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The Limits of the Imagination

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The Uncanny Rise of Medical Hypnotism, 1888–1914

Part of the book series: Mental Health in Historical Perspective ((MHHP))

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Abstract

One of the obstacles to the acceptance of therapeutic hypnotism by the Victorian medical profession was an explanation for its mode of action. The related effects of mesmerism and placebo treatments had been previously theorised to be the result of the doctrine of the imagination. This complex idea had originated with the ancient Greeks but was substantially modified by the alchemists Paracelsus and van Helmont. The creative aspect of the mind was held to be responsible for psychosomatic illness, birth malformations triggered by maternal experience and in excess, madness. The concept of the imagination was ancient but also mystical and spiritual and therefore quite at odds with the physical and materialist turn of European nineteenth-century medicine. By the end of the century, it remained an explanatory model only in the fields of obstetrics and psychiatry which were more resistant to the anatomical insights of the post-mortem examination. The chapter outlines the lineage of ideas of the imagination, culminating with Daniel Hack Tuke’s classic text, On the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease (1872).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Charles Lloyd Tuckey, Psycho-Therapeutics or Treatment by Sleep and Suggestion (London: Balliere, Tindall and Cox, 1889).

  2. 2.

    Esther Fischer-Homberger, ‘On the Medical History of the Doctrine of Imagination’, Psychological Medicine, 9 (1979) (pp. 619–628) (p. 620).

  3. 3.

    Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom Three Books, Vol 1, trans by George Stanhope (London: Printed for R. Bonwick, 1707) (p. 158).

  4. 4.

    Károly Kerényi, Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence, Ch 2 Epidauros trans by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959) (pp. 18–46).

  5. 5.

    George Rousseau, ‘Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 3 (1969) (pp. 108–35) (p.112).

  6. 6.

    Stanley Jackson, ‘The Imagination and Psychological Healing’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science, 26 (1990) (pp. 345–58).

  7. 7.

    Frantz Hartmann, Life of Paracelsus (1493–1541) (New York: Theosophical Publishing, 1918) (p. 179).

  8. 8.

    Arthur Waite, The Occult Sciences: A Compendium of Transcendental Doctrine and Experiment (London: Paul Keagan, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1891) (p. 230).

  9. 9.

    Jolande Jacobi, Paracelsus Selected Writings (Trans. Norbert Guterman) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951) (p. 106).

  10. 10.

    Fischer-Homberger, Imagination (p. 625).

  11. 11.

    J. B. van Helmont, Aufgang der Artzney-Kunst, trans. by F. M. van Helmont (Sulzbach: Endters Söhne: 1683) qtd. in Fischer-Homberger, Imagination (p. 622).

  12. 12.

    J. B. van Helmont, Artzney-Kunst (qtd in Fischer-Homberger, Imagination) (p. 621).

  13. 13.

    Keith Thomas, ‘Magical Healing’ Ch 7 in Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Penguin, 2003).

  14. 14.

    Charles Saint-Evremond, The Works of Saint-Evremond, 2 Vols. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1705) (p. 81).

  15. 15.

    Charles Saint-Evremond, The Works of Saint-Evremond, 2 Vols. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1705) (p. 79).

  16. 16.

    Stephen Brogan, ‘Introduction’ in The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2015) (pp. 1–22).

  17. 17.

    Charles McKay, ‘The Magnetisers’ in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995) (pp. 304–345) (p. 304).

  18. 18.

    Mesmer’s story remains contested and has been appropriated by many academics for their own ends. Robert Darnton, ‘Mesmerism and Popular Science’, in Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (New York: Schocken Books, 1970) (pp. 2–45); Marie Tatar, ‘Preface’ in Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) (pp. ix–xvi); Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (London: Allen Lane, 1970); Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robin Waterfield, Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (London: Pan, 2004); Leon Chertok and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Hypnose et Psychanalyse: Reponses a Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (Paris: Dunod, 1987).

  19. 19.

    Anonymous Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners: Charged by the King of France, with the Examination of the Animal Magnetism, As Now Practised at Paris (London: J. Johnson, 1785).

  20. 20.

    Lorraine Daston, ‘Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science’, Daedalus, 27 (1998) (pp. 73–95) (p. 80).

  21. 21.

    Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur, An Essay of Instruction on Animal Magnetism trans. by John King (New York: J C Kelley, 1838).

  22. 22.

    Sharda Umanath, Daniel Sarezky, and Stanley Finger, ‘Sleepwalking Through History: Medicine, Arts, and Courts of Law’, Journal of the History of Neuroscience, 20 (2011) (p. 4) (pp. 253–76).

  23. 23.

    William MacLehose, ‘Sleepwalking, Violence and Desire in the Middle Ages’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 37 (2013) (pp. 606–17).

  24. 24.

    Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001) (p. 247).

  25. 25.

    John Watts, Medical Dictionary, Containing an Explanation of the Terms in Surgery, Medicine, Midwifery, Anatomy, Chemistry 2nd Ed. (London: Printed for Highley and Son, 1813).

  26. 26.

    Somnambulism. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/somnambulism (accessed 25 September 2017).

  27. 27.

    Geoff Watts, ‘Histories: Elisha Perkins and his Medical Tractors’, New Scientist, 2481 (2005) (p. 25).

  28. 28.

    Jacques Quen, ‘Elisha Perkins, Physician, Nostrum-Vendor, or Charlatan?’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 37 (1963) (pp. 159–166).

  29. 29.

    Benjamin Perkins, The Influence of Metallic Tractors on the Human Body (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1798).

  30. 30.

    Anon, The Times, 10 October, 1799.

  31. 31.

    John Haygarth, On the Imagination As a Cause & As a Cure of Disorders of the Body (Bath: Crutwell, 1800).

  32. 32.

    Christopher Booth, ‘John Haygarth FRS (1740–1827)’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 107 (2014) (p. 12) (pp. 490–493).

  33. 33.

    Haygarth, Imagination (p. 2).

  34. 34.

    Haygarth, Imagination (p. 15.).

  35. 35.

    Haygarth, Imagination (p. 32).

  36. 36.

    Stanley Jackson, ‘The Use of the Imagination’, Ch. 10 in Care of the Psyche (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1999) (pp. 221–35) (p. 232).

  37. 37.

    Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) (pp. 49–54).

  38. 38.

    Michel de Montaigne, ‘The Essays’ Ch 20, ‘Of the Force of Imagination’ (Trans. Charles Cotton) (1877). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm.

  39. 39.

    Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify (pp. 52–54).

  40. 40.

    Margrit Shildrik, ‘Maternal Imagination: Reconceiving First Impressions’, Rethinking History, 4 (2000) (pp. 243–60).

  41. 41.

    Lars Andersen, ‘Before the Placebo Effect: Discussions on the Power of the Imagination in 19th Century Medicine—With Perspectives to Present Discussions on the Mind’s Influence upon the Body’, Tidsskrift for Forskning i Sygdom og Samfund, 12 (2016) (pp. 31–52).

  42. 42.

    M. J. MacCormack, ‘Influence of Maternal Impressions on the Foetus: Letters to the Editor’, The Lancet, 2 (1850) (p. 697).

  43. 43.

    William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill, 21st-Century Oxford Authors Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) (p. 74).

  44. 44.

    Jasmine Jagger, ‘Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Healing Powers of the Imagination’, Romanticism, 22 (2016) (pp. 33–47).

  45. 45.

    Daniel Hack Tuke, Illustrations of the influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease, Designed to Elucidate the Action of the Imagination (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1872).

  46. 46.

    Daniel Hack Tuke, ‘Illustrations of the influence of the Mind Upon the Body in Health and Disease, Part 1’, Journal of Mental Science, 16 (1870) (pp.166–95).

  47. 47.

    Daniel Hack Tuke, Illustrations of the influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease, Designed to Elucidate the Action of the Imagination (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1872).

  48. 48.

    Henry Rollin, ‘Obituary: Daniel Hack Tuke’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 166 (1995) (pp. 403–5).

  49. 49.

    Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (Oakland: University of California Press, 1992).

  50. 50.

    Anon, ‘Reviews and Notices of Books’, Lancet, 101 (1873) (p. 2576) (pp. 52–3).

  51. 51.

    Tuke, Illustrations (p. 180).

  52. 52.

    Tuke, Illustrations (p. 180).

  53. 53.

    Tuke, Illustrations (p. 441).

  54. 54.

    Braid, James, Neurypnology or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep (London: J. Churchill: 1843). qtd in Tuke, Illustrations (1884) (p. 445).

  55. 55.

    William Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology (London: King, 1876).

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    Gordon David Lyle Bates

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Bates, G.D.L. (2023). The Limits of the Imagination. In: The Uncanny Rise of Medical Hypnotism, 1888–1914. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42725-1_3

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