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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and this makes

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Speaker 1: me feel pretty Victorians. But I want to let everybody

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Speaker 1: know that I have been to a hypnosis show before,

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Speaker 1: and I think, Katie, you have to yeah, back in

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Speaker 1: college Jack, in college e g. A. The show I

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Speaker 1: went to was in the gym, and the hypnotist, you know,

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Speaker 1: brought out folks from the audience. We did some of

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Speaker 1: them out and then supposedly hypnotized the rest. And it

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Speaker 1: was tame. You know. They didn't do anything that they

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Speaker 1: would be terribly ashamed of. There is actually like chickens

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Speaker 1: and like flapped all around the series and clucking Britney

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Speaker 1: spears dancing. I would have done that without being hypnotized,

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Speaker 1: and basic like slumping in your seat. There was definitely

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Speaker 1: no poking with needles or shooting of guns or knives

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Speaker 1: under fingernails. Would I'm really glad of because I think

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Speaker 1: that would have made me very uncomfortable to see at

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Speaker 1: a college performance. No, I want my money's worth. Oh gosh, Well, okay,

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Speaker 1: it's finally almost Halloween. We've been talking about these spooky

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Speaker 1: topics for the past month, and we're going to bring

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Speaker 1: our series to a cloth with a little discussion of hypnosis.

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Speaker 1: You probably saw that coming, specifically its predecessor mesmerism, which

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Speaker 1: if you've ever heard of it, it's probably in relation

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Speaker 1: to the word mesmerize, and it's pretty weird and spooky

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Speaker 1: on its own, but it's also connected to so many

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Speaker 1: famous names that it starts to get pretty interesting, especially

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Speaker 1: for US history lovers. The string of people connected to

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Speaker 1: it don't always have all that much in common an

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Speaker 1: illustrious list, though it is very yes and um, when

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Speaker 1: you look at someone the literature of the time, it

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Speaker 1: becomes really clear that regardless of whether people thought it

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Speaker 1: was a scam or not, it had a big influence

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Speaker 1: on the public consciousness during the Enlightenment and then again

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Speaker 1: during the Victorian era, which is what I always connected

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Speaker 1: to as well. Definitely, all right, so Katie, let's get

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Speaker 1: hypnotized mesmerized. Alright, So we're gonna start with friends Anton

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Speaker 1: mesmer who, um, you know, hypnosis had been around for

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Speaker 1: a long time, obviously connected with sorcery and magic and medicine,

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Speaker 1: but it's scientific history started with this Mesmer guy. He

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Speaker 1: was born in what is now Germany in seventeen thirty four,

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Speaker 1: and he attended the University of Vienna, and in seventeen

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Speaker 1: sixty six he wrote his dissertation on animal gravitation. And

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Speaker 1: that sounds not at all like what it is, but

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Speaker 1: his ideas were partly inspired by this British physician named

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Speaker 1: Richard Mead. But Mesmer's idea was that we all had

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Speaker 1: this invisible fluid inside of us, and in fact everything

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Speaker 1: in Nay had this invisible fluid, and the fluid was

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Speaker 1: controlled by the gravitational attraction of the planet, so like

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Speaker 1: the moon and tide exactly, so like you have internal

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Speaker 1: tides inside your body. And in seventeen seventy three he

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Speaker 1: met patient Frauleine Ulsterlin who had some physical problems, and

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Speaker 1: Mesmer decided to put his theories to the test. Let's

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Speaker 1: see if her tidal fluctuations are out of balance. So

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Speaker 1: he tried to create this artificial tide inside of her

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Speaker 1: by having her swallow and iron solution, which sounds terrible,

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Speaker 1: but Sarah was reminding me, there is iron in my

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Speaker 1: serious sprinkle it in he'd ever did that high school

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Speaker 1: chemistry experiment. Then he put magnets on her stomach and legs,

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Speaker 1: and she said she felt this occult force, this fluid

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Speaker 1: in her body and began to feel better, and eventually

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Speaker 1: she completely recovered after a few treatments. So obviously, you know,

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Speaker 1: word gets around about something like that happening, and over

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Speaker 1: time Mesmer tweaked his theory and renamed it animal magnetism,

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Speaker 1: which again doesn't sound like what it is um, And

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Speaker 1: he considered that the fluid followed the laws of magnetism,

