Intro

[A] very singular discovery made in the year 1841 by a surgeon named Braid, of Manchester, England, affords convincing proof of the possibility of somnambulism being voluntarily induced, even in the manner of the Hindoo fakirs.

This man found that by making a person in a sitting posture gaze steadfastly upon an object situated at an angle of forty-five degrees above the common axis of vision, congestion of the nerves and vessels of the eye was produced, which extended to the brain and threw the subject into the mesmeric condition, so far at least that total insensibility to external impressions was induced. We have repeatedly tried this experiment with perfect success, but could never cause clairvoyance in this manner, except in our habitual mesmerizees.

Medieval anecdotal accounts

In Europe, however, after the overthrow of the Western Empire, we perceive but few traces of mesmerism, until the dawn of the new civilization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Two or three remarkable cases seem nevertheless to have occurred during the dark ages, some of which fell under the observation of the learned and pious St. Augustine, who, in his City of God, mentions a man who could perspire when he wished, and also a priest who,whenever he pleased, could throw himself into a peculiar kind of trance, during which he was as insensible as a corpse.

The famous Arabian philosopher and physician, Ibn-Sina, or Avicenna, who lived in the tenth and eleventh centuries, relates the case of a man who could at pleasure, by an exertion of his will, paralyze his whole frame, or throw it into what we should now term a mesmeric condition.

Jerome Cardan, of the sixteenth century, a man of genius and discrimination, and one of the first scholars of his day, states of himself that he possessed a capacity of abandoning his body in a sort of ecstasy whenever he pleased. He felt, in these cases, a sort of splitting of the heart, as if his soul was about to withdraw, the sensation spreading over his whole frame, like the opening of a door for the dismissal of its guest. His apprehension was that he was out of his body, and that, by an energetic exertion, he still retained a small hold of his corporeal figure. He also could see, when he pleased, whatever he desired to see, not through the force of imagination, but with his material organs: he saw groves, animals, and orbs, as he willed. When he was a child, he saw these things as they occurred, without any previous volition or anticipation that such a thing was about to happen. But after he had arrived at years of maturity, he saw them only when he desired, and such things as he desired. These images were in perpetual succession, one after another.

Universal magnetic power

It is, however, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that we find the existence of mesmerism first acknowledged and distinctly announced. Many writers, the most eminent of whom were Kircher, Pomponatius, Van Helmont, and Sir Kenelm Digby, assumed the existence of a universal magnetic power, by which they attempted to explain the dependence and reciprocal action of bodies, in general, upon each other, and, in particular, the phenomena of the vital organization. They also broadly and distinctly maintained the proposition that the will or imagination of man, when energetically called into action, is capable of producing certain perceptible effects upon the organism of other living beings, even at a considerable distance.

Pomponatius

Pomponatius, a native of Mantua, and professor of philosophy at the celebrated university of Padua, assumes it as a fact generally acknowledged, that there are men endowed with the faculty of curing certain diseases, by means of an effluence or emanation, which the force of their imagination directs towards the patient. “When those,” says he, “who are endowed with this faculty, operate by employing the force of the imagination and the will, this force affects their blood and their spirits, which produce the intended effects by means of an evaporation thrown outwards.” He afterwards observes, that it is by no means inconceivable, that health may be communicated to a sick person, by the force of the imagination and the will so directed; and he compares this susceptibility of health to the opposite susceptibility of the infection of disease.

In another passage, he enumerates the conditions of the exercise of this faculty, in nearly the same terms as are employed by the modern mesmerizers; and he adds, that the confidence of the patient contributes to the efficacy of the remedy. “It is necessary,” says he, “that he who exercises this sort of enchantment should have great faith, a strong imagination, and a firm desire to cure the sickness. But these dispositions are not to be found equally in all men.”

Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the famous astrologer, chemist, and magician, asserted that it is possible for a man to communicate his thoughts to another, even at a great distance, and appeals to his own experience, as well as to that of others, for the truth of the fact.

But there is no author of that age, observes Colquhoun, in treating of this subject, who appears to have so fully anticipated the modern discovery of mesmerism, as Van Helmont.