Abstract
Something went terribly wrong that September evening in 1894, at the Salamon castle in remote north-eastern Hungary. It began as usual. Countess Szirmay, Baron Jungfeld and several members of the Forgách family were present, the dinner table was elegantly laid and excitement was mounting about the performance that was to come. For Ella, the 22-year-old daughter of the landowner Tódor Salamon, however, this night was different from others. She was thrilled by the fact that Dr Vragassy, chief doctor of the Viennese voluntary ambulance association, was expected to arrive just for the event; he was, after all, a trained eye to judge her performance, another possible convert who could enhance her already splendid reputation within the country and beyond its borders.1
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Notes
I reconstructed the case based principally on the September and October 1894 issues of the Hungarian newspapers Pesti Napló (hereafter PN), Budapesti Hírlap (BH), Debreczeni Ellenor (DE), Nyíregyházi Hírlap (NH) and Szaböőlcsi Szabadsajtó (SS); Dr Lajos Szilvek, Hypnotismus lélektani, orvostudományi, történeti és törvényszéki szempontból (Hypnotism from Psychological, Medical, Historical, and Forensic Perspectives) (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1900), pp. 192–209; and András Jósa, Barangolás Németországba és visszaernlékezések (Wanderings in Germany and Reminiscences) (Nyíregyháza, 1906).
The decree was issued by the Ministry of Interior in December 1894. See Kornél Chyzer, Az egészségügyre vontakozó törvények és rendeletek gyűjteménye. 1854–1894 (Collection of Laws and Decrees Concerning Health Care, 1854–1894) (Budapest, 1894), p. 752, emphasis added.
There were several legal attempts in Europe to ban public hypnotic séances and lay hypnotic practice; see Albert Moll, Hypnotism. Including a Study of the Chief Points of Psycho-Therapeutics and Occultism, transl. Arthur F. Hopkirk (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1909), pp. 439–43. The 1894 Hungarian resolution was unique in prohibiting academic research in the field of hypnosis.
For general histories of hypnosis, see Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud. Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
For the role of hypnosis in the history of dynamic psychiatry, see Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
For mesmerism in Victorian England, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized. Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
On Svengali, see Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web. The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000).
On the medical fascination with altered states and hypnosis at the turn of the century, see, among others, Henri Ellenberger, ‘The Great Patients’, in Beyond the Unconscious. Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry, ed. Mark S. Micale (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 237–307;
John Forrester and Lisa Appignanesi, Freud’s Women (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992);
Sonu Shamdasani, ‘Introduction’ to Théodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars. A Case o f Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1899/1994), pp. xi–li;
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O. A Century of Mystification, transl. Kirby Olson et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 1996);
Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, eds, Dora’s Case (London: Virago, 1985);
Max Rosenbaum and Melvin Muroff, eds, Anna O: Fourteen Contemporary Reinterpretation (New York and London: Free Press, 1984).
On the Department of Mental Health and Pathology at the Budapest Medical Faculty, see Emese Lafferton, ‘From Private Asylum to University Clinic: Hungarian Psychiatry, 1850–1908’, in Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, ed. George S. Rousseau et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 190–213.
Károly Schaffer, A hypnotismus élettani, gyógytani és törvényszéki szempontból (Hypnotism from Physiological, Therapeutic and Forensic Perspectives) (Budapest, 1895).
For the detailed analysis of Ilma’s case, see Emese Lafferton, ‘Hypnosis and Hysteria as Ongoing Processes of Negotiation. Ilma’s Case from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’, History of Psychiatry 2 (2002): 177–97; 3 (2002): 305–27.
See Jendrássik, ‘A suggestióról’ (On Suggestion), Orvosi Hetilap (Medical Weekly), 23 (1888): 746–9, 781–5, esp. 748; Jendrássik, ‘Hypnoticus suggestio kisérletek’ (Experiments with Hypnotic Suggestion), Gyógyászat (Medicine) (1887): 140–2.
See Jendrássik, ‘A hysteriás suggerálhatóságról’ (On Hysterical Suggestibility), Orvosi Hetilap 42 (1892): 508–10; 43 (1892): 523–5; 44 (1892): 537–9; 45 (1892): 551–3, esp. 538.
See August Forel, Hypnotism or Suggestion and Psychotherapy. A Study of the Psychological, Psycho-Physiological and Therapeutic Aspects of Hypnotism, transl. H. W. Armit from the 5th German edition (New York and London: Rebman, 1906), pp. 320, 329. Also Schaffer, A hypnotismus, p. 30; and Moll, Hypnotism, p. 415.
See Schaffer, A hypnotismus, p. 73; Szilvek, Hypnotismus, pp. 239–40; Moll, Hypnotism, p. 415. For a discussion of the medico-legal debate between adherents of the Salpêtrière and the Nancy schools, see Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness. Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 171–93.
For a wonderful discussion of this in the French context, see Harris, Murders and Madness. See also Ragine Plas, ‘Hysteria, Hypnosis and Moral Sense in French Nineteenth-century Forensic Psychiatry: The Eyraud-Bompard Case’, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 4 (1998): 397–407;
and Ruth Harris, ‘Melodrama, Hysteria and Feminine Crimes of Passion in the Fin de Siècle’, History Workshop 25 (1988): 31–63.
For more general works on legal psychiatry in the nineteenth century, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Trail of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the American Gilded Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968);
Roger Smith, Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981);
Joel Peter Eigen, Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
Schaffer, A hypnotismus, pp. 71–2. See also A. von Schrenck-Notzing, ‘Zum Fall Czynski. Eine Entgegnung’, Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus 3 (1894/5): 176–85.
For the Tiszaeszlár case, see Bernheim, Suggestive Therapeutics, pp. 167–78, esp. 167–9 and 176, and Bernheim, De la suggestion et de ses applications à la thérapeutique, 2nd edition (Paris, 1888), pp. 231–40.
Forel, Hypnotism, p. 342. See also A. von Schrenck-Notzing, Über Suggestion und Erinnerungsfälschung im Berchthold-Process (Lepzig: Barth Verlag, 1897).
Ödön Blum, ‘Szabad-e hypnotizálni?’ (Is Hypnosis Permissible?), Gyógyászat 31 (1889): 361–2.
See Jakab Salgó, ‘A hypnotismus tudományos és gyógