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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2024
In order to explore the ways knowledge travels across spatial and cultural boundaries, this article focuses on the intriguing case of the Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808–59), who, after practising conventional surgery for almost fifteen years in British colonial India, quite unexpectedly turned to mesmeric anaesthesia in the last five years of his service. By following his career and his mesmeric turn, the article describes Esdaile's subsequent public experiments in mesmeric anaesthesia in collaboration with indigenous practices and practitioners of trance induction in the 1840s which led to the creation of a special mesmeric hospital in Calcutta. Although very successful, it eventually ceased to function, apparently victim to new and cheaper chemical anaesthetics. Mobilizing the insights of science studies scholarship into the processes of scientific experimentation, this article seeks to shed new light on the necessary professional, social and political investments for the making and mobility of scientific knowledge across social and cultural boundaries in a colonial setting.
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3 This quotation from Cicero, In Catilinam (c.63 BC), Speech 2, #1, translates literally as ‘He left, withdrew, escaped, disappeared!’
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11 For ‘open-air’ science see Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes and Yannick Barthe, Agir dans un monde incertain, Paris: Le Seuil, 2001; Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. See also Raj, ‘Introduction: circulation and locality in early modern science’, BJHS (2010) 43, pp. 513–17; Raj, ‘Beyond postcolonialism … and postpositivism: circulation and the global history of science’, Isis (2013) 104, pp. 337–47; Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, Thomás A.S. Haddad and Kapil Raj (eds.), Beyond Science and Empire: Circulation of Knowledge in an Age of Global Empires, 1750–1945, London: Routledge, 2024.
12 The bibliography here is too vast, but see Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995; David Hardiman and Projit Bihari Mukharji (eds.), Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics, London: Routledge, 2012; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
13 Simone Turchetti, Nestor Herran and Soraya Boudia, ‘Have we ever been “transnational”? Towards a history of science across and beyond borders’, BJHS (2012) 45, pp. 319–36; John Krige (ed.), Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
14 Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, London: Longman, 1989; Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
15 University of Edinburgh, List of the Graduates in Medicine in the University of Edinburgh from MDCCV to MDCCCLXVI, Edinburgh, 1867, p. 87.
16 On returning to India, he published his voyage circumnavigating India to the Red Sea and his onward journey through Egypt, Italy, Switzerland and the Rhine valley in epistolary form. See James Esdaile, Letters from the Red Sea, Egypt and the Continent, Calcutta: Medical Journal Press, 1939.
17 Calcutta Gazette, 7 February 1839, sourced from Dirom Grey Crawford, ‘James Esdaile’, Bengal Past and Present (1910) 5, pp. 52–65, 52. For a history of the town and district of Hooghly see Crawford, A Brief History of the Hughli District, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1902; for the medical topography of Hooghly see Crawford, Hughli Medical Gazetteer, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1903.
18 Crawford, Hughli Medical Gazetteer, op. cit. (17), p. 308. For Imambarah Hospital, see ibid., pp. 306–16.
19 The three letters are reproduced in Crawford, ‘James Esdaile’, op. cit. (17), pp. 58–65. On the allusion to the Calcutta Medical College see Letter 2 in ibid., p. 61. Quote from Crawford, Hughli Medical Gazetteer, op. cit. (17), p. 200.
20 Esdaile, op. cit. (16), pp. 23, 24, 28.
21 James Esdaile, ‘Non-secretion of bile for a long period’, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (1845) 32, pp. 221–2.
22 James Esdaile, ‘Aneurism by anastomosis’, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (1845) 32, pp. 222–3.
23 The statistics concerning post-operative mortality are telling: ‘We learn that among five patients, four of whom underwent primary amputation, three died.’ Charles Alexander Gordon, Experiences of an Army Surgeon in India, London: Baillière, Tindall, and Cox, 1872, p. 9. And even though one might want to take Esdaile's self-stated spectacular decrease in mortality with a pinch of salt, there was broad agreement on the substantial lowering of post-operative deaths in the Mesmeric Hospital.
24 James Esdaile, The Introduction of Mesmerism, as a Curative and Anaesthetic Agent, into the Hospitals of India, Perth: Dewar and Son, 1852, p. 33.
25 Letter dated 1 February 1846, from James Esdaile to his father, the Reverend James Esdaile, reprinted in Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. v; the quote is on p. 40.
