animal magnetism.
“charlatan is rising in public favour, and has many backers who book him to win.”—sporting intelligence.
of all the signs of the times—considering them literally as signs, and the public literally as “a public”—there are none more remarkable than the hahnemann’s head,—the crown and compasses, devoted to gall and spurzheim’s entire,—and the cock and bull, that hangs out at the house of call for animal magnetizers. the last concern, especially—a daring, glaring, flaring, gin-palace-like establishment—is a moral phenomenon.
[pg 453]
that a tap dispensing a raw, heady, very unrectified article, should obtain any custom whatever, in a reputed genteel and well-lighted neighbourhood, seems quite impossible; yet such is the incomprehensible fact;—respectable parties, scientific men, and even physicians, in good practice in all other respects, have notoriously frequented the bar, from which they have issued again, walking all sorts of ways at once, or more frequently falling asleep on the steps, but still talking such “rambling skimble-skamble stuff” as would naturally be suggested by the incoherent visions of a drunken man. such exhibitions, however are comparatively rare in london to their occurrence in paris, which city has always taken the lead of our own capital in matters of novelty. it is asserted by a good authority, that at a french concern, in the same line, no
[pg 454]
less than seventy-eight “medical men, and sixty-three other very intelligent individuals,” became thoroughly muzzy and mystified, and so completely lost all “clairvoyance” of their own, that they applied to an individual to read a book and a letter to them; to tell them the hour on their own watches; to mention the pips on the cards; and by way of putting the state of their “intuitive foresight” beyond question, they actually appealed to the backsight of a man who was sound asleep! a bout on so large a scale has not been attempted, hitherto, in the english metropolis; but as all fashions transplanted from paris flourish vigorously in our soil, it is not improbable that we may yet see a meeting of the college of physi
[pg 455]
cians rendered very how-come-you-so indeed by an excess of mesmer’s “particular.” the influence of such an example could not fail to have a powerful influence on all classes; and a pernicious narcotic would come into general use; the notorious effect of which is to undermine the reason of its votaries, and rob them of their common senses. to avert such a national evil, surely demands the timely efforts of our philanthropists; and above all, of those persons who have set their faces against the old tom—not of lincoln, but of london—and in their zeal for the public sobriety, aim at even converting the brewers’ kilderkins into pumpkins.—seriously, might not the temperance societies extend the sphere of their operations by a whole hemisphere, and perhaps with equal advantage to mankind, by attacking mental dram-drinking, as well as the bodily tippling of ardent spirits? the bewildered rollings, reelings, and idiotic effusions of mere animal drunkenness can hardly be more degrading to rational human beings, than the crazy toddlings and twaddlings of a bemused mind, whether only maudlin with infinitesimal doses of quackery, or rampant to mad staggers with the lushious compounds and devil’s elixirs of the mesmerian distillery. take the wildest freaks of the most fuddled, muddled, bepuddled soaker,—such as “trying to light his pipe at a pump,”—attempting to wind up a plug with his watch-key,—or requesting, from a damp bed in the gutter, to be tucked in,—and are they a bit, or a whit, or a jot, or a what-not, more absurd, more extravagant, or more indicative of imbecility of reason, than the vagary of a somnambulist, gravely going through the back-gammon of reading back’s journal, or a back-number of the retrospective review, through the back of his head?
