The Uncanny Rise of Medical Hypnotism, 1888–1914 by Gordon David Lyle Bates

Author:Gordon David Lyle Bates
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031427251
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Hart did not restrict his condemnations of therapeutic hypnotism to the journal which he edited. Like his opponents, he was happy to prosecute the battle in public view and to court public approval within the national newspapers and general journals. It was surely no coincidence that when he came to publish his first essay on hypnotism for a general audience in 1892, it was in the Nineteenth Century, the same journal that had published Tuckey’s ‘Faith-Healing’ in 1888. The tone of the essay was scathing as can be gathered from its title, ‘Hypnotism and Humbug,’ reprising the Okey and Elliotson incident headline from the Times from fifty years before.60

The article was derived from a presentation that Hart had given to a non-medical audience at the Toynbee Hall in December 1891, as part of his philanthropic work.61 The Hall had been established as a base for graduates of Oxford and Cambridge to support the poor, by Hart’s sister-in-law and her husband, the social reformers, Henrietta and Samuel Barnett. It was located in Whitechapel, one of the poorer parts of East London, as a part of the reformist Settlement movement. As well as providing food, shelter and musical entertainment for the poor, it had links to the University and offered basic and higher education. Hart’s talk was therefore part of a broader purpose of the intellectual improvement of the poor.

In spite of the critical title, Hart makes some surprising revelations. We learn that Hart has some direct early experience of hypnotism, witnessing a relative with severe arthritis gain the ease of sleep following the intervention of John Elliotson. Hart claimed that as a result of this early exposure he had himself investigated and experimented with hypnotism. He disclosed that he had nearly lost his job as a house surgeon, when some friends had persuaded him to hypnotise a young woman in his rooms at a London hospital. She was spotted leaving his rooms unsteadily when she could not be fully roused following Hart’s demonstration of hypnotism to his fellows. This incident Hart claimed taught him the danger of meddling. If these revelations are designed to give Hart a platform for his views by demonstrating his knowledge and experience then they appear limited grounds for expertise.

However, Hart’s main conclusions were relevant and logically consistent. He proposed that as the means of hypnotic induction and influence were so many and varied, that it was likely that the hypnotised subject was more important than the hypnotist for the observed phenomena. Like Charcot and Henry Maudsley, Hart continued to view suggestibility or susceptibility to hypnosis as evidence of mental pathology. Also, like these two he had fixed, deterministic and organic views of mental illness and could not contemplate the kind of dynamic psychiatry that suggestion offered.

The features of the hypnotised were just as relevant to the public acceptance of therapeutic hypnotism as the qualities of the hypnotist. Susceptibility to fictional hypnotism was already associated with a variety of other characteristics: weak will, female gender or femininity, creativity, mental illness and South European or Celtic heritage.

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