Mesmerism and Hypnosis: An Illustrated Lecture with Andrew Scull, Author of Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine, presented by Shannon Taggart, Morbid Anatomy Museum Programmer in Residence
Date: Friday, September 25th
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215
Tickets Here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2142449
Mesmerism was the brain child of an Austrian physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, and enjoyed a period of immense popularity in pre-revolutionary Paris before being dismissed as quackery. But it made a comeback a half century later under a new name, hypnotism. Championed by the leading neurologist of the late nineteenth century, Jean-Martin Charcot, it was deployed twice weekly before tout Paris, demonstrating the power of the male physician over hysterical female patients. The young Sigmund Freud travelled to Paris to learn at Charcot’s feat, and on returning to Vienna began using hypnosis to treat his own hysterical patients, before losing faith in its utility, and developing psychoanalysis using free association. This lecture reviews the complex history of the medical exploitation of what Mesmer called “animal magnetism.”
Andrew Scull received his B.A. from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. from Princeton. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton prior to coming to UC San Diego. His books include Museums of Madness; Decarceration; Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen; Durkheim and the Law (with Steven Lukes); Social Control and the State (with Stanley Cohen); Social Order/Mental Disorder; The Most Solitary of Afflictions: Madness and Society in Britain, 1700-1900; and Masters of Bedlam. His articles have appeared in leading journals in a variety of disciplines, including British Journal of Psychiatry, Psychological Review; European Journal of Sociology; Medical History. He has held fellowships from (among others) the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Davis Center for Historical Studies, and in 1992-93 was the president of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
