i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



treatment, it was not without danger, since the convulsions excited 

 were often violent and exceedingly apt to spread, especially among 

 men feeble in body and weak in mind, and almost universally among 

 w^omen ; and they dwelt strongly also on the moral dangers which, as 

 their inquiries showed, attended these practices. 



Now, this report, although referring to a form of mesmeric pro- 

 cedure which has long since passed into disrepute, really deals with 

 what I hold to be an important principle of action, which, long vague- 

 ly recognized under the term " imagination," now takes a definite 

 rank in physiological science ; namely, that in individuals of that ex- 

 citable nervous temperament which is known as " hysterical " (a tem- 

 perament by no means confined to women, but rare in healthy and 

 vigorous men), the expectation of a certain result is often sufficient to 

 evoke it. Of the influence of this " expectancy " in producing most 

 remarkable changes in the bodily organism, either curative or morbid, 

 the history of medicine affords abundant and varied illustrations ; and 

 I shall presently show you that it operates no less remarkably in call- 

 ing forth movements which, not being consciously directed by the 

 person who executes them, have been attributed to hypothetical occult 

 agencies. 



I shall not trace the further history of Mesmer, or of the system 

 advocated by himself; contenting myself with one ludicrous example 

 of the absurdity of his pretensions. When asked in his old age by one 

 of his disciples why he ordered his patients to bathe in river-water in 

 preference to well-water, he replied that it was because river-water is 

 exposed to the sun's rays ; and when further asked how these affected 

 it in any other way than by the warmth they excited, he replied, 

 " Dear doctor, the reason why all water exposed to the rays of the 

 sun is superior to all other water is because it is magnetized since 

 twenty years ago I magnetized the sunf'' 



In the hands of some of his pupils, however, animal magnetism, or 

 Mesmerism (as it gradually came to be generally called), assumed an 

 entirely new development. It was discovered by the Marquis de Puy- 

 segur, a great landed proprietor, who appears to have practised tlie 

 art most disinterestedly for the sole benefit of his tenantry and poor 

 neighbors, that a state of profound insensibility might be induced by 

 very simple methods in some individuals, and a state akin to somnam- 

 bulism in otiiers; and this discovery was taken up and brought into 

 vogue by numerous mesmerizers in France and Germany, while, dur- 

 ing the long Continental war, and for some time afterward, it remained 

 almost unknown in England. Attention seems to have been first 

 drawn to it in this country by the publication of the account of a 

 severe operaition performed in 1829, by M. Cloquet, one of the most 

 eminent surgeons of Paris, on a female patient who had been thrown 

 by mesmerism into the state of somnambulism; in which, though able 

 to converse with those around her, she showed herself entirely insen- 



