From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surp
For most of his life a clerk in the post office, Frank Podmore (1856–1910) was a prolific author on psychical research. As an undergraduate Podmore became interested in spiritualism, and he joined the British National Association of Spiritualists. Eventually disillusioned by that society, Podmore co-founded several organisations: the Progressive Association (in 1882); the Fellowship of the New Life (1883); and, spurred by his desire to see political change, the Fabian Society (1884). Podmore's membership in the Society for Psychical Research influenced his activities and interests, and he spent the next twenty years investigating and writing on psychical phenomena. Podmore's two-volume Modern Spiritualism (also reissued in this series) is a source for this 1909 work, which 'constituted the most scholarly history of mesmerism and its offshoots to that date', according to one reviewer. This work will interest historians of science and medicine, and scholars of Victorian religious movemen
Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, arrived in Paris and began to promulgate a somewhat exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general popu
