theater, mimicking the drama that had so captivated and entertained Parisians in Mesmer's time. It also had the unfortunate side effect of disenfranchising mesmerism from the serious consideration of the American scientific community, which highly disapproved of pairing frivolity with science.
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While people certainly came for the entertainment, many others sought Poyen's medical care. Like Mesmer, he attempted to direct the flow of animal magnetism to the diseased part of the body with his hands. These patients generally remembered nothing of their mesmeric trance but still declared themselves cured when they awoke. Poyen boasted the successful treatment of everything from rheumatism and back pain to liver disease and nervousness. Newspaper articles and letters to the editor from patients following his appearances tended to support his healing assertions.
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Word of Poyen's healing methods spread rapidly throughout New England and the rest of the country. Poyen was an able and evocative speaker bursting with egotism, and his message played on growing public confidence in the promise of science to bring about a better world. He prophesied that mesmerism, when fully accepted by “intelligent and fast progressing” people, would make America “the most perfect nation on earth.”
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For an American public with a boundless sense of destiny, Poyen's message found eager ears.
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But while many Americans enthusiastically embraced mesmerism without question, others were not so sure. The idea of a force with the power to influence human behavior led some to worry about what horrors could result if it were left uncontrolled or put in the hands of the untrained or immoral. Many ministers thought that mesmerism might undermine religious faith with its similarities to the healings performed in the New Testament. They worried that some followers might conclude that the miracles described in the Bible were simply mesmerism and that Christ raised the dead through animal magnetism rather than anything divine. Some mesmerists did, in fact, make that claim, perhaps hoping to capitalize on religious skepticism or to link magnetism to a long and ancient history.
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These religious concerns tended to fade as mesmerism claimed more and more converts. Many evangelicals came to embrace mesmerism's potential to demonstrate the hidden powers of the mind. Mesmerists put patients through an intense physical and mental experience that “restored
the body to harmony,” but also happened to look an awful lot like a religious conversion experience. The visible changes seen in patients under trance seemed to testify to the utter transformation possible when people came under spiritual guidance. Both revivalists and mesmerists argued that confusion and self-doubt would continue until people gave themselves over to a higher power, which for mesmerists was animal magnetism and for the religious, God. In America, the two became increasingly entwined.
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The sexual overtones of the mesmerizing process, however, worried far more Americans, and these worries were not as easily dispatched as religious concerns. It was, after all, an act where a passive patient, often female, willingly yielded all mental resistance to comply with the physical gestures of a powerful and usually male mesmerist. Individual treatment often relied on close proximity between doctor and patient. Sitting face-to-face, the doctor usually enclosed the patient's knees between his own. He then began touching and stroking the patient's body, often paying particular attention to the abdomen. Many could not help but suspect improper passions at work, an accusation that dogged mesmerism from the very beginning, particularly as most reports of mesmeric malfeasance involved female patients. In fact, members of the original French commission had secretly submitted a second report to Louis XVI warning of the indecencies to which Mesmer's science and method were inherently prone. The king had a personal stake in this as his wife, Marie Antoinette, had been among Mesmer's greatest fans.
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Eighteenth-century comics, writers, and musicians seized on mesmerism's erotic implications, satirizing the treatment in cartoons and bawdy verses that congratulated Mesmer for conquering so many women. Mesmer repeatedly denied that he took liberties with his female patients, but the gossip continued unabated.
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These concerns crossed the Atlantic with Poyen. The publication of the anonymous but American-written
Confessions of a Magnetizer
, in which the author boasted of taking advantage of his more attractive patients after placing them in a trance, certainly did nothing to quell suspicions and fears.
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Soon, a whole genre of scare literature featuring evil mesmerists who seduced innocents appeared on the publishing scene. Timothy Shay's
Agnes; or, The Possessed, A Revelation of Mesmerism
(1848) told the story of a young woman who leaves her fiancé after falling under the spell of mesmerist Monsieur Florien during a
tooth extraction. Her exceptional magnetic conductivity leads Florien to abduct Agnes for further experiments. She's eventually rescued by her fiancé, who tracks her from Boston to New York City. Fortunately, he finds that the young Agnes has not been compromised. Florien's wife assures the fiancé that Agnes has remained pure under her watchful eye. In case the message was not clear enough, Shay warns of the dangers of mesmerism and its “disorderly, and therefore, evil origin” in both the preface and afterward of his tale. In a more enduring book,
The Bostonians
, Henry James compares mesmerists to vampires feeding on the animal magnetism of their unknowing patients.
