The case of Victor revolutionized the art of mesmerism. The large part of his life, in which M. de Puységur had nothing to do but to follow this vein of inquiry, was occupied in practising and advocating a gentle manipulation to produce sleep, in preference to the more exciting means which led to the violent crises in Mesmer’s art. I have no plea for telling how M. de Puységur served in the first French revolutionary armies; how he quitted the service in disgust; how narrowly he escaped the guillotine; how he lived in retirement afterwards, benevolently endeavouring to do good to his sick neighbours by means of mesmerism; how he survived the Restoration; and how, finally, he died of a cold caught by serving in the encampment at Rheims, at the coronation of Charles X.
For he had fulfilled his mission the day that he put Victor to sleep. He had made a vast stride in advance of his teacher. Not but that Mesmer must frequently have induced the same condition; but he had passed it by unheeded as one only of numerous equivalent forms of salutary crises; or that M. de Puységur himself estimated, or had the means of estimating, the real nature and value of the step which he had made. To himself he appeared to be winning a larger domain for mesmerism, when in fact he had emerged into an independent field, into which mesmerism happened to have a gate.
The state which he had induced in Victor was common trance, the initiatory sleep, followed by half-waking. He had obtained this result by using the Od force with quietness and gentleness, leaving out the exciting mental agencies to which the mixture of violent seizures in Mesmer’s practice is attributable. The gentler method has been adopted and practised by the successors of M. de Puységur, by Deleuze, Bertrand, Georget, Rostan, Foissac, Elliotson, and others. To Dr. Elliotson, the most successful probably, certainly the most scientific employer of the practice of mesmerism, the credit is due of having introduced its use into England: the credit,—for it required no little moral courage to encounter the storm of opposition with which his honest zeal in the advocacy of an unpopular practical truth was met. It is but fair to add, that though his theory has been superseded, and his method changed, to Mesmer belongs the merit of having first tracked out and realized this path of discovery. The golden medal is his.