It was common knowledge in early Victorian England that ether vapors and nitrous oxide dulled pain–for decades both chemicals figured in comical stage acts in which people under their influence suffered abuses with giddy oblivion. So why did it take nearly half a century for doctors to adopt these anesthetics in the operating theater? Alison Winter, a historian of science at the University of Chicago, traces this mystery to the concurrent popularity of mesmerism, a practice of inducing trance by supposedly manipulating invisible magnetic fluids in a person’s body. From the late 1830s through the 1860s, wandering lecturers staged demonstrations that drew thousands, who came to watch their entranced peers get twisted into unnatural positions, speak in tongues, and have strange torments–electric shocks, deafening noises–inflicted upon them by skeptics with no apparent ill effects.
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Mesmerism is named after Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese doctor who first came to prominence in 1775 after debunking the technique of an exorcist. He claimed he could perform superior ministrations by “tuning” a patient’s magnetic harmony, which involved moving his hands around the body. After quitting Austria for France, he became such a celebrity in prerevolutionary Paris that in 1784 he and his clinics drew the scrutiny of a royal commission, which ultimately concluded that “this fluid without existence is consequently without utility.”
Winter got interested in mesmerism after she came across a mesmeric journal in the dead periodicals stacks at Cambridge, where she earned her PhD. In the journal, mesmerists complained bitterly that doctors had taken all the credit for inventing anesthesiology. That mesmerism had a medical application, she says, made her take it seriously as an area of study.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bill Stamets.
