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this march towards knowledge. It is in Britain that science has been yoked to technology and to progress. It is here that engines powered by steam first clattered down iron tracks. It is here that the earliest adventurers in understanding – heroes like Priestley and Davy and Faraday and Brown – first divined the operations of the air, of gases and, perhaps most of all, of Electrical Forces which, I do believe, will affect a bigger change on this Planet than any preceding innovation. And of course all these great Divinations were set down upon the early edifice built by the mightiest genius of us all, Sir Isaac Newton.
But there is a baleful paradox behind all our discoveries. We know what causes the plants to grow and multiply, so to feed the planet and ourselves. We know how to harness the hidden forces of the world to pump water from mines, to send engines down tracks, to speed our massive ships to the far ends of the Earth. We know what fixes the stars in their heavens.
But the engine which powers all these transitions, the mighty organ that is the Mind of man, remains an essential mystery to us. I speak as one who has laboured for decades within institutions which we once called Madhouses, but are now known as Lunatic Asylums. I have lived through a period of great change in the matter of mad-doctoring, and I have been one of its key innovators.
What is the mind, and how does it conceive? It is a question that has haunted our finest doctors and our most brilliant philosophers. We have argued about the mysteries of the understanding, the relationship of the mind and the body, and the matter of consciousness. We have treated the head
somatically
, as a part of the body, and
philosophically
, as the seat of the soul. To hold a brain in your hands, as I have done on dozens of occasions, is to wonder at how something can be at once a slab of meat and the throne of Reason.
I do not seek to answer such questions in this paper. I seek instead to broaden our understanding of the mind’s capacities. For the past four decades I have made the matter of mental disturbance my ground for research. I have investigated melancholy and hysteria, fury and mania, and I have long held that the mind is a stronger instrument than we have ever credited, though I should perhaps say the Brain. I wish to emphasise the, as it were, muscular capacities of this extraordinary organ.
The present paper is not a complete treatise on this matter. I have been forced to commit these thoughts to ink because of the publications of another doctor, who has published his own theories of a concept he calls
hypnotism
. I speak of Dr James Braid of Manchester, in whose book
Neurypnology
this concept is introduced. Dr Braid’s book has been greeted with some derision among my colleagues, but I will not stoop to mockery. Although Braid’s concepts are misguided, and his conclusions wilful and positively dangerous, there can be no doubt that some of the theories which he has published have affinities with thoughts of my own.
I have been at this particular work for thirty years now. My interest began with events I witnessed at Brooke House, the private asylum (or madhouse, as we then called such places) in Hackney, in the year 1814. The things I saw were so extraordinary, and so out of the range of human experience and theory, that I have made it my life’s work to try and place them within a theoretical whole which can at least accommodate them. Now that Dr Braid’s ideas are, as it were, out in the public sphere, it may be that a more receptive audience will be available for my own theories.
I believe the events described herein – and the medical conclusions I have drawn from them – will be seen by future generations as a great leap forward in human understanding. My depiction of those terrible nights at Brooke House may attract derision and disbelief, but I speak as a doctor of forty years standing when I say they are real, they happened precisely as I