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Speaker 1: so it's weird. But at this point everything was starting

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Speaker 1: to seem a little more legit and scientific. There's some

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Speaker 1: vague science following laws, but it also got weirder and

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Speaker 1: more ritualistic, and that's partly because of the rituals Mesmer

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Speaker 1: himself attached to it. He figured that disease was the

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Speaker 1: result of fluid blockages or some sort of dis equilibrium

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Speaker 1: of these internal tides and the operator. So the I

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Speaker 1: mean what we would consider the hypnotist today. The mesmerist

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Speaker 1: um could help restore that balance by acting as a

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Speaker 1: conduit to the greater world of magnetic fluid. So you

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Speaker 1: couldn't access that magnetic fluid just alone, but somebody else

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Speaker 1: could do it for a powerful operator, and this was

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Speaker 1: done with a magnetized object or by the past sing

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Speaker 1: of hands over the patient called magnetic passes, and eventually

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Speaker 1: the patient would experience what he called a crisis, which

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Speaker 1: was a trance, sometimes ending in convulsions and delirium. Wheel

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Speaker 1: We found this all a bit suggestive, very suggestive, especially

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Speaker 1: when you consider that most of the patients are women

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Speaker 1: and he's a guy. So he even came up with

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Speaker 1: a special tool that he invented for the purpose of

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Speaker 1: treating multiple patients at once, called I think aboucka and

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Speaker 1: unsurprisingly he gets famous for his crazy semi pseudo scientific antics.

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Speaker 1: Mozart is a follower and he even performs music and

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Speaker 1: Mesmer's honor, and then, also unsurprisingly, there's a scandal and

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Speaker 1: the Viennese physicians expose Mesmer as a fraud. He leads

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Speaker 1: Austria in disgrace and goes to Paris in seventy eight,

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Speaker 1: and he finds a pretty willing audience in Paris, and

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Speaker 1: that's partly because the city was already so a wash

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Speaker 1: and all these discussions and demonstrations of gravity and magnetism

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Speaker 1: and electricity, so this idea about this magnetic force and

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Speaker 1: fluid in your body seemed to fit more or less

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Speaker 1: in with the rest of it, and he would set

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Speaker 1: the mood for these demonstrations playing the instrument du jour,

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Speaker 1: which was Franklin's glass harmonica to induce deeper trances and

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Speaker 1: sarah S's you have to go listen to it, which

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Speaker 1: having yet, I don't think you can. I could never

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Speaker 1: describe what it sounds like, but I mean, it's kind

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Speaker 1: of like if you've ever seen anybody play crystals with water,

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Speaker 1: except they're all stacked on top of each other, and

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Speaker 1: it can be played seamlessly, so you're not chiming away

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Speaker 1: at it. It's a very eerie, mysterious sound and just

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Speaker 1: sort of a weird side note on the glass harmonica. Um.

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Speaker 1: Eventually people thought that it was dangerous to your mental health,

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Speaker 1: so it's sort of ironic that it's being used in

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Speaker 1: conjunction with treatment and mesmerism. They thought that listening to

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Speaker 1: the glass harmonica if you were already in a delicate state,

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Speaker 1: could possibly cause mental illness, so maybe you shouldn't listen

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Speaker 1: to it. Actually, maybe small dose. Are you okay so far?

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Speaker 1: Are you feeling like that? I'm feeling all right. I

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Speaker 1: don't know. I only listened to like a couple of

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Speaker 1: YouTube videos worth I'll check in with you tomorrow. But

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Speaker 1: Marie Antoinette really liked Mesmer and he was I think

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Speaker 1: she was just bored at that court, to be perfectly honest,

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Speaker 1: he was frequently invited to the French court to perform

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Speaker 1: for the Queen, but that ultimately proved to be his

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Speaker 1: downfall because Louis the sixteenth was not so into this

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Speaker 1: whole thing. He's a skeptic, so he put together a

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Speaker 1: commission to investigate Mesmer's science quote unquote. The members include

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Speaker 1: Ben Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, the Paris mayor, Gen Bay, and

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Speaker 1: even doctors Dr Joseph Giuta, who um, you know it's

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Speaker 1: behind something that sounds a lot of similar to his name.

