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“You will do just what I tell you” – the controversy of stage hypnosis
At Brighton hippodrome in December 1948, an 18 year old girl, Diana Grace Rains-Bath, volunteered to be hypnotized on stage by the Russian born American hypnotist, Ralph Slater who wrote the 1950’s classic book “Hypnotism and Self Hypnosis”. Duly rendered… Continue reading
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Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800-1920
Dr Shane McCorristine is a Marie Curie Fellow (COFUND, Irish Research Council) at NUI Maynooth and University of Cambridge. McCorristine is an interdisciplinary historian who is currently writing up a project on embodiment and disembodiment in British Arctic exploration. Here… Continue reading
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Mesmerism on show
Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) was the promoter of a form of animal magnetism (named Mesmerism after him), at first in Vienna (1773-1777) and subsequently in France (1778-1784). His unique selling point was the supply of mesmeric fluid that served to… Continue reading
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Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing statistics: December 2010
In the weeks before Christmas work proceeded on various long-running projects within and outside the online database. As mentioned last month, behind the scenes retroconversion work continues on the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (SA/CSP), completion of which… Continue reading
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A novelist’s bicentenary
Elizabeth Gaskell, the novelist, was born 200 years ago today, on 29th September 1810. The huge success of the BBC’s version of Cranford (which added several of her other short stories to the adaptation) and, a few years before that,… Continue reading