436 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



Vague general assertions of this kind, without a 

 particle of proof offered or which can be offered, 

 are alone sufficient to destroy the judicial or scien- 

 tific claims of the work ; but we have no intention 

 of wasting space in further comment upon them. 



Dr. Carpenter lays especial stress on his char- 

 acter of historian and man of science in relation 

 to this inquiry. He parades this assumption in 

 his title-page and at the very commencement of 

 his preface. He claims, therefore, to review the 

 case as a judge, giving full weight to the evidence 

 on both sides, and pronouncing an impartial and 

 well-considered judgment. He may, indeed, be- 

 lieve that he has thus acted — for dominant ideas 

 are very powerful — but any one, tolerably ac- 

 quainted with the literature and history of these 

 subjects for the last thirty years, will most as- 

 suredly look upon this book as the work of an 

 advocate rather than of a judge. In place of 

 the impartial summary of the historian he will 

 find the one-sided narrative of a partisan ; and, 

 instead of the careful weighing of fact and exper- 

 iment characteristic of the man of science, he will 

 find loose and inaccurate statements, and nega- 

 tive results set up as conclusive against positive 

 evidence. We will now proceed to demonstrate 

 the truth of this grave accusation, and shall in 

 every case refer to the authorities by means of 

 which our statements can be tested. 



The first example of Dr. Carpenter's "histori- 

 cal" mode of treating his subject which we shall 

 adduce, is his account (pp. 13-15) of the rise 

 of mesmerism in this country, owing to the suc- 

 cessful performance of many surgical operations 

 without pain during the mesmeric trance. Dr. 

 Carpenter writes of this as not only an admitted 

 fact, but (so far as any word in his pages shows) 

 as a fact which was admitted from the first, and 

 which never went through that ordeal of denial, 

 misrepresentation, and abuse by medical men and 

 physiologists, that other phenomena are still un- 

 dergoing from a similar class of men. Yet Dr. 

 Carpenter was in the thick of the fight and must 

 know all about it. He must know that the great- 

 est surgical and physiological authorities of that 

 day — Sir Benjamin Brodie and Dr. Marshall Hall 

 — opposed it with all the weight of their influ- 

 ence, accused the patients of imposture, or as- 

 serted that they might be " naturally insensible 

 to pain," and spoke of the experiments of Dr. 

 Elliotson and others as " trumpery," and as "pol- 

 luting the temple of science." He must know, 

 too, that Dr. Marshall Hall professed to demon- 

 strate " physiologically " that the patients were 

 impostors, because certaiu reflex actions of the 



limbs, which he declared ought to have occurred 

 during the operations, did not occur. The medi- 

 cal periodicals of the day were full of this, and a 

 good summary may be found in Dr. Elliotson's 

 " Surgical Operations without Pain," etc., Lon- 

 don, 1843. Dr. Carpenter tells us how his friends, 

 Dr. Noble and Sir John Forbes, in 1845 accepted 

 and wrote in favor of the reality of the facts ; 

 but it was hardly " historical " to tell us this as 

 the whole truth when, for several years previous- 

 ly, the most violent controversy, abuse, and even 

 persecution, had raged on this very matter. Great 

 physiological authorities were egregiously in the 

 wrong then, and the natural inference to those 

 who know the facts is, that other physiological 

 authorities, who now deny equally well-attested 

 facts, may be no more infallible than their prede- 

 cessors. 



Dr. Carpenter persistently denies that there is 

 any adequate evidence of the personal influence 

 of the mesmerizer on the patient independent of 

 the patient's knowledge and expectation, and he 

 believes himself to be very strong in the cases he 

 adduces, in which this power has been tested and 

 failed. But he quite ignores the fact that all who 

 have ever investigated the higher phases of mes- 

 merism — such as influence at a distance, com- 

 munity of sensation, transference of the senses, 

 or true clairvoyance — agree in maintaining that 

 these phenomena are very uncertain, depending 

 greatly on the state of body and mind of the 

 patient, who is exceedingly susceptible to mental 

 impressions, the presence of strangers, fatigue, 

 or any unusual conditions. Failures continually 

 occur, even when the mesmerizer and patient are 

 alone or when only intimate friends are present ; 

 how, then, can the negative fact of a failure be- 

 fore strangers and antagonists prove anything ? 

 Dr Carpenter also occupies his readers' atten- 

 tion with accounts of hearsay stories which have 

 turned out exaggerated or incorrect, and lays 

 great stress on the " disposition to overlook 

 sources of fallacy" and to be "imposed on by 

 cunning cheats," which this shows. This may 

 be admitted ; but it evidently has no bearing on 

 well authenticated and carefully observed facts, 

 perfectly known to every student of the subject. 

 Our author maintains, however, that such facts 

 do not exist, and that "the evidence for these 

 higher marvels has invariably broken down when 

 submitted to the searching tests of trained ex- 

 perts." Here the question arises, Who are 

 "trained experts ? " Dr. Carpenter would main- 

 tain that only skeptical medical men and pro- 

 fessed conjurers deserve jthat epithet, however 



