James Esdaile

For the British politician, see James Esdaile (lord mayor).
James Esdaile to James Braid (October 1850).[1][2]

    I shall find much in the books to interest and instruct me, as I did in your first
work on Hypnotism; but I shall not wait to read them before replying to your
communication.
    I have not seen any of the papers you allude to in the journals; but am glad
to hear that the doctors are, at last, condescending to turn their attention to one
of the most interesting and important subjects ever submitted to the consider-
sideration of the physiologist, the metaphysician, and natural philosopher.***
    Regarding the reality and cause of the mesmeric phenomena, if I venture to
differ from you even, who are so much better prepared to investigate the subject
[than certain individuals to whom the Doctor had referred], it is for reasons which
I hope you will consider worthy your attention. I am fully aware that there are
various modes of inducing the mesmeric symptoms, to a certain extent, without
the probability, or even possibility, of any vital force proceeding from the
operator being concerned in the matter. But I have never (except for experiment)
produced the mesmeric state of the system by the exhaustion of any organ,
such as the eye, [here the Doctor has overlooked the important part which the
mental act of fixed attention plays in this matter] or by acting strongly on the
imagination, or by any means that could favour self-mesmerization, as you will
perceive from the following resumé of my practice:—
    During the last six years I have performed upwards of 300 capital operations
of every description, and many of them of the most terrible nature, without in-
flicting pain on the patients; and, in every instance, the insensibility was
produced in this fashion.
    All knowledge of our intentions was, if possible, concealed from the patients;
and if they had never heard of mesmerism and painless operations, so much
the better. They were taken into a darkened room, and desired to lie down and
shut their eyes. A young Hindoo or Mussulman then seated himself at the
head of the bed, and made passes, without contact, from the head to the
epigastrium, breathing on the head and eyes all the time, and occasionally
resting his hands for a minute on the pit of the stomach. This often induced
the coma deep enough for the severest surgical operation in a few minutes;
but the routine was for me to examine the patient at the end of an hour, and
if he was not ready, the process was repeated daily. Taking the average, the
operation, of whatever description, was usually performed on the fourth or
fifth day.
    Probably as many more cases were subjected to the trance for medical
purposes, and were usually treated in the same way, for its convenience to
both parties.
    The enclosed remarkable case of clairvoyance, with transference of the
senses to the epigastrium, will show that the mesmeric control of the system
may be obtained, when the patient is not only asleep, but in a state of
intense natural coma.
    I have also entranced a blind man, and made him so sensitive, that I could
entrance him however employed, (eating his dinner, for instance) by merely
making him the object of my attention for ten minutes. He would gradually
cease to eat, remain stationary a few moments, and then plunge, head fore-
most, among his rice and curry.
    Numbers of madmen have been entranced in the lunatic asylum of Calcutta;
and I performed a mesmeric operation on one man who had cut his throat.
    I frequently desired the visitors of my hospitals to pretend to take the
portraits of patients, and to engage their attention as much as possible, by
conversing with them. I then retired to another room, and reduced them to
statues, without the possibility of their suspecting my intentions.
    How such phenomena can be accounted for, without presuming the
existence of a physical power transmitted from the operator to the subject,
passes my comprehension. That the mesmeric virtue can be communicated
to inanimate matter, is a physical fact, of which I am as well convinced as
of my own existence. It was my common hospital practice to entrance patients
for the purpose of having their sores burned with Nitric Acid, by giving them
mesmerised water to drink.
    Community of taste, and thought-reading, are among the most common of
the higher mesmeric phenomena; and how they are to be explained, except by
the transmission of the operator’s sensations, through his thought-stamped,
nervous fluid, sent to the brain of the subject, I cannot conjecture.
    "Important, if true", you will probably say. I can only say, that healthy senses,
a natural power of seeing things as they really are, and an earnest desire to
know the truth, whatever it may be, are perfectly useless for the acquisition
of knowledge, if all I have related is not perfectly true.
    Till such facts are known to medical men and natural philosophers, it is surely
premature to dogmatise about the only source of the mesmeric phenomena.
    It happened, curiously enough, that the sleeping Faqueer of Lahore had
attracted my attention about the very time your interesting account of him
appeared,[3] and I had actually written to Sir Henry Lawrence, begging him to
procure us information on the subject; but my departure from India, shortly
after, prevented my prosecution of the subject.

