Pain is not removed but prevented by means of the passes. It is not excited in the mesmerised patient during severe surgical operations, because the movements of the brain, as is said of a watch with the finger on a wheel, are stopped.
General insensibility being effected by pressure of the surgeon's finger on the brain of a fractured skull, so is it mesmerically effected by the nervous fluid, which has suffered increase as the nerves have been de-electrised by the passes.
Curative Mesmerism.
— The curative principle of mesmerism seems to consist in correcting occasional irregularities in the electric circulation. By the passes, electric matter in excess is removed, which, from being noxious to the part, might contribute to the formation of mucus to become concrete, or otherwise injurious to the flesh: or, the passes may transfer the excess to supply deficiency elsewhere,—as in the case of gout, a disease of the sufferer's own making, from excess of de-electrising food and drink, which uncoats and unlines the nerves, and thus leaves the nervous fluid, from casual circumstances, to almost lacerate the brain. Stomach coating aliment, not denuding physic, is the cure: as electric matter may become a constituent of the humidities of the different organs, so may it of the serous fluid, which is indispensable to wholesome flesh. In all such cases mesmerism is curative.
Ethers.
— From inhaled ethers, producing insensibility without rigidity, it would seem that they contribute a kind of electric matter to the interior of the nerves, but which, from being uncongenial, is happily soon displaced. All excess being the more prejudicial, the quicker the displacement the better. Any ether imparted to the fluids of the nerves, may effect reduction in the quantity of the true fluid through the cuticle orifices; or make breaks in what is left, so as to leave the nervous fluid incompetent to produce excitement of the brain; hence the insensibility of the patient, if that can be considered insensibility, when there is nothing of pain of which to be insensible.
Etherising by external application, but which may not amount to mesmerizing, is nothing new. A Dublin apothecary, sixty years since, cured the poor daily of nervous complaints, headaches especially, by pressing a folded handkerchief on the forehead, taken from a wide-mouth jar, concealed with professional delicacy, behind the counter, but long since discontinued; the learned in the laws of life and living, considering that short-hand work is a forbidden practice,—that something newest in the last Pharmacopoeia is better than the best, for all parties. Tobacco-smoking brings on a degree of insensibility, and mesmerically conduces to sleep, which exertion frustrates. The smoke of the fire in London stayed the plague in the year 1666. The subject is worthy of consideration by the mesmerizing physician, in case of epidemics especially.
