ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From South Asia to Europe and Back Again: Inter-Imperial Circulations of Mesmeric Theory and Practice, 18th-19th Centuries

• In Event: Contested Mesmerism, a Plural Medical Science in Global Perspective

English Abstract

A largely understudied phenomenon, the Indian subcontinent has had a singular role to play in the development of mesmeric theory and practice in Europe almost ever since its inception in the closing decades of the 18th century through to its use in mid-19th century Calcutta. This presentation will sketch the circulation of mesmerism between the Indian subcontinent and Europe in the Portuguese and British imperial contexts. It will focus on the life and work of two eminent mesmerists: the Goan Catholic priest José Custodio de Faria (1756-1819), a member of Marques de Puységur’s circle of animal magnetists and himself a theoretician and celebrated practitioner of mesmerism in Paris in the early decades of the 19th century; and the Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808-1859) who set up the first highly successful Mesmeric hospital in the British empire in Calcutta in the mid-1850s with the consent and active help both of the imperial administration and the Bengali elite. It will seek to show the crucial role of inter-imperial and global circulations in the making and rise of mesmerism and the contestations it gave rise to.

Author

• Kapil Raj, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales