The Mesmerist
- Author Wendy Moore
- Narrator Piers Hampton
- Publisher Orion
- Run Time 12 hours and 41 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre General and world history, History, History of medicine.
Titles Purchased
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Listen to a sample
What to expect
Into this scene came John Elliotson, the dazzling new hope of the medical world. Charismatic and ambitious, Elliotson was determined to transform medicine from a hodge-podge of archaic remedies into a practice informed by the latest science. In this aim he was backed by Thomas Wakley, founder of the new magazine, the Lancet, 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. The mesmerism mania would take the nation by storm but would ultimately split the two friends, and the medical world, asunder - throwing into focus fundamental questions about the fine line between medicine and quackery, between science and superstition.
Read by Piers Hampton
(p) 2017 Orion Publishing Group
Critics Review
-
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
LITERARY REVIEW -
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
DAILY TELEGRAPH -
Elliotson, as Moore’s engrossing study describes, became passionate about hypnosis, under which (he tried to prove) a patient could have surgery without pain. His demonstrations became as fashionable as any theatre – but was it fraud?
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH -
The enthralling story of the Victorian doctor who claimed patients could be cured and operated on with hypnosis – only to be branded a fraud by the medical establishment. Today he’s been triumphantly vindicated
DAILY MAIL -
Charles Dickens, as it happens, has a cameo role in Moore’s book. Sceptical at first about the powers of mesmerism, the novelist became a convert after witnessing one of the many sessions run by John Elliotson, the doctor who helped to start a craze for putting Londoners, sick and healthy alike, into trances
THE TIMES -
Lively…Moore tells her story with gusto
THE OBSERVER
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