Mesmerized

Alison Winter (1965-2016) was a professor of history at the University of Chicago. She taught at Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology before coming to Chicago in 2001. Her research encompassed the history of sciences of mind, the history of modern medicine, modern British history (especially the Victorian era), and historical issues of gender. She was the author of Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain and Memory: Fragments of a Modern History. The latter book won the Gordon J. Laing Prize in 2014.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: An Invitation to the Seance 1: Discovery of the Island of Mesmeria 2: Animal Magnetism Comes to London 3: Experimental Subjects as Scientific Instruments 4: Carnival, Chapel, and Pantomime 5: The Peripatetic Power of the "New Science" 6: Consultations, Conversaziones, and Institutions 7: The Invention of Anesthesia and the Redefinition of Pain 8: Colonizing Sensations in Victorian India 9: Emanations from the Sickroom 10: The Mesmeric Cure of Souls 11: Expertise, Common Sense, and the Territories of Science 12: The Social Body and the Invention of Consensus Conclusion: The Day after the Feast Notes Bibliography Index