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Speaker 1: Yeah the YouTube. Weirdly, a few of the commission members

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Speaker 1: meet their fate with the real deal. Don't get into pseudoscience.

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Speaker 1: Then Franklin is a bit sickly at the time, so

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Speaker 1: this commission works from his house and Mesmer, of course,

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Speaker 1: you know, he's he wants to defend his reputation, he

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Speaker 1: has to defend it, but he also wants to distance

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Speaker 1: himself from the Commission. You don't want to go there,

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Speaker 1: Mesmer himself and demonstrate your theories and your ideas and

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Speaker 1: have it all blow up in your face, especially if

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Speaker 1: you have a suspicion that you might be a bit

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Speaker 1: of a fraud. It won't work quite right. Or maybe

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Speaker 1: maybe you wouldn't even think that, you would just think

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Speaker 1: of the Commission wouldn't get it right. So Mesmer sends

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Speaker 1: an assistant, Dr. Charles Doeslin to represent him. That way,

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Speaker 1: you know, if this guy messes up, Mesmer can blame

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Speaker 1: it on him. So Doeslin demonstrated some of the Mesmerism

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Speaker 1: techniques for the panel. At one point, he magnetized a

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Speaker 1: tree and then had this subject I d the tree

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Speaker 1: that had the most forced. Unfortunately, the twelve year old

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Speaker 1: blindfolded boy starts going in the wrong direction, saying, you know,

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Speaker 1: I feel the force increasing, tree A going down, the

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Speaker 1: line of trees going further and further away from there.

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Speaker 1: I can just imagine the guy watching this and you know,

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Speaker 1: based in in hand. Well, and then the kid fainted. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and that put an end to the demonstration. So a

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Speaker 1: few of these and the Commission concludes that there's no

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Speaker 1: scientific evidence behind mesmerism. They publish a report and that's

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Speaker 1: really that. For Mesmer himself in Paris, he falls out

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Speaker 1: of favor almost immediately. He dies in obscurity, but he

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Speaker 1: does not fall out of memory. Now he's still in

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Speaker 1: the back of everyone's heads. One of his main fans

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Speaker 1: is our mom Marie Jacques to Shaston, a who is

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Speaker 1: a marquis and an aristocrat who starts doing these experiments

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Speaker 1: with mesmerism with the help of a young man on

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Speaker 1: his estate even before Mesmer was out of commiss and

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Speaker 1: and the marquis would hypnotize the guy and then leave

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Speaker 1: him with no memory. And he came to believe that

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Speaker 1: the magnetic effects depended on the operator's belief on the

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Speaker 1: rapport with the patient. So more like the two people

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Speaker 1: involved in it and the relationship between the two than

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Speaker 1: just I am mass mesmerization that Mesmer himself was doing.

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Speaker 1: And um, it's interesting. You know, the guy who he's

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Speaker 1: working with will talk quite openly when he's in this

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Speaker 1: mesmerized state. Tell um, you know, tell this aristocratic master

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Speaker 1: of his things that he wouldn't normally say, like I

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Speaker 1: had a fight with my sister. And then after he

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Speaker 1: gets some advice on how to deal with it. He

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Speaker 1: has no recollection, but he still acts on the advice.

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Speaker 1: Weird stuff like that. So it still sounds kind of

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Speaker 1: out there. But the Marquees work in Sight four on

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Speaker 1: his experiments are sometimes consider the start of modern psychotherapy.

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Speaker 1: And I mean I can see that to a certain

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Speaker 1: they're talking to each other and trying to drawing everything

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Speaker 1: out there. Yeah, so mesmerism really started to get its

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Speaker 1: second wind in the eighteen thirties and forties. It spread

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Speaker 1: to the United States and influenced William James, the psychologist

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Speaker 1: and the brother of Henry James, and it was simultaneously

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Speaker 1: supported and disproven in eighteen forty three by the English

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Speaker 1: doctor James Braid. He concluded that this whole fluid idea

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Speaker 1: was nonsense, but he also decided that these physical effects

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Speaker 1: were real and they were produced by quote a peculiar

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Speaker 1: condition of the nervous system induced by a fixed and

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Speaker 1: abstracted attention end quote. So this is a real thing.