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Mesmerism both fascinated and repelled Nathaniel Hawthorne, who used its power dynamics as a theme and cautionary tale. In
The House of the Seven Gables
, the hardworking carpenter Matthew Maule entrances the snooty beauty Alice Pyncheon and uses his powers in selfish revenge after she spurns his affections. The acts he subjects her to eventually result in her death. Mesmerism appears again in
The Blithedale Romance
in which the passive and receptive Priscilla is exploited as a stage performer. But despite these dark portrayals of mesmerism, Hawthorne also found similarities between himself as an artist and the mesmerist: both create characters, the author in his stories and the mesmerist of his patients under trance and often of himself as well; explore intimate lives; and hold others spellbound. The negative view prevailed in his own life, though, as Hawthorne was unwilling to entertain his wife Sophia's interest in mesmerism. He told her to “take no part” in “magnetic miracles” to prevent the possible violation of her soul by the mesmerist.
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The patient-mesmerist relationship did not have to be this way, though, counseled Joseph Francois Deleuze. The French mesmerist devoted an entire section of his mesmerism manual
Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism
, first translated into English in 1837, to choosing the right magnetizer. He counseled women to seek the services of other women since patients commonly developed a deep affection for the magnetizer. Female modesty was also at stake since magnetism tended to produce “spasmodic movements” in women that were “not proper for a man to . . . witness.”
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Concern for women could turn quickly to scorn, however, if a woman voluntarily participated in mesmerist shows as a volunteer or, worse, as a clairvoyant. Immoral, greedy, and attention seeking were just some of the insults hurled by critics at these women. But mesmerism
offered poor women an opportunity for economic and social advancement far from the dangers of the factory floor in a culture that afforded them few choices. Poyen's own clairvoyant, Cynthia Gleason, had worked in a textile mill in Rhode Island when she sought his care for chronic stomach pain. Her skills while under mesmeric trance “of discerning the symptoms of disease, and prescribing appropriate remedies for them” impressed Poyen, who hired her on as his traveling assistant. By the time she died in 1847, Gleason had amassed a small fortune for her work as a clairvoyant somnambulistic healer, first for Poyen and then on her own. With hundreds if not thousands of people attending some demonstrations, it wasn't hard to understand why some factory girls preferred this more lucrative and potentially star-making job. Mesmerists also preferred female assistants because of the widespread belief that women more easily succumbed to trance than men.
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Women participated in mesmerism as far more than passive subjects, though. They also used its healing power for their own gain and benefit. Women loved mesmerism's potential to reduce the pain of childbirth. Just as the mesmeric trance could be used as an anesthetic in surgery, it found a welcome home in the home health-care regimen of some midwives. Once there, it never really left, as hypnobirthing is still in use today with more than one thousand practitioners in the United States, online courses, and classes offered at some major hospitals.
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Other women became mesmerists themselves. As in other irregular fields, female mesmerists treated women almost exclusively. Most appear to have received little public notice, as the uproar over potential liberties taken by male mesmerizers over supposedly helpless female patients dominated popular conversation. A female mesmerist named Elizabeth angrily denounced accusations of immorality from regular doctors in the pages of the mesmerist journal the
Zoist
. “But
why
, and on
what account
and
proof
, are mesmerists to be thus stigmatized?” she asked. “Are then mesmerists, as a class, ‘notoriously' worse than other people? There must be some distinguishing character belonging to them.” She asserted that mesmerists “proudly boast among their number, refined and educated females, possessing highly intellectual attainments.”
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The United States soon crawled with itinerant mesmerists. In Boston alone, more than two hundred magnetizers sold their services
by 1843. Dozens of books with do-it-yourself instructions appeared on store shelves to train and tempt would-be home mesmerizers with the promise of health and self-improvement. Methods of inducing trance varied from practitioner to practitioner. Nearly all passed their hands over the body, but where some made actual contact, others simply moved their hands over and around the body. Some imitated Mesmer and used a metal wand to conduct the flow of animal magnetism. Still others dragged phrenology into the mix and tried to direct their magnetic powers toward particular parts of the brain associated with one or more phrenological traits.
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All mesmerists could agree on one thing, though: one person had the power to gain control over another.
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As mesmerism's disciples became more numerous and enthusiastic in the United States, the movement fell ever further away from respectability in the eyes of regular medicine. In 1844, the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
expressed the frustrated bewilderment felt by many in the medical establishment. “In after times, the history of the mesmeric infatuation in New England will be read with surprise, and produce a train of feeling much like that developed by reading an account of the witchcraft mania in the ancient town of Salem.”
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A writer in the
New-Hampshire Gazette
wondered, “Can it be possible, that among enlightened men, in this age of light, the pretended wonderful art or science of ‘animal magnetism' can gain a moment's credence!”
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The apparent ease of inducing mesmeric trance did inevitably draw enterprising showmen who drew large crowds with what amounted to carnival sideshow hypnotism. For these practitioners, mesmerism was nothing more than entertainment and profit. And as with other irregular healing movements, these showmen degraded all of mesmerism in the eyes of regular doctors eager to find fault with their competitors.
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