Letters on Mesmerism

This account of Harriet Martineau's apparent cure by the popular treatment of mesmerism reveals Victorian interest in alternative therapies.

Suffering from serious illness in the early 1840s, the writer Harriet Martineau turned to the popular alternative therapy of mesmerism. She attributed her apparent cure to this, and published this account of the treatment as a book in 1845. This reissue also includes her doctor's defence of his standard treatments.Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) was a British writer who was one of the first social theorists to examine all aspects of a society, including class, religion, national character and the status of women. Seriously ill in the early 1840s, she turned to alternative remedies, and underwent a course of mesmerism, to which she attributed her remarkable restoration to health. She published her account of the treatment in a series of letters in the Athenaeum in December 1844, and subsequently in book form, and her cure caused a sensation, adding greatly to public interest in mesmerism. To her fury, her doctor (and brother-in-law) T. M. Greenhow defended his own treatment of her in a remarkably detailed account of her illness, which she regarded as a serious breach of patient confidentiality, and his pamphlet is appended to Martineau's work in this reissue.