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  • The Mesmerist

  • The Society Doctor Who Held Victorian London Spellbound
  • By: Wendy Moore
  • Narrated by: Piers Hampton
  • Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (9 ratings)
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The Mesmerist

By: Wendy Moore
Narrated by: Piers Hampton
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Summary

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

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Invisible medicine

Moore's strength is in identifying real characters from history and using research and vivid language to re-tell the story for 21st-century audiences. We are a long way in time and metaphorically from Victorian medicine, however, Moore shows us the brutality and nepotism of treatments 200 years ago. Do you want your doctor to be 'qualified' as a result of his surname rather than ability?
There were a few careless idioms I never enjoyed, but the relationships between eminent medical characters like Wakely, Liston and Elliotson were well told outside of this criticism. It was a surprise to hear of there being London Mesmerist Infirmary and further versions in Edinburgh, Dublin etc. that is quite a movement considering very little reference given to the practice today.
The conclusion was particularly satisfying for me as Moore brought the story and use of hypnotism up to date, answering the exact questions in my mind as the end was drawing near.

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