The Mesmerist

Wendy Moore

Medicine in the early 1800s was a brutal business. Operations were performed without anaesthesia while conventional treatment relied on leeches cupping and toxic potions. The most surgeons could offer by way of pain relief was a large swig of brandy.

Onto this scene came John Elliotson the dazzling new hope of the medical world. Charismatic and ambitious Elliotson was determined to transform medicine from a hodge-podge of archaic remedies into a practice informed by the latest science. In this aim he was backed by Thomas Wakley founder of the new magazine theLancet and a campaigner against corruption and malpractice.

Then in the summer of 1837 a French visitor - the self-styled Baron Jules Denis Dupotet - arrived in London to promote an exotic new idea: mesmerism. The mesmerism mania would take the nation by storm but would ultimately split the two friends and the medical world asunder - throwing into focus fundamental questions about the fine line between medicine and quackery between science and superstition.

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