– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
In order to demonstrate his own point, Méheust invokes Alison Winter’s historical study of the effective use of magnetic anesthesia during surgical operations in India in the Calcutta practice of the Scottish surgeon James Eisdale. The impossible phenomenon, which dated from about 1845 to 1851, is well attested: working for up to two (sometimes even eight) hours a day on each patient, local medical workers under Eisdale’s instruction were able to magnetize whole rows of suffering subjects. Eisdale would then come into the hospital, test the magnetized trance of a particular patient, and then perform the requisite surgical procedure. Some of these operations were especially dramatic (huge scrotum tumors were his specialty, and amputations were not unknown), and, although we have no data from the patients themselves, most of the surgeries were reported as being both successful and as accompanied by little or no apparent pain.
Winter approaches these historical events through a classic cultural context argument, that is, by suggesting that the profound social inequalities between the elite Western surgeons and their patients, who were often impoverished charity patients as well as colonial subjects, set up a certain “physiology of colonial power” that made the practice work. She also points out that, unlike in Britain, where the mesmerized often displayed power over the mesmerists, in Eisdale’s Calcutta hospital the whole point was to render the mesmerized subject completely unconscious and entirely passive beneath the surgeon’s knife. These events were sometimes veritable spectacles, moreover, with Eisdale essentially performing minor tortures (burning coals were sometimes used, for example) on the patient to test the depth of a particular trance.
Yes, of course, Méheust answers, such scenes do in fact reenact the social conditions of Victorian society and British colonial power, and they are inexplicable without such historical contexts. But they also did happen, and this also needs to be explained. Precisely because many of the surgeries were successful, they “constitute at the same time an enigma for the psychologist and the physiologist”. The perspectives of the sociologist and the parapsychologist, in other words, can be joined, can be made complementary, but only if we are willing to step out of both our antihistoricism and our resistance to the metaphysical implications of the actual historical data. But how to go about this? Méheust proposes an elegant model of human potentiality and cultural actualization: “If the alleged facts reveal themselves as sufficiently attested, then it is also necessary to consider them as a potentiality of the human spirit, rendered possible by a certain context”. Again, this seems exactly right to me.
Pp. 238-9