The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

by Lindsey Fitzharris

Mesmerism—named after the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who invented the hypnotic technique in the 1770s—had also failed to be accepted into mainstream medical practice in the eighteenth century. Mesmer and his followers thought that when they moved their hands in front of patients, a physical influence of some kind was generated over them. This influence created positive physiological changes that would help patients heal and could also imbue a person with psychic powers. Most doctors remained unconvinced. Mesmerism enjoyed a brief revival in Britain in the 1830s, when the physician John Elliotson began holding public displays at University College Hospital during which two of his patients, Elizabeth and Jane O’Key, were able to predict the fate of other hospital patients. Under Elliotson’s hypnotic influence, they claimed to see “Big Jacky” (otherwise known as Death) hovering over the beds of those who later died. Any serious interest in Elliotson’s methods was short-lived, however. In 1838, the editor of The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, tricked the O’Key sisters into confessing their fraud, thus exposing Elliotson as a charlatan.