Conducting the vital fluid: the politics and poetics of mesmerism in the 1790s.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University

BY DECEMBER 1795 PRIME MINISTER WILLIAM PITT WAS WELL ON THE way to crushing political dissent in Britain. He had tried reformers for treason, passed laws restricting the right of association and suspended habeas corpus, all without an outcry from British people about their loss of freedom. To one radical, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the people's quietude was an uncanny sign of a new malaise coursing through the body politic:



WILLIAM PITT, the great political Animal Magnetist, ... has most foully worked on the diseased fancy of Englishmen ... thrown the nation into a feverish slumber, and is now bringing it to a crisis which may convulse mortality! (1)

Coleridge was not alone in seeing Pitt as an animal magnetist, mesmerizing his countrymen into a trance to be followed by the convulsions of war. According to James Tilly Matthews, returning to London in 1796 after imprisonment by the Jacobins, the Prime Minister had been "actuated" by "magnetic spies" sent from revolutionary France. (2) Now controlled "like a mere puppet by the expert-magnetists," Pitt was himself a traitor, part of a Jacobin conspiracy to mesmerize the nation towards its destruction.

Puppet or not, Pitt acted decisively when Matthews repeated his allegations from the gallery of the House of Commons. He had Matthews locked up in Bedlam madhouse. On the ministry's reading, it was Matthews, and not the Prime Minister, whose mind had been "possessed"--Matthews had himself been an enthusiast of mesmerism, and had now been hypnotized by the practice he had gone to France to study.

Animal magnetism was inextricably linked in most British minds with France and its revolution. Indeed, many of Pitt's supporters viewed it as part of a revolutionary conspiracy that Britain must fight. The reactionary scientist John Robinson, for instance, feared the "almost irresistible" influence of an association dedicated to "rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning the existing governments of Europe." The members of this association were, he diagnosed, "Magicians--Magnetisers--Exorcists, &c." (3) According to the alarmist political commentator W.H. Reid, magic medicine threatened London itself: a set of "Infidel mystics," "made up of Alchymists, Astrologers, Calculators, Mystics, Magnetizers, Prophets, and Projectors" had embraced the politics of France and were spreading deism and democracy amongst the "lower orders." (4) Mesmerism, he was sure, was a menacing political force.

How did it come to seem so? Why did both radicals and reactionaries see the people of Britain as being in a mesmeric trance? In part, because political events called for a new explanation. The French Revolution was so violent and unprecedented an outbreak of popular energy that frightened Britons were left grasping after credible reasons for it. To Robison and Reid, it simply seemed like madness--the French had become possessed by an irrational fanaticism. Now the British too were losing their reason--or rather the common people were. Well-enough educated to read, but not discriminating enough to distinguish fact from fancy, the "lower orders" were being infected by the political nostrums of groups of quacks, fakers and would-be prophets. "The visionary expectation of a new order of things," Reid argued, "vibrated from the imaginations of the leading members [through] their fingers ends" (Reid 12). Revolution, in other words, was a creature of the imagination--spread not by rational argument but through the mesmerist's hypnotic touch. It was a matter of excessive and fanatical mass belief--belief of which millennial religion and magical medicine were both the symptoms and carriers. Conversely, in Coleridge's radical diagnosis, it was reaction rather than revolution that was imagination's offspring. It was perfectly rational to expect a "new order of things"; subservience to Pitt's tyranny, on the other hand, was only explicable as an irrational enthrallment of Britons' minds to the power of the "leading member" of parliament. Coleridge, we shall see, was to use what he had learned about mesmerism as he set out to explore that enthrallment in his political and poetical writings.

To discover why magnetism became a key concept in British political debate and why it was equated with irrational belief (both revolutionary and reactionary) we must investigate its relationship to the other new scientific discourses of late eighteenth-century Europe.

In both Paris and London mesmerism flourished in a medical and scientific context that had, in part, been opened up by theories about life made in the developing disciplines of surgery, electrics and natural history. In Britain this context was markedly different from today's scientific world, where disciplines are thoroughly professionalized, with institutionalized boundaries. Experimental science, whether, for example, the dissections of John and William Hunter or the work on gases of Joseph Priestley and Humphry Davy, was typically performed by gentlemen amateurs or in ad hoc institutions built around one man and his enthusiasm. Even medicine was only a partial exception: even though doctors had had their Royal College since 1518, it was stir perfectly possible for a gentleman to buy himself a medical degree from certain Scottish universities without ever having undertaken formal medical study. Alison Winter's verdict on the 1820s is still more appropriate for the 1780s and 1790s: "What counted as a proper science, or as a 'scientific' practice, remained open to dispute ... [.] There were no definitive medical orthodoxies to police the profession and to define a medical heterodoxy." (5) Medicine was expensive; doctors had few cures and still fewer satisfactory explanations of how and why their cures worked. The authority of a particular treatment was often based on tradition while the typical means of gaining acceptance for a new cure was to publish a collection of case histories. But such collections were easily produced: every quack marketing a new panacea "proved" its efficacy by assembling the testimonies of satisfied patients and by narrating the progress of miracle cures.

It was in this inchoate and contested medical context that Franz Anton Mesmer's therapy proved popular. It did so, in part, because the latest experiments suggested that it might be possible, by an act of will, to detect and transmit to others an imponderable life-giving fluid. When the anatomist John Hunter published his dissections of the torpedo and gymnotus fish (in 1773 and 1775), the anatomical organs for transmitting electricity were laid open. They revealed, Hunter concluded, "that the will of the animal does absolutely control the electric powers of its body; which must depend on the energy of its nerves." (6) Joseph Priestley soon incorporated Hunter's demonstration into his theories (7)--if electricity could be transmitted at a distance through water, perhaps that was formed by a combination of electricity with other vital principles. The power of the fish, the medium through which it passed and the body receiving the shock must all be akin. Hunter noted that the "oscillation" produced by the gymnotus:

may be so strong, as not only to check and overpower those in the part which touches the fish, but also to propagate themselves along the skin and up the nerves, to the brachial ganglion, and even to the spinal marrow and brain; whence the person would first feel the stupefaction ascend along the arm to the shoulder, and then fall into a giddiness. (77)

This gradual ascent of the electric charge suggested that the nervous system was itself electrical--"the effluvia of electric bodies seem to have vibrating motions ... [which] resemble the motions along the nerves in sensation and muscular contraction" (Hunter 77). Electricity, it seemed, connected exterior and interior, for the two were organized on the same principles--shocks joined the body of the fish, with the body of a person, via the intervening water because they simply reversed the direction of a human nervous system that itself employed electrical vibrations to transmit the will from the brain to the limbs.

Such conclusions seemed to be confirmed when in 1791 Luigi Galvani claimed to have made the legs of a frog move by conducting electricity, through wires, from its nerves to its muscles. Galvani argued that this fluid was "animal electricity." Produced in the brain and transmitted to the muscles, it was the vital force, causing motion. Although it was unclear whether this "galvanic" fluid was the same as the "electrical fluid" traced in the nerves by Franklin and Hunter, it was now even more strongly possible to identify electricity as the medium through vitality and will operated within and without intelligent life-forms. In 1800, Robert Southey did just that, writing that "the galvanic fluid stimulated to motion ... is the same as the nervous fluid." (8)

Hunter's and Galvani's experiments gave impetus to theraputic practices that depended on transmitting the electric fluid. Experimentalists armed with the simple eighteenth-century apparatus for collecting and discharging static electricity, the Leyden jar, were already in the 1770s shocking the blind and the lame back to health. Armed with the latest conclusions of Hunter, Priestley and Galvani, their successors were able to...

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