Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain by Alison Winter (Chicago, University of Chicago Pr., 1998.) ISBN 0-226-90219-6. 464 pp.

During the 1830s, the London scientific community observed an experimental treatment conducted by a radical physician at the University College Hospital, London. Labeled "animal magnetism" but later known as "mesmerism," after its creator Franz Anton Mesmer, practitioners of the "new science" rendered patients unconscious via a series of repeated hand gestures that theoretically transmitted an invisible electro-magnetic fluid, which flowed from the active magnetizer, who was usually male, to the passive, usually female, subject. Thus entranced, patients experienced various forms of altered states, including personality shifts and clairvoyance. In the depths of the trance, immobile patients appeared unable to see, hear or experience pain, a state of great interest to early Victorian surgeons searching for ways to anesthetize patients.

Not surprisingly, the treatment was never without controversy and a series of fraudulent cases discredited animal magnetism within the London medical elite. However, according to Alison Winter's study, the popularity of mesmerism increased during the 1840s and 1850s. Still the subject of medical debate, the disputed "science of possibility," (345) was actually sustained by a growing number of lay and professional practitioners who used it to treat mental and physical disorders, chronic invalidism and to relieve the pain of childbirth. Despite its obvious associations with medical quackery, cheap stage tricks and the occult, Winter rescues mesmerism from the margins of early Victorian social history. Not only does she defend the importance of mesmerism as an overlooked but influential aspect of British medical history, she use it as a "diagnostic tool" for understanding Victorian intellectual life.

From a broad range of historical evidence, including letters, diaries, medical journals and political cartoons, Winter demonstrates how the language of mesmerism permeated the public consciousness. More significantly, it acted as a catalyst for controversial ethical debates concerning medical authority and the production of scientific knowledge, gender and women's mental and physical capabilities, and the fundamental relationships between the human mind, body and spirit. For example, when the political economist and essayist Harriet Martineau left her sick room after five years confinement, publicly claiming that mesmeric treatments administered by a female therapist had cured her of a uterine tumour, she invited the medical community to consider the legitimacy of her case. The resulting debate, and the response of her own physician, reveal more about Victorian constructions of gender and pedagogy than they do about the therapeutic value of mesmerism. While political historians might question her assertion that by the 1860s, mesmeric discourse even informed the language of liberal reform, readers interested in the history of women, medicine and Victorian Britain will find this a fascinating examination of the "spirit of an age."

Anne Clendinning
Department of History
McMaster University