James Esdaile
James Esdaile, M.D., E.I.C.S., Bengal, an Edinburgh trained Scottish surgeon, who served for twenty years with the East India Company, is a notable figure in the history of "animal magnetism" and, in particular, in the history of general anaesthesia.
Family
The eldest son of the Rev. James Esdaile, D.D., a minister of the Church of Scotland, and Margaret Blair, he was born in Montrose, Angus, Scotland on 6 February 1808. He died in Sydenham, Kent on 10 January 1859.He had three brothers, David Esdaile, D.D. — an ordained cleric, who, along with James Esdaile, founded Edinburgh’s Ministers’ Daughters’ College, dedicated to the education of the daughters of Ministers of the Church of Scotland, and of Professors in the Universities of Scotland — John Esdaile and Robert Esdaile, both of whom migrated to Canada, and one sister, Janet.
He married three times.
- His first wife, Mary Ann Christie, whom he had married on 6 June 1838, whilst on furlough in Scotland, died on 9 November 1838, "in her 18th year", on their voyage to India.
- His second wife, Sophia Ullmann — daughter of the Delaware banker, John James Ullmann and Jeanne F. Ullmann, and the sister of lawyer and, later, General Daniel Ullmann — whom he married on 17 November 1842 at Chinsurah, while stationed at Hooghly, died in Calcutta on 27 July 1850, aged 44.
- He married his third wife, Eliza Morton in Calcutta on 3 February 1851.
Education
India
In 1830, he was appointed as Civil Assistant Surgeon to the East India Company, and arrived in Calcutta, Bengal, in 1831.Having suffered from chronic bronchitis and asthma since his adolescence, Esdaile thought that India's different climate would be of benefit. Five years later, he suffered a total breakdown while working at Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh, and, later, was given an extended furlough from 1836 to 1838. During this time he travelled extensively; and his 1839 work, Letters from the Red Sea, Egypt, and the Continent, was written as a result of these travels.
He returned from his furlough to Calcutta, and was soon appointed as Civil Surgeon to the small Hooghli Imambara Hospital; and, through this appointment, he was also responsible for the hospital at Hooghly Jail. From November 1839 to December 1841 Esdaile also served as the Principal of the prestigious Hooghly College, located in the palladian mansion in Chinsurah that had been originally designed and built for "General Perron". The College had been founded in August 1836 by the Bengali philanthropist Haji Muhammad Mohsin, and Esdaile replaced the College's original principal — another surgeon, Thomas Alexander Wise, M.D. — who had been promoted to the position of Principal at the Dacca College. He was serving as the Registrar of Deeds for Hooghly in 1843, and as Secretary of the Hooghly Branch of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India in 1843.
In 1846, Esdaile's work with pain-free surgery at Hoogly had come to the attention of the Deputy Governor of Bengal, Sir Herbert Maddocks. Maddocks appointed a committee of seven reputable officials to investigate Esdaile's claims. They submitted a positive report, and a small hospital in Calcutta was put at his disposal in November 1846.
By 1848, a mesmeric hospital supported entirely by public subscription was opened in Calcutta especially for Esdaile's work.
It was closed 18 months later by the Deputy Governor of Bengal, Sir John Littler: according to Cotton, although the Mott's Lane Mesmeric Hospital, which opened in 1846 and permanently closed in 1848, Elliotson "continued to practise mesmerism at the Sukeas' Street Dispensary until he left India in 1851".
In 1848, Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, appointed Esdaile to the position of Presidency Surgeon; and, in 1849 -- whilst not supporting the continuation of the mesmeric hospital in Calcutta -- Dalhousie had so much respect for Esdaile and his work, that he appointed him to the position of Marine Surgeon on 29 May 1849.
Esdaile retired from the British East India Company in 1853, on the expiration of his 20 years' contract.
Esdaile and "pain-free" surgery
It is an objective matter of record that, over a six-year period, James Esdaile, an Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon employed by the East India Company -- a colonial official employed as both "Civil Surgeon" to the East India Company’s Hooghly Imambara Hospital, and as the medical officer responsible for the hospital at Hooghly Gaol -- performed 'pain-free' major surgery on more than 300 cases excruciating pain: the extraordinary reduction in the mortality rate of his "native" surgery patients from 50% to 5%, due to a significant reduction in post-operative shock".Indian subjects only
According to Winter, who notes that "the persuasiveness of work actually relied upon the lowly status of his patients", Esdaile "thought nothing" of routinely subjecting his surgical patients -- "the great majority were impoverished Indian subjects: peasants, sidar bearers, husbandmen, and cart drivers" -- "to indignities and even tortures that were highly effective in validating but that no high-caste Indian or member of the European community would tolerate". According to Gauld,Esdaile's experiments with his own version of "mesmerism"
According to Esdaile's own account, he knew very little of "mesmerism" -- having "never it practised", and only coming to know of it "from reading " -- and he only came to experiment with "mesmerism" entirely by "accident"; and, in relation to the widespread attribution of the characteristic mesmeric phenomena to "imitation", Esdaile would later stressed that this was impossible in this "accidental" case:Greatly distressed by the pain being experienced during a drainage procedure by one of his double-hydrocele patients from Hooghly Gaol, Esdaile decided, on the spur of the moment, to experiment with "mesmerism" as a means of reducing the man's excruciating misery.