26 Elliotson was not the first to use mesmerism as an anaesthetic in surgery. The French surgeon Jules Germain Cloquet (1790–1883) had already used it to remove a woman's cancerous breast in Paris in 1829. Cf. Jules Germain Cloquet, ‘Ablation d'un cancer du sein pendant un sommeil magnétique’, Archive générale de médecine, série 1 (1829) 20, pp. 131–4.
27 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 35–40, quote on p. 40. On Rome's position see David Armando, ‘The 19th century debate on animal magnetism viewed from Rome: the Holy Office's decrees’, Laboratorio del'ISPF (2022) 19(11), pp. 1–56.
28 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 17–21. Esdaile was not alone, nor the first, in believing in the universality of mesmeric phenomena. The belief in the equivalence between animal magnetism and magical practices everywhere, including the past, since at least the 1780s was widely shared: Jacques Cambry, La vision contenant l'explication de l’écrit intitulé: Traces du magnétisme, et la théorie des vrais sages, Paris: Chez Couturier, 1784; Joseph Ennemoser, Der Magnetismus nach der allseitigen Beziehung seines Wesens, seiner Erscheinungen, Anwendung und Enträthselung in einer geschichtlichen Entwicklung von allen Zeiten und bei allen Völkern wissenschaftlich dargestellt, Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1819; and Aubin Gauthier, Introduction au magnétisme: Examen de son existence depuis les Indiens jusqu’à l’époque actuelle, sa théorie, sa pratique, ses avantages, ses dangers et la nécessité de son concours avec la médecine, Paris: Dentu, 1840. Also Arthur Schopenhauer, Über den Willen in der Natur, Frankfurt-am-Main: Siegmund Schmerber, 1836. Ironically, these very similarities noticed amongst slaves, notably in the French colony of Saint Domingue, also motivated strong anti-mesmeric reactions. Cf. Kieran M. Murphy, ‘The occult Atlantic: Franklin, Mesmer, and the Haitian roots of modernity’, in Elizabeth Maddox Dillon and Michael J. Drexler (eds.), The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, pp. 145–61.
29 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 3.
30 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 9, original emphasis.
31 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 41.
32 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 40, added emphasis.
33 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 43–4.
34 See, however, the independent testimony of Esdaile's colleague Dr Badan Chunder Chaudhuri printed in George Toynbee, A Sketch of the Hooghly District from 1795 to 1845 with Some Account of the Early English, Portuguese, Dutch, French and Danish Settlements, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1888, pp. 174–7, esp. 175. Importantly, Chaudhuri largely corroborates Esdaile's account above, but specifies that the surgery was performed by both men in tandem.
35 James Esdaile, ‘On the operation for the removal of scrotal tumors and c. The effects of mesmerism and chloroform compared’, London Medical Gazette, NS (1850) 11, pp. 449–54, on 449.
36 Esdaile, op. cit. (35), pp. 449–50.
37 For a complete list of surgical and medical cases using mesmerism treated by Esdaile see Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. xxii–xxiii.
38 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 10.
39 Report of the Committee Appointed by Government to Observe and Report upon Surgical Operations by Dr. J. Esdaile, upon Patients under the Influence of Alleged Mesmeric Agency, Calcutta: Military Orphan Press, 1846, pp. 7, 11–12.
40 James Esdaile, ‘Second half-yearly report of the Calcutta Mesmeric Hospital, from 1st March to 1st September 1849’, reprinted in John Elliotson (ed.), Mesmerism in India, etc., London: Hippolyte Baillière, 1850, pp. 3–13, 11–12.
41 Report of the Committee, op. cit. (39), p. 2. See also Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 145–6.
42 James Esdaile, Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance, with the Practical Application of Mesmerism in Surgery and Medicine, London: Hippolyte Baillière, 1852, pp. 138–44.
43 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 60–1.
44 On translation see Michel Serres, Hermes III: La traduction, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974.
45 James Esdaile, Mesmeric Facts, Calcutta: Ostell and Lepage, 1845 (British Library), p. 7.
46 ‘Letter to the editor of The Englishman’, reprinted in Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 253–62.
47 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 252.
48 Esdaile, op. cit. (45), p. x.
49 Esdaile, op. cit. (24), p. 24.
50 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 93–4.
51 Report of the Committee, op. cit. (39). This was not world-first, a ‘magnetical’ clinic having been set up near Moscow in the late 1810s: Charles Poyen, ‘Introduction’, in Report on the Magnetical Experiments Made by the Commission of the Royal Academy of Medicine, of Paris, Boston, MA: Hitchcock, 1836, p. lxx. For O'Shaughnessy on cannabis see his ‘On the preparations of the Indian hemp, or gunjah’, Provincial Medical Journal (1843) 123, pp. 363–9.