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Speaker 1: You induce it through this, through this process, and then

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Speaker 1: it does have effects on your nervous It has nothing

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Speaker 1: to do with magnetic fluids, no internal times, and so

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Speaker 1: trying to distance this idea trying to distance the effects

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Speaker 1: of mesmerism from mesmerism itself, which has this shady reputation.

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Speaker 1: Braid coins a few new terms. One of them is

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Speaker 1: hypnotism and other is hypnosis, and he starts to investigate

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Speaker 1: the applications of hypnosis in paralysis and rheumatism, and you know,

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Speaker 1: just treating it more like a possible medical science. French

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Speaker 1: doctors and scientists follow his lead, and by the eighties

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Speaker 1: scientists really start tackling hypnosis as you know, as a

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Speaker 1: real thing. And at this point we can separate hypnosis

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Speaker 1: from mesmerism. But don't think that mesmerism went away. It

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Speaker 1: just science took a different track. I'm thinking parallel track.

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Speaker 1: We're going to get back to the chrism. But these

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Speaker 1: more modern scientists accepted that, yeah, it definitely doesn't involve

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Speaker 1: physical forces, no fluid. Instead, it had something to do

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Speaker 1: with your mind. And Sigmund Freud actually got really interested

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Speaker 1: in hypnosis and it's something that had a very big

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Speaker 1: effect on psychology, even though he abandoned it pretty quickly

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Speaker 1: for pre association, it was too hard to actually get

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Speaker 1: people into it. Translates that rapport fraud and um by

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Speaker 1: world War One, World War Two, we have hypnosis being

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Speaker 1: used on returning soldiers and it's not just a sideshow

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Speaker 1: act anymore. It's part of psychology. But interestingly, we still

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Speaker 1: don't understand what hypnosis really is. There's no generally accepted

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Speaker 1: explanation for how it works. Yeah, but I'm going to

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Speaker 1: go back to mesmerism, which did become a bit of

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Speaker 1: a sideshow act and yet still was considered somewhat it's

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Speaker 1: quasi medical. So between the eighteen forties and eighteen eighties

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Speaker 1: mesmerism got completely drawn into this, both spiritualism and stage demonstrations.

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Speaker 1: So it's a pop culture hit. But if you were

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Speaker 1: a self respecting physician there is you wouldn't even touch

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Speaker 1: that with Tempho Pole it would ruin your career. But

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Speaker 1: if you were an itinerant mesmerist, you might have a

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Speaker 1: pretty good career. It's my backup. Yeah, I think you could.

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Speaker 1: I think you could pull it off, Katie Um. So

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Speaker 1: these folks would travel around Britain, travel around different countries

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Speaker 1: and perform these shows, and the shows would bring in

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Speaker 1: a paying audience, but the main point of them was

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Speaker 1: to try to attract private clients for personal treatment because

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Speaker 1: they would give you the big box for mesmerizing them.

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Speaker 1: And you think that these shows might sound fine, kind

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Speaker 1: of like the U. G. A shows we described at

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Speaker 1: the beginning, But the knives under fingernails. I was not

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Speaker 1: making that up. That's unfortunately a real thing. Well and

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Speaker 1: and worse, let's see, we've got a pouring acid on

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Speaker 1: the skin, administering electric shocks, putting ammonia in people's mouths,

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Speaker 1: firing pistols near their ears. And the weird thing about

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Speaker 1: this is it's not just the mesmeris who are doing

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Speaker 1: this to try to prove that it's real. It's skeptics.

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Speaker 1: So people would come to the saying mesmerism is fake.

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Speaker 1: I can disprove it by you know, firing a pistol.

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Speaker 1: By this, guys total going to stand up. Yeah, So

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Speaker 1: you would end up with just escalating brutalities on these

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Speaker 1: poor supposedly mesmerized people. And um, you know it worked

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Speaker 1: to both ends. If the patient jumped when the gun

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Speaker 1: was fired by her ear, it's a fake. You know,

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Speaker 1: we've exposed it. If nothing happened, then people thought either

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Speaker 1: it was all real or it was such good fakery

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Speaker 1: that it was really really sick and disturbing. And in

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Speaker 1: case you're wondering about why we titled our podcast what

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Speaker 1: we did, that's from a New York Times article from

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Speaker 1: eight seven, and the head the headline is he was

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Speaker 1: killed by mesmeris of the exclamation point nation point and