This inmate -- who "was the person destined to become my first mesmeric victim none other than a Hindoo felon of the hangman caste, condemned to labour on the roads, in irons" -- was "mesmerised", by Esdaile, without any warning or explanation, on 4 April 1845. Esdaile "mesmerised" him on a number of occasions over the next seven days; and, although Esdaile was able to painlessly drain fluid from the hydroceles, Esdaile did not conduct any surgery.
Esdaile described the two-hour version of "mesmerization" that he used in his first experiments as follows:
''Jhar-Phoonk''
Although his experiments with his own version of "mesmerism" had shown that "mesmeric analgesia" was entirely possible, it was obvious that his "mesmeric induction" with both patient and operator seated restricted its application to the attenuation of discomfort in seated patients undergoing a fluid-drainage procedure. Inspired by his experimental success, and aware of the need to have his surgical subjects lying on the operating table, he made the extraordinary decision, decided to experiment with the "native" procedure known as Jhar-Phoonk.Jhar-Phoonk -- a secular, "white magic", folk treatment procedure, derived from an Islamic exorcism ritual known as Ruqyah -- was routinely performed upon poor, illiterate, impoverished Northern Indian rural workers by itinerant fakirs or dedicated practitioners to alleviate distress, dispel illness and infirmity, and treat disease.
As performed by Esdaile -- on semi-naked subjects, who had had their heads shaven -- the procedure involved an intense combination of continuously stroking the subject and continuously breathing on them.
As performed by Esdaile, the procedure was exhausting:
As a consequence, Esdaile, whose own health was far from good, soon began to delegate this exhausting work -- which, when necessary, would involve " a patient magnetized for hours each day for ten or twelve days native assistants, saving his own strength for the performance of surgery" -- and Esdaile himself spoke of how "it is exacting too much of human nature to expect people to sweat for hours pawing the air".
In a short time, Esdaile had gained a wide reputation for painless surgery, especially in cases of the scrotal "tumours" that were endemic in Bengal at that time due to filariasis that was transmitted by mosquitoes. Esdaile's mesmeric anaesthesia was extremely safe:
However, despite his successes with anaesthesia and his impressive surgical outcomes, Esdaile was at a loss to explain these events in the light of his earlier six years' experience:
According to James Braid, who had, himself, performed the first hypnotism-assisted 'pain-free' surgery several years earlier, Esdaile "believe in the transmission of some peculiar occult influence from the operator to the patient, as the cause of the subsequent phenomena". And, according to Esdaile, "the can not only saturate the system of the patient, generally, with his own nervous fluid; but, when his patient becomes very considerably under his influence, can induce local determinations of the nervous energy to various parts, so as to place them, for a time, beyond the patient's volition, even while he retains his general consciousness".
Mistaken identification of Esdaile’s ''Jhar-Phoonk'' with d’Eslon’s ''magnetization-by-contact''
The entirely mistaken, generally held, and widely published view that Esdaile used "mesmerism" to produce the pain-free condition under which he conducted completely pain-free surgery, not only significantly muddies the already far-from-clear waters in relation to the historical accuracy of the modern accounts of the history of mesmerism, anaesthesia, and hypnotism, but is so far from the objective historical truth that, to use Wolfgang Pauli’s expression, "Not even wrong| is not only not right, it is not even wrong".The mistake has its origins in the activities of a rather wide range of geographically isolated Eurocentric advocates and promoters of "mesmerism" -- such as, for example, John Elliotson with his journal, The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology & Mesmerism, and Their Applications to Human Welfare, George Sandby, with his Mesmerism and its Opponents, etc. – and their eagerness to shelter all sorts of endeavours, and all sorts of practices, beneath the capacious umbrella term "mesmerism".
Having noticed a vague, superficial similarity between Esdaile’s Jhar-Phoonk procedures and the "magnetization-by-contact" procedures of -- as represented in the Reports of the two French Royal Commissions on "Animal Magnetism" -- they had, to use a biological analogy, mistakenly identified what is a clear case of "homoplasy" as a case of "homology".
However, as Yeates observes, when viewed from a 19th-century Eurocentric perspective -- and, especially, given the physical invasive nature of, say, the surgeon's scalpel, the apothecary's mixture, the herbalist's decoction, the barber-surgeon's blood-letting, and the physician's emetics and purgatives -- it is easy to see how "mesmerism à la d'Eslon" could have been considered, by contrast, to be some sort of 'energy field manipulation' ; and, given that perspective, it could be said that, when viewed from a sufficiently abstract "level of analysis", Esdaile's Jhar-Phoonk -- despite its non-"mesmeric" roots -- also involved some sort of analogous process of manipulating an 'energy field'. From this, Yeates argues, it seems clear that the erroneous view that Esdaile's Jhar-Phoonk was "mesmerism" came from two simple mistakes:
- Equivocation : The term "mesmerism" was being used to denote both the super-ordinate class and its sub-division.
- The wrong referent : Although the term "mesmerism" could have been loosely applied to Esdaile’s Jhar-Phoonk in the vaguest sort of a way -- on the grounds that, when viewed as an 'energy field manipulation', and when compared with, say, a physician's application of leeches, Jhar-Phoonk'' certainly seemed to be a sort-of-kind-of-mesmeric-process -- the supposedly vague term was being universally interpreted in the narrowest and most restricted way.