Medical report of the case of Miss H[arriet] M[artineau] / [William Alexander Greenhill].

  • Thomas Michael Greenhow
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical report of the case of Miss H[arriet] M[artineau] / [William Alexander Greenhill]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    those feelings of false delicacy which might have led many, of less firmness of purpose, to shrink from the explanation of the precise causes of such continued suffering, although, scarcely any one was ignorant of their general character. How far the relief from the sympathetic nerv¬ ous distress, attendant on this case, is to be at¬ tributed to the direct agency of mesmerism— whether it has acted by a power sui generis, or by supplying a powerful and well-timed stimu¬ lus to the mind, and thus acting through the imagination and the will, is a question which every one must be left to answer for himself, after a careful consideration of the facts related in the following pages and in the communications to the Athenceum, lately supplied by the patient herself. The numerous and striking claims in favour of mesmerism, emanating from so many sources, have, at length, rendered it a subject of serious and philosophical inquiry, which can no longer be resisted by the members of the medical profes¬ sion. It is by them only that its pretensions can