Metals and magnets in medicine: hysteria, hypnosis and medical culture in fin-de-siècle Paris

Abstract

SynopsisIt is well known that the end of the nineteenth century represented a ‘golden age’ of hysteria and hypnosis research under Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris, but the extent to which metals and magnets figured in this strange and provocative world has been very incompletely told. This paper offers itself as a first corrective to this neglect. In 1876 a certain elderly physician and mesmerist, Victor Burq, asked the Parisian Société de Biologie formally to establish the validity of his so-called ‘metallotherapy’ (later ‘metalloscopy’) treatment for hysteria. The paper argues that Charcot's participation in the investigation of Burq's work – undertaken in conjunction with two other leading French neurologists, Amédée Dumontpallier and Jules Bernard Luys – served as a major catalyst in arousing the great neurologist's interest in hypnosis in the first place, and was subsequently responsible for several of his key beliefs about the underlying physiological link between hypnosis and hysteria. It is also shown how these early metalloscopy studies – and especially the discovery by Charcot and his colleagues of so-called metalloscopic ‘transfer’ – opened the door to the rise of a neo-mesmeric, and increasingly occult, branch of hypnosis research in French psychiatry, which has to date, in the secondary literature, gone almost wholly unremarked.