52 See, for instance, the reduction of enlarged lymphatic glands in one Miss Gordon described in ‘Report by Dr. Elliotson on “A record of cases treated in the Mesmeric Hospital”’, The Zoist (1848) 6, p. 32.
53 ‘Petition to the Rt. Hon. The Earl of Dalhousie, Governor-General of India for the continuance of the Mesmeric Hospital’, The Zoist (1848) 6, pp. 119–120, 119. It was signed by over three hundred ‘principal Native gentlemen of Calcutta’, with the names of over thirty of the most prominent appearing at the end on p. 120, many of whom were members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (cf. ‘List of members’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1844) 13, pp. i–ii). For some of the newspaper reports from Calcutta see Elliotson, ‘Triumph and reward of Dr. Esdaile’, in The Zoist (1848) 6, pp. 113–20.
54 ‘Report of the Government Sukeas’ Lane Dispensary and Mesmeric Hospital. From May to December 1851, drawn up by the native sub-assistant surgeon at the request of Dr. Allan Web, surgeon superintendent, Calcutta’, The Zoist (1851) 10(39), pp. 281–6; and ‘A visit to the Mesmeric Hospital, by a fellow of Caius College, Cambridge’, The Zoist (1851) 10(39), pp. 286–90.
55 Journal du magnétisme (1949) 8, pp. 78 et passim.
56 See Joseph William Turner Johnstone, Notes of a Case of a Painless Surgical Operation Performed while the Patient was under the Influence of Mesmeric Agency, Madras: The Christian Knowledge Society Press, 1847; John Elliotson, ‘Mesmerism in the East’, The Zoist (1849–50) 7, pp. 121–37.
57 Esdaile, op. cit. (40), pp. 11–12; C.J.E. Davidson, ‘Mesmerism in the native human and brute inhabitants of India’, The Zoist (1851–2) 9, pp. 1–10. Also M.E. Bagnold, ‘Mesmerism in India forty years ago’, The Zoist (1848–9) 6, pp. 250–4.
58 Esdaile, op. cit. (24), pp. 27–8.
59 James Esdaile, The Introduction of Mesmerism (with the Sanction of the Government) into the Public Hospitals of India, 2nd edn, London: W. Kent and Co., 1856, p. 4. Esdaile spared little effort to cultivate his relationship with Dalhousie, having dedicated to him his Natural and Mesmeric Clairvoyance, London: Hippolyte Baillière, 1852: see pp. iii–iv.
60 Toynbee, op. cit. (34), p. 76.
61 Crawford, Hughli Medical Gazetteer, op. cit. (17), p. 309.
62 C.D.T. James, ‘Mesmerism: a prelude to anaesthesia’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (1975) 68, pp. 446–7.
63 Esdaile, op. cit. (24), p. 7, original emphasis.
64 James Braid, Magic, Witchcraft, Animal Magnetism, Hypnotism, and Electro-biology, London: John Churchill, 1852, pp. 77–82.
65 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 29.
66 Esdaile, op. cit. (35), p. 453.
67 For the United States see George Rosen, ‘Mesmerism and surgery: a strange chapter in the history of anesthesia’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1946) 1, 527–50; Jerome Schneck, ‘James Esdaile, hypnotic dreams, and hypnoanalysis’, Journal of the History of Medicine (1951) 6, pp. 491–5; Lee Pulos, ‘ Mesmerism revisited: the effectiveness of Esdaile's techniques in the production of deep hypnosis and total body hypnoanaesthesia’, American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (1980) 22, pp. 206–11; D. Croydon Hammond, ‘A review of the history of hypnosis through the late 19th century’, American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (2013) 56, pp. 174–91. For Britain see Frank Podmore, Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism, 2 vols., London: Methuen, 1902, vol. 1, p. 125; Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, esp. pp. 221–6. The term ‘magnetic crusade’ is a nod to the near-contemporary movement to collect and interpret masses of geomagnetic data in the 1830s. John Cawood, ‘The magnetic crusade: science and politics in early Victorian Britain’, Isis (1979) 70, pp. 492–518.
68 See Runa Das Chaudhuri, ‘Enchantingly modern: whispers of the occult in popular psychic healing practices of early 20th-century Bengal’, Oriental Anthropologist (2021) 21, pp. 86–103.
69 For the classic exposition of the diffusionist thesis in science see George Basalla, ‘The spread of western science’, Science (1967) 156(3775), pp. 611–22.
70 Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, ‘La construction d'une référence culturelle allemande en France: genèse et histoire (1750–1914)’, Annales ESC (1987) 42e année, pp. 969–92; Scarlett O'Phelan and Carmen Salazar Soler, Passeurs, mediadores culturales y agentes de la primera globalización en el mundo ibérico, Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Perú, 2005.
71 Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006, p. 10. Also Murphy, op. cit. (28). Contrast, however, with François Regourd, ‘Mesmerism in Saint Domingue: occult knowledge and vodou on the eve of the Haitian Revolution’, in James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, New York: Routledge, 2008, pp. 311–32. Also Bernard Gainot, ‘Des baquets sous les Tropiques: A propos de la diffusion du magnétisme animal à Saint-Domingue en 1784’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française (2018) 1, pp. 81–104.
72 Chaudhuri, op. cit. (68).
73 Waltraud Ernst, ‘“Under the influence” in British India: James Esdaile's Mesmeric Hospital in Calcutta and its critics’, Psychological Medicine (1995) 25, pp. 1113–23; Ernst, ‘Colonial psychiatry, magic and religion: the case of mesmerism in British India’, History of Psychiatry (2004) 15, pp. 57–71.
74 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
75 Sengoopta, op. cit. (5), pp. 47–8.
76 Sengoopta, op. cit. (5), p. 61.
77 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 14.
78 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 76–7.
79 Report of the Committee, op. cit. (39), p. 2.
80 Prakash, op. cit. (5), p. 162.
81 Winter, op. cit. (6), p. 188.
82 Christian Hochmuth, ‘Patterns of medical culture in colonial Bengal 1835–1880’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2006) 80, pp. 39–72.
83 Prakash, op. cit. (5), p. 161; Winter, op. cit. (6), p. 189.
84 Esdaile, op. cit. (45), p. 104.
85 Steven Shapin, ‘The house of experiment in seventeenth-century England’, Isis (1988) 79, pp. 373–404, 374; Harry M. Collins, ‘Public experiments and displays of virtuosity: the core-set revisited’, Social Studies of Science (1988) 18, pp. 725–48.
86 David Gooding, ‘“In nature's school”: Faraday as an experimentalist’, in David Gooding and Frank A.J.L. James (eds.), Faraday Rediscovered: Essays on the Life and Work of Michael Faraday, 1791–1867, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1985, pp. 105–35. Esdaile was not alone in seeking to constitute a motley committee of prominent citizens to witness his operations. The Bostonian medic Robert H. Collyer also did so in 1841. However, in this case the committee refused to commit itself beyond certifying that no collusion existed between the mesmerist and his subjects. Cf. Robert H. Collyer, Psychography, or the Embodiment of Thought, Boston, MA: Redding and Co., 1843, p. 38.
87 Gooding, op. cit. (86).
88 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), pp. 58–9, original emphasis.
89 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 7, original italics.
90 Deleuze, Joseph Philippe François, Instruction pratique sur le magnétisme animale, Paris: Dentu, 1825Google Scholar; English translation Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, or Mesmerism, London: J. Cleave, 1845. Quote from Esdaile, op. cit. (24), p. 13.
91 Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge, London: Routledge, 1958Google Scholar; Sibum, H. Otto, ‘Les gestes de la mesure: Joule, les pratiques de la brasserie et la science’, Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales (1998) 53e année, pp. 745–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collins, Harry M., Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the difficulties of replicating procedures without the presence of their practitioners and the necessity of finding alternatives see Abattouy, Mohammed, Renn, Jürgen and Weinig, Paul, ‘Transmission as transformation: the translation movements in the medieval east and west in a comparative perspective’, Science in Context (2001) 14, pp. 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 23. The terms ‘backstage’ and ‘frontstage’ are inspired by Hilgartner, Stephen, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000Google Scholar. I thank Kevin Lambert for the reference.
93 Esdaile, op. cit. (4), p. 15. Also Esdaile, op. cit. (24), p. 7. Esdaile's stance here resonates strikingly with Franz Anton Mesmer's Rousseauist conceptions and would certainly repay closer examination. See Darnton, Robert, Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968, pp. 116–24Google Scholar.