Wolffram, Heather (Author)
Maehle, Andreas-Holger (Author)
Since the 1990s a number of studies, such as Alan Gauld's A history of hypnotism , Alison Winter's Mesmerized , Daniel Pick's Svengali's web , Andreas Mayer's Sites of the unconscious and, most recently, William Hughes' That devil's trick , have elucidated the scientific as well as the popular cultures in which mesmeric and hypnotic practices thrived in the nineteenth century.1 By the end of the nineteenth century – that is, the time on which the articles of this special issue focus – hypnotism was a common topic of medical, legal and public debate in several European countries. The therapeutic potential of hypnotic suggestion was balanced against the dangers of a mental state that made the individual a seemingly powerless subject of the hypnotizer's will and commands. Risks to individual and collective mental health, of sexual abuse of hypnotized persons, and of criminal suggestions were widely invoked whenever hypnotism was discussed. The ‘magnetic’ treatments by lay healers and the popular performances by stage hypnotists such as Donato (Alfred Edouard D'Hont) and Carl Hansen, who toured Europe, caused political concerns about public health and public order, leading to calls for the banning of hypnotic practices or for restricting their use to qualified medical men. Indeed, hypnotism appears to have been a practice around which a number of acute popular anxieties coalesced during the nineteenth century, including fears related to psychological contagion, crowds, race, class and gender.2 In the scientific discourse, the pendulum of opinion had begun to swing from Jean-Martin Charcot's school at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, which interpreted hypnosis as an induced pathological state of the nervous system, to Hippolyte Bernheim's school at the University of Nancy, which saw it as a psychological state resulting from suggestion. In some instances, however, the idea of pathology was hard …
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Article
Schott, Heinz;
(2004)
Imagination---Einbildungskraft---Suggestion: Zur Scharlatanerie in der neuzeitlichen Medizin
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Article
Schott, Heinz;
(2004)
Imagination -- Einbildungskraft -- Suggestion: Zur “Scharlatanerie” in der neuzeitlichen Medizin
(/isis/citation/CBB000671097/)
Article
Maehle, Andreas-Holger;
(2014)
The Powers of Suggestion: Albert Moll and the Debate on Hypnosis
(/isis/citation/CBB001214400/)
Article
Chettiar, Teri;
(2012)
“Looking as Little Like Patients as Persons Well Could”: Hypnotism, Medicine and the Problem of the Suggestible Subject in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001250962/)
Chapter
Lara Karpenko;
(2017)
“So Extraordinary a Bond”: Mesmerism and Sympathetic Identification in Charles Adams’s Notting Hill Mystery
(/isis/citation/CBB341567788/)
Book
Montiel, Luis;
(2006)
Daemoniaca: Curación mágica, posesión y profecía en el marco delmagnetismo animal romántico
(/isis/citation/CBB000830258/)
Article
Andreas-Holger Maehle;
(2017)
A Dangerous Method? the German Discourse on Hypnotic Suggestion Therapy Around 1900
(/isis/citation/CBB817774860/)
Article
Graus, Andrea;
(2014)
Hypnosis in Spain (1888--1905): from Spectacle to Medical Treatment of Mediumship
(/isis/citation/CBB001421645/)
Book
John Scheid;
Nicoud, Marilyn;
Boisseuil, Didier;
Coste, Joël;
(2015)
Le thermalisme. Approches historiques et archéologiques d'un phénomène culturel et médical
(/isis/citation/CBB609426468/)
Book
William Hughes;
(2015)
That Devil's Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination
(/isis/citation/CBB298369957/)
Article
Andrea Graus;
(2017)
Hypnosis Lessons by Stage Magnetizers: Medical and Lay Hypnotists in Spain
(/isis/citation/CBB903946725/)
Article
Kennaway, James;
(2012)
Musical Hypnosis: Sound and Selfhood from Mesmerism to Brainwashing
(/isis/citation/CBB001210691/)
Article
Kaat Wils;
(2017)
From Transnational to Regional Magnetic Fevers: The Making of a Law on Hypnotism in Late Nineteenth-Century Belgium
(/isis/citation/CBB453163278/)
Article
Carlos S Alvarado;
(2019)
Jules Bernard Luys on magnetic pathology
(/isis/citation/CBB875248563/)
Book
Andriopoloulos, Stefan;
(2008)
Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema
(/isis/citation/CBB000850341/)
Article
Lamont, Peter;
(2010)
Reflexivity, the Role of History, and the Case of Mesmerism in Early Victorian Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001033705/)
Article
Rodríguez-Ocaña, Esteban;
(2007)
The Social Production of Novelty: Diphtheria Serotherapy, “Herald of the New Medicine”
(/isis/citation/CBB000820144/)
Article
Bruno Belhoste;
(2021)
La condamnation du mesmérisme revisitée
(/isis/citation/CBB067953438/)
Book
Emily Ogden;
(2018)
Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism
(/isis/citation/CBB409677268/)
Article
Julia Saatz;
(2018)
Wissenschaftsreflexionen bei Justinus Kerner
(/isis/citation/CBB181333061/)
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