James Esdaile, M.D. (1808–1859), is a notable figure in the history of mesmerism. Esdaile married three times.[4]

Education

He was the eldest son of the Rev. James Esdaile and Margaret Blair, born on 6 February 1808 in Montrose, Angus, Scotland. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh,[5] graduating MD in 1830.

India

In 1830, he was appointed as assistant surgeon to the East India Company, and arrived in Calcutta, Bengal (then the capital of British India), in 1831. Having suffered from chronic bronchitis and asthma since his adolescence, Esdaile thought that India's different climate would be of benefit. He suffered a total breakdown and was given an extended furlough from 1836 to 1838.[6]

He returned from his furlough to Calcutta, and was soon appointed to the small Hooghly Hospital; and, as a consequence of this, was also responsible for the local Jail hospital.

Mesmeric Analgesia

On 4 April 1845, Esdaile performed his first mesmeric procedure:

On 4 April 1845, [Esdaile] was treating a convict afflicted with double hydrocele. The drainage and injection of one side of the scrotum caused the patient such pain that Esdaile determined to try mesmerism upon him for the second operation…
he was successful in rendering the convict analgesic, and at once began to experiment with mesmerism both as a means of producing analgesia in surgical cases, and as a method of treatment for medical ones.[7]

By his own admission, Esdaile had never seen a mesmeric act; but, given the level of pain of this specific patient, and the understanding that he had gained from what he had read, it occurred to him that mesmerism might be of great value:

Seeing him [the patient] suffering in this way, I turned to the native sub-assistant surgeon, an élève [student] of the medical college, and asked him if he had ever seen Mesmerism? He said, that he had seen it tried at the medical college, but without effect. Upon which I remarked, "I have a great mind to try it on this man, but as I never saw it practised, and know it only from reading, I shall probably not succeed."[8]

Esdaile did succeed.

As performed by Esdaile, the mesmeric act was an exhausting procedure:

Esdaile's method was to make the patient lie down in dark room, wearing only a loin cloth, and [Esdaile would] repeatedly pass the hands in the shape of claws, slowly over the [patient's] body, within one inch of the surface, from the back of the head to the pit of the stomach, breathing gently on the head and eyes all the time [and] he seems to have sat behind the patient, leaning over him almost head to head and to have laid his right hand for extended periods on the pit of the stomach.[9]

As a consequence, Esdaile, whose own health was far from good, soon began to delegate this exhausting work which, when necessary, would involve "[having] a patient magnetized for hours each day for ten or twelve days [to his] native assistants, saving his own strength for the performance of surgery".[10]

In a short time, Esdaile had gained a wide reputation amongst the European and indigenous communities for painless surgery, especially in cases of the scrotal "tumours" that were endemic in Bengal at that time[11] due to filariasis (similar to elephantiasis) that was transmitted by mosquitoes. Esdaile's mesmeric anaesthesia was extremely safe:

I beg, to state, for the satisfaction of those who have not yet a practical knowledge of the subject, that I have seen no bad consequences whatever arise from persons being operated on when in the mesmeric trance. Cases have occurred in which no pain has been felt subsequent to the operation even; the wounds healing in a few days by the first intention; and in the rest, I have seen no indications of any injury being done to the constitution. On the contrary, it appears to me to have been saved, and that less constitutional disturbance has followed than under ordinary circumstances.
There has not been a death among the cases operated on.[12]

In 1846, Esdaile's work with mesmerism-assisted painless surgery at Hoogly had come to the attention of the Deputy Governor of Bengal, Sir Herbert Maddocks. Maddocks appointed a committee of seven reputable (medical and non-medical) officials to investigate Esdaile's claims. They submitted a positive report (on 9 October 1846), and a small hospital in Calcutta was put at his disposal in November 1846.

By 1848, a mesmeric hospital supported entirely by public subscription was opened in Calcutta especially for Esdaile's work. It was closed 18 months later by the Deputy Governor of Bengal, Sir John Littler.[7]

In 1848, Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, appointed Esdaile to the position of Presidency Surgeon; and, in 1850,[13] whilst not supporting the continuation of the mesmeric hospital in Calcutta, Dalhousie had so much respect for Esdaile and his work, that he appointed him to the position of Marine Surgeon.

Esdaile retired from the British East India Company in 1853, upon the expiration of his 20 years' contract. After briefly returning to Scotland he settled in Sydenham where he died on 10 January 1859. He is buried at West Norwood Cemetery.

Connection with hypnotism

Esdaile is thought by many to have been a pioneer in the use of hypnosis for surgical anaesthesia in the era immediately prior to James Young Simpson's discovery of chloroform. However, Esdaile had studied neither hypnotism nor Mesmerism himself.

Although some would trace the practice of hypnotherapy back to Faria, Gassner, and Hell, it is conventional to trace what we now know as hypnotism back to the Scottish surgeon James Braid's reaction to a public exhibition of mesmeric techniques given by Charles Lafontaine in Manchester on 13 November 1841

There are some similarities between both the theory and practice of Victorian Mesmerism and hypnotism. Braid reported favourably upon the Government committee chaired by Atkinson's September 1846 report on Esdaile's use of Mesmerism in an Indian hospital, although only 30% of his clients actually exhibited no signs of pain during their operations.[14] However, Braid also expressed reservations about Esdaile's claims of supernatural powers possessed by certain subjects, and the fact that his operations were yet to be demonstrated in British hospitals.

In theory I entirely differ from Dr. Esdaile. He is a Mesmerist – that is, he believes in the transmission of some peculiar occult influence from the operator to the patient, as the cause of the subsequent phenomena.[14]

In fact, as this report shows, Esdaile did not generally "Mesmerise" the patients himself but employed native Indian boys to spend 2–8 hours per day with each patient in a darkened room, employing a technique that involved breathing on the patient's body. The resemblance to the conventional techniques of Mesmerism is therefore minimal.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The only record of this correspondence is that reprinted in Braid (1852), pp.78–80; the parenthetical comments in the square brackets are Braid's, and the three asterisks indicate a passage that had been deleted by Braid.
  2. ↑ Although John Elliotson had met both James Braid and James Esdaile in person; Braid never met Esdaile in person, although they did correspond, on a single occasion. The reply from Esdaile, dated October 1851 – a result of Braid sending some of his works to Esdaile – represents their only known contact. In the section wherein Braid records the correspondence, he described Esdaile as a surgeon "whose firmness of nerve, and dexterity of hand, and scientific skill, in every way stamped him as a man eminently qualified for being a leader in his profession" (p.80).
  3. ↑ Braid, J., Observations on Trance; or, Human Hybernation, John Churchill, (London), 1850.
  4. ↑ His first wife died during their voyage to India; his second wife died in India some years later. He was survived by his third wife, Eliza Weatherhead, whom he married sometime around 1851.
  5. ↑ The University of Edinburgh was also the alma mater of John Elliotson and James Braid.
  6. ↑ During this time he travelled extensively. His 1839 work was a result of these travels.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Gauld (1992), p.223.
  8. ↑ Esdaile (1846), p.43.
  9. ↑ Gauld (1992), p.257.
  10. ↑ Gauld (1992), p.223. Esdaile himself speaks of how "it is exacting too much of human nature to expect people to sweat for hours pawing the air (1846, p.11, emphasis added).
  11. ↑ Some of these massive scrotal growths were as large as 112lbs/51kg (Gauld, 1992, p.222).
  12. ↑ Esdaile (1846), p.xxiv.
  13. ↑ See Letter from the Marquis of Dalhousie to The Poor Law Guardians of Exeter, 27 June 1856 (Esdaile, 1856, p.4).
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Braid, "Facts and Observations, etc." (1847).
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