Mesmerism had promise. According to accounts of popular demonstrations and parlor séances of the 1830s through the 1850s, a subject in mesmeric sleep was immune to external stimuli; she (and it was often a girl or woman) couldn’t feel the pain of needles pricking her skin, smell pungent salts held under her nose, taste vinegar poured into her mouth, or hear someone screaming in her ear. Her only sensory input came from that of her (almost always male) operator. If a man could manipulate the vital fluid German physician Anton Mesmer claimed existed in the human body through passing his hands over a woman’s body, the possibilities were endless. Advocates insisted surgeons could use mesmerism as an anesthetic — an appreciable innovation in the years before ether.1 Sugar planter and mesmerist Charles Poyen advocated its use as a management tool on the plantation and in the factory. Others hoped to solve crimes, diagnose disease, or allow subjects to visit faraway places without leaving home.
But if mesmerism could entertain, anesthetize, and control, its promise was inextricable from its danger. Mesmerism transferred power over female bodies from protective male relatives to operators, threatening early nineteenth-century gendered constructs of virtue and honor.
This anxiety over mesmerism’s questionable propriety played out in American newspapers. An 1839 article dismissed the practice, explaining:
Suppose it be true:—and see the consequences. By a single wave of the hand, we deprive a female of all sense, and throw her into such a profound sleep that the teeth may be pulled out of her head without the slightest consciousness on her part. Should such a power on the one side, and such susceptibility on the other, be once established, no female in the realm, however high or low her station, would be one day safe from the machinations of the wicked and licentious! In short, the whole foundations of society would be broken up, and every fence of virtue and honor would be levelled in the dust!
If mesmerism worked as advertised, its power imbalance created too much opportunity for abuse. The practice was a threat to every woman, and the men who should protect them.
An article in the medical journal The Lancet echoed this sentiment. It noted that mesmerism “acts most intensely on nervous and impressionable females,” and asked, “What father of a family, then, would admit even the shadow of a mesmeriser within his threshold? Who would expose his wife, or his sister, his daughters, or his orphan ward, to contact of an animal magnetiser?” Because of the threat mesmerism posed to women, The Lancet recommended honorable men shun its practitioners as if they were “the uncleanest of the unclean.”