392 Notices of Books, [ j uly, 
cient to destroy the judicial or scientific claims of the work ; but 
we have no intention of wasting space in further comment upon 
them. 
D r . Carpenter lays especial stress on his character of historian 
and man of science in relation to this enquiry. 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, 
believe that he has thus added — for dominant ideas are very 
powerful — but any one tolerably acquainted with the literature 
and history of these subjedls for the last thirty years, will most 
assuredly 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 fadd and experiment charac- 
teristic of the man of science, he will find loose and inaccurate 
statements, and negative 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 “ historical ” mode of 
treating his subjedd which we shall adduce, is his account 
(pp. 13 to 15) of the rise of mesmerism in this country owing to 
the successful performance of many surgical operations without 
pain during the mesmeric trance. Dr. Carpenter writes of this 
as not only an admitted fadd, but (so far as any word in his pages 
shows), as a fadd 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 undergoing 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 greatest surgical and physiological 
authorities of that day — Sir Benjamin Brodie and Dr. Marshall 
Hall — opposed it with all the weight of their influence, accused 
the patients of imposture, or asserted that they might be 
“ naturally insensible to pain,” and spoke of the experiments of 
Dr. Elliotson and others as “ trumpery,” and as “ polluting the 
temple of science.” He must know, too, that Dr. Marshall Hall 
professed to demonstrate “ physiologically ” that the patients 
were impostors, because certain reflex-addions of the limbs which 
he declared ought to have occurred during the operations did not 
occur. The medical periodicals of the day were full of this, and 
a good summary maybe found in Dr. Elliotson’s Surgical Opera- 
tions without Pain, &c.,” London, 1843. Dr. Carpenter tells us 
how his friends, Dr. Noble and Sir John Forbes, in 1845 accepted 
and wrote in favour of the reality of the fadfs ; but it was hardly 
“ historical ” to tell us this as the whole truth, when, for several 
years previously, the most violent controversy, abuse, and even 
