The Mesmerist

The Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound

De: Wendy Moore

Narrado por: Piers Hampton

Medicine in the early 1800s was a brutal business. Operations were performed without anaesthesia while conventional treatment relied on leeches, cupping and toxic potions. It was said of one surgeon, 'His surgical acquirements were very small, his operations generally very badly performed and accompanied with much bungling, if not worse.' It was lucky, for the doctor at least, that his deafness made him immune to his patients' dying groans.

Into this milieu came John Elliotson, the dazzling new hope of the medical world. Charismatic and ambitious, Elliotson was determined to transform medicine from a medieval hodgepodge of archaic remedies into a practice informed by the latest science. In this aim he was backed by Thomas Wakley, founder of the new Lancet magazine and a campaigner against corruption and malpractice. Then, in the summer of 1837, a French visitor - the self-styled Baron Jules Denis Dupotet - arrived in London to promote an exotic new idea: mesmerism. It was a trend that would take the nation by storm but would ultimately split the two friends, and the medical world, asunder, throwing into sharp focus fundamental questions about the line between medicine and quackery, between science and superstition.

©2017 Wendy Moore (P)2017 Orion Publishing Group

Reseñas de la Crítica

Wendy Moore has written a thrilling account of this odd byway of medical history...she has successfully taken a historical episode and used it to colour in the world of 19th-century scientific endeavour and its attempts to uncover the still-unexplained mysteries of the human unconscious (Lucy Lethbridge)

Engrossing...her social history of Victorian medicine, which struggled with innovation and provision for the poor, also feels rivetingly topical...[A] witty and instructive tale (Miranda Seymour)