Hypnosis in History: Dr John Elliotson

Following in the footsteps of Mesmer, Dr John Elliotson (1791-1868) built further on the medical uses of hypnosis, even founding a ‘mesmerist hospital’ in 1849. Unfortunately, his legitimate work became mixed with false ideas and frauds and caused massive scandal in the strict Victorian society.

Who was John Elliotson?

The son of a well-known London chemist, Elliotson studied medicine at Edinburgh, Cambridge, and London Universities. Elliotson became a professor of the ‘principles and practice of physic’ in 1831. An intelligent and lively lecturer, he was popular and often featured in the medical news. By 1834, he was a practising physician at University College Hospital. He was certainly a brilliant man, known for his interests in new discoveries such as the stethoscope, the study of allergy treatments, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Not all of his ideas have held up until the present day, though. Phrenology is the theory that a person’s personality can be read by measuring the bumps on their head. Elliotson was a founder and the first president of the London Phrenological Society. You can’t win them all, I suppose. The image on the header (on the cream background) is a Punch cartoon of Dr Elliotson practising phrenology.

Elliotson and hypnosis

At the time, hypnosis was called mesmerism or magnetism. Elliotson became interested after reading articles about it in medical journals. These included accounts from Richard Chenevix and Baron du Potet, who used hypnotism to treat young ladies with epilepsy. Elliotson decided to try this for himself. He waved his hand back and forth very close to people’s faces to put them in trance, or applied magnets to their skin. Different-sized magnets could bring about lighter or deeper hypnosis, according to Elliotson.

Elizabeth and Jane Okey were teenage sisters from a working-class family. Admitted to the charity hospital, they became Elliotson’s best subjects. Elizabeth suffered from ‘fits’, which were probably epileptic in nature. She had been treated via hypnosis by Baron du Potet, and Elliotson continued this treatment.

He soon noticed this wasn’t the only effect, however. Elizabeth was a shy, respectable housemaid but, in trance, she would speak freely and flirt, tell jokes, make fun of the doctor, and sing and dance. This led to Elliotson putting on popular shows in which he put the sisters in trance on stage for the amusement of the public. The audience encouraged their odd behaviour in trance, so their acts became more shocking and showier.

Elizabeth felt no pain when he stuck a large needle into her or gave her electric shocks. Elliotson said this showed how effective hypnosis was, used in place of anaesthetic. Years later, in 1843, he wrote Surgical Operations in the Mesmeric State without Pain. A respected medical journal, The Lancet, reported Elliotson’s experiments. Fans of his work included the authors Dickens and Thackeray. In fact, Elliotson taught Dickens how to make ‘mesmeric passes’ (the hand movements) himself.

Hypnosis and mind control

One especially interesting incident occurred on the stage; Elliotson attempted to bring Elizabeth out of trance, but she wouldn’t wake, whatever he did. Then his assistant, Wood, had an idea; he asked her how she would like to wake. Elizabeth declared that Wood must wake her by rubbing her neck. Elliotson himself tried rubbing her neck, with no response. When Wood did, she woke right away. This proves the hypnotised person always has control of themselves and the hypnotist can’t force them to do anything, even something so harmless as coming out of trance!

Elliotson and controversy

Unfortunately, controversy arose. Many thought the Okey sisters were frauds, and that Elliotson was either a fool or in on the trick. Other doctors thought they were making a joke of the medical profession by performing silly tricks on stage while claiming to be demonstrating a medical technique, and the public found the girls’ crude and flirtatious behaviour in trance offensive and scandalous. The surgeon Robert Liston disapproved of its use for surgical pain relief, preferring to operate very fast to leave the patient in pain as short a time as possible, which often led to carelessness, death of the patient, and sometimes injury to the surgical assistants.

Elliotson and the sisters didn’t help their case by branching out into so-called medical clairvoyance; Elliotson would lead the entranced girls around the hospital wards and have them try to psychically diagnose other patients with the help of their spirit guide. Members of the public came to the hospital to see them, disrupting the treatment of patients. Elliotson’s former friend, Thomas Wakley, founding editor of The Lancet, couldn’t let this go on anymore and decided to expose the sisters as frauds once and for all.

In 1838, Elliotson and Wakley brought the Okey sisters and ten witnesses, both sceptics and believers, to Wakley’s home. Elliotson used magnets to induce trance, so Elizabeth’s sight was blocked with a board and Wakley touched her hand with un-magnetised lead and a nickel magnet. The lead caused no response, but the nickel put her into an immediate trance.

Unconvinced, Wakley suggested a repeat of the test. However, this time, he secretly hid the nickel magnet and used an ordinary coin, but had his helper William Hering say, ‘Take care, do not apply the nickel too strongly!’ Elizabeth reacted to the coin in the same way as she had the magnet, and Wakley declared this was proof that she was acting. A series of experiments followed. Asked to tell the difference between magnetised and un-magnetised metals and between ordinary and ‘mesmerised’ water (water which has had a person direct their intentions strongly into it), the sisters were not able to reliably do this.

Was John Elliotson a fraud?

We know now that expectation and cooperation play a large part in inducing a trance. Elizabeth already believed that magnets could bring about a trance. Applying something she thought was a magnet would therefore do the trick. The power of suggestion wasn’t understood at the time, so Elliotson was denounced as a fraud.

The university board forbade Elliotson from performing any more mesmerism and so, in 1838, he resigned. Over a hundred of his students signed a petition to reinstate him, but it failed. Instead, Elliotson continued his private practice and, in 1842, started his own medical journal, named The Zoist, devoted mainly to scientific studies of hypnosis. By 1850, he had founded the London Mesmeric Hospital. , in which hypnosis was used in place of ether or chloroform (the anaesthetics used at the time) during surgery.

Images attribution:
[1] Photo: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
[2] 1843 Punch cartoon – author unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons