Volume 46, Number 5 · March 18, 1999
Mind Over Matter
By Ian Hacking
Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain
by Alison Winter
University of Chicago Press, 464 pp., $30.00
The most astonishing scene in Alison Winter's book takes place in the Calcutta Native Hospital in 1846. All the employees, right down to the cook, have been taught to 'mesmerize' patients to the point where they are in a state of complete anesthesia. (To mesmerize may be to hypnotize, a question to which I'll return.) A man is lying on his back. The mesmerizer sits at his head behind him, leaning over, making almost face-to-face contact, his right hand reaching down to the pit of the man's stomach, his left hand making passes close to the face, over and over again, for hours, sometimes for six hours a day.
Review, 4616 words
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