We see this especially in Winter's extended account of the medical mesmerist John Elliotson, his remarkable subjects Jane and Elizabeth O'Key, and their encounter with Thomas Wakley, the skeptical editor of the Lancet . In neither case did such exposure suffice to silence the mesmerists, but it did serve to cast them increasingly into opposition to more mainstream science. 2 Winter's descriptions of Elizabeth O'Key's mesmeric performances are fascinating, but her analysis of their significance is undercut by a lack of relevant evidence. We simply do not know if O'Key was really an Irvingite, if she ever read works on spiritual mesmerism, if she frequented music halls, if she was in fact a sincere believer or simply a fraud. In the end, we are left with little more than speculations.
Readers can look for themselves and judge how little there is on which to base such conclusions.
3 Winter's strongest chapters are those on anesthesia. Winter makes a persuasive case that the answer lies in the controversial advent of mesmeric anesthesia earlier in the decade. Various mesmerists in Britain, and particularly James Esdaile in Bengal, had had remarkable success in rendering patients insensible to surgical pain, even during amputations. According to Winter, this both opened orthodox doctors' eyes to the value of offering such relief from pain and spurred them to find a way to provide it without bringing in mesmerism and its suspect associations. By using ether and later chloroform, doctors could deaden their patients' pain without giving up control of the situation, and they soon banished mesmerism from their accounts of the origins of anesthesia.