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Speaker 1: I mean when I when I read it, it's it's

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Speaker 1: about this young man, Spurgeon young who died after a

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Speaker 1: few days illness and quote. It is now claimed that

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Speaker 1: death resulted from injuries received while under mesmeric influence at

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Speaker 1: the hands of amateurs in a science corner. Bowers has

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Speaker 1: summoned a jury and will make a thorough investigation. Um,

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Speaker 1: it's easy to see how somebody could be killed under

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Speaker 1: an amateur mesmerist demonstration if you read some of these

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Speaker 1: things they did to people well, and some people started

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Speaker 1: connecting this this idea of this you know, unconscious state

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Speaker 1: with surgery, thinking well, exactly, maybe this is a good

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Speaker 1: way to get people through something like amputation. Mesmeric and

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Speaker 1: anesthesia was used to amputate the leg at the thigh

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Speaker 1: of a forty two year old man named James Womble,

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Speaker 1: who said he didn't feel anything, but it was obviously

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Speaker 1: crowded out before it could get going. That's why you

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Speaker 1: haven't heard many stories about mesmeric anesthesia because you know,

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Speaker 1: things like ether came into use instead, which another sort

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Speaker 1: of strange side note there, ether and nitrous oxide were

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Speaker 1: they originally had applications on the stage before they were

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Speaker 1: thought of for medical purposes. Really yeah, kind of a

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Speaker 1: strange It's hard to imagine going to like the cool

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Speaker 1: ether show in town, but who knows. So with these

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Speaker 1: itinerant performances, these debates, people getting amputations in our mesmeric trance,

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Speaker 1: mesmerism becomes a very contentious thing and the perfect plot

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Speaker 1: point for a Romantic or Victorian writer to pursue these

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Speaker 1: altered states of consciousness into the altered states of con

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Speaker 1: especially those achieved through opium um but also quite effectively

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Speaker 1: done through hypnosis, sleepwalking, and trance. Because not every story

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Speaker 1: can have the opium eater and know, some of them

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Speaker 1: just have to plain trances. So according to this book

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Speaker 1: Bram Stoker and The Man Who Is Dracula, there's a

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Speaker 1: whole genre of mesmeric novels that combine Gothic elements, you know,

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Speaker 1: things that we're we're familiar with in much earlier fiction,

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Speaker 1: with these more modern scientific ideas than we have Daniel

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Speaker 1: Dormer The Mesmerist Secret, Edward Harron Allen's The Princess Daphne,

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Speaker 1: and obviously Bram stoker S Dracula, which is published a

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Speaker 1: little late in the game. For some of this mesmerist stuff, um,

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Speaker 1: it was definitely not in anymore the science wasn't but

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Speaker 1: it's used to great effect by Stoker. Yes, this is

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Speaker 1: one of my favorite books of all time and has

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Speaker 1: a prominent place on my bookshelf. But the character of

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Speaker 1: Lucy is often sleepwalking. The vampire uses mesmerism to satisfy

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Speaker 1: his blood lust, and Van Helsing uses it to fight back.

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Speaker 1: It's it's a central point in how everything happens, and

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Speaker 1: and observing what someone is like in a trance and

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Speaker 1: what they can do when they're in this altered state

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Speaker 1: of consciousness, things against their will. Even so, another famous

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Speaker 1: horror writer too used it to pretty great effect. That's

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Speaker 1: Edgar Allan Poe. He became interested in mesmerism after he's

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Speaker 1: into this lecture by Andrew Jackson Davis, and his most

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Speaker 1: famous story on mesmerism is The Facts in the Case

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Speaker 1: of Monsieur Valdemar, and the story was so good that

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Speaker 1: people thought it might be true, even though it sounds

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Speaker 1: incredibly outrageous. Just give you, like a brief plot outline. Here.

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Speaker 1: There's this mesmerist and he's interested in the effect of

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Speaker 1: hypnosis on a dying person. So he reaches out to

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Speaker 1: this dying friend and gets his approval to try to

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Speaker 1: hypnotize him on his deathbed. He puts the guy into

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Speaker 1: a state of hypnosis, and then the guy starts to

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Speaker 1: talk and says, I'm dead even though he's in this

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Speaker 1: trance state. And the guy just remains like that, in

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Speaker 1: this inert state for months and months without a pulse,

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Speaker 1: just in this death trance, half living, half dead, And

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Speaker 1: finally the narrator jostles him out of the trance by

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Speaker 1: repeatedly saying dead, dead, dead, And when he comes to,

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Speaker 1: he immediately rots because he's been sitting there for months

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Speaker 1: dead and turns into this puddle of goo. So I

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Speaker 1: have to read this immediately. I think it sounds like

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Speaker 1: a really great use of mesmerism. It wasn't always used though,

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Speaker 1: in that that horrifying kind of way. People weren't always

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Speaker 1: rotting and falling into the puddles. Unfortunately, just with a

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Speaker 1: psychological kind of twist, you had a couple examples. I

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Speaker 1: think Wild in the picture of Dorian Gray, and even

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Speaker 1: Walt Whitman in poetry The Sleepers and Song of Myself,

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Speaker 1: and Dickens, who is of course arguably the most famous.

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Speaker 1: He is weird. He was very much influenced by mesmerism.

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Speaker 1: In fact, he takes it a step beyond somebody like

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Speaker 1: po or Wild. He's actually a mesmerist himself. He performed

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Speaker 1: mesmerism on his wife in Pittsburgh and then yeah, of

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Speaker 1: course on this other lady in eight and forty four.

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Speaker 1: Classic Dickens for you, and his final unfinished novel, The

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Speaker 1: Mystery of Edwin Drewd, is about an evil mesmerist who

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Speaker 1: sexually manipulates women through hypnosis, which I have never heard

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Speaker 1: of that book before. A really Candice, a former co

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Speaker 1: host um for y'all, who remember from way back in

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Speaker 1: the day, she's reading Drewd by Dan Simmons, and I

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Speaker 1: was trying to decide it's kind of a takeoff on

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Speaker 1: that if I had to read the Unfinished Mystery of

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Speaker 1: ed and drew before, so you can let me know, um,

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Speaker 1: But that does raise an interesting point about mesmers and

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Speaker 1: when we brought up earlier that it's pretty sexual. The

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Speaker 1: patients are nearly almost always women. Uh, something that may

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Speaker 1: have helped that literary success damsels and probably heard its

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Speaker 1: medical reputation too. And there's also that that crime angle

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Speaker 1: of being hypnotized and doing things against your will, which

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Speaker 1: that appears in literature for way longer. It's even in

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Speaker 1: You'll You'll hear. Actual defense is using that aside for literature.

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Speaker 1: I was hypnotized. Um, I don't know what to say

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Speaker 1: about even how there's some sleepwalking murder stories. I wrote

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Speaker 1: an article for the website how stuff works dot com

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Speaker 1: how sleepwalking works, and I was reading many defenses that

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Speaker 1: people have given. I had no idea I killed my wife.

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Speaker 1: I was sleep walking altered states of consciousness. Time to

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Speaker 1: wake up everybody, because it's time for listener mail. And

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Speaker 1: today we just have a correction for you. And we

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Speaker 1: would say the names of everyone who sent this email in,

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Speaker 1: but it would take a really long time. We misspoke

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Speaker 1: and our Curse of Macbeth podcast. Um, what we had

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Speaker 1: meant to say was that Lincoln was reading a copy

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Speaker 1: of Macbeth days before his assassination. In the passage he

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Speaker 1: was reading was about the witches, the Witches right and

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Speaker 1: other king being assassinated. But the play he was attending

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Speaker 1: wasn't Macbeth. It was our American cousin, and I actually

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Speaker 1: knew that, but wrote it really confusingly in the outlines,

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Speaker 1: so I apologize for that. We do know that it's

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Speaker 1: not make that. If you have any corrections to send

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Speaker 1: us or good ideas for podcasts, our email addresses History

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Speaker 1: podcast at how stuff works dot com. We've also got

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Speaker 1: a Twitter feed and missed in History and Facebook fan page,

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Speaker 1: and if you'd like to learn a little bit more

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Speaker 1: about our subject for today, you can type in sleep

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Speaker 1: walking or hypnotism on our home page at www dot

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. For more on this and

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Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com

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Speaker 1: and be sure to check out the stuff you missed

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Speaker 1: in History Glass blog on the how stuff works dot

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Speaker 1: com home page