ON CERTAIX PHENOMENA OF HYPNOTISM. 91 



the hand.'"^ Notable amongst these was an Irishman, Valentine 

 Greatrakes, who attained great celebrity by his supposed power of 

 curing scrofula, known popularly as " the king's evil." Many of 

 the most noted scientific men of the day, such as Robert Boyle 

 and R. Cudworth, witnessed and attested the cures supposed to be 

 effected by Greatrakes, and thousands of sufferers crowded to him 

 from all parts of the kingdom. A belief in some mysterious 

 personal influence, possessed by certain men, has never entirely 

 died out since the time of Greatrakes. 



About the middle of the i8th century a German priest, John 

 Joseph Gassner, acting under the persuasion that a majority of 

 diseases arise from demoniacal influence, attempted their cure by 

 exorcism. His influence over the nervous systems of his patients 

 was extraordinary, and his method of cure was similar to that 

 followed by Mesmer and others. But it was reserved for the 

 brilliant charlatan Mesmer himself to attract the attention of both 

 the fashionable and the learned worlds of his period to the 

 phenomena of what he was the first to call " Animal Magnetism." 

 It seems to me not improbable that this very term may be 

 restored in its old and strictly scientific sense. Now we know in 

 all sober seriousness that animal bodies are electrical machines, 

 and that the vertebrate heart is a living magnet. f 



So little, however, was as yet known of electricity and magnet- 

 ism in Mesmer's time, that his " twenty-seven propositions," even 

 when he happened to be right, could only be of the nature of 

 guess-work. Mesmer undoubtedly believed that the phenomena 

 he produced were real, and were worthy of further investigation, 

 but in his greed for money, and the sensational means to which 

 he resorted to obtain it, he sank irredeemably into the charlatan. 

 He had his " consulting apartments dimly lighted and hung with 

 mirrors ; strains of soft music occasionally broke the profound 

 silence ; odours were wafted through the room ; and the patients 

 sat round the ' baquet ' — a kind of vat, in which various chemical 

 ingredients were concocted. Holding each other's hands, and 

 joined by cords passed round their bodies, the patients sat in 

 expectancy, and then Mesmer, clothed in the dress of a magician, 



* Encyclopedia Britannica. 

 t See Journal of Microscopy^ for October, 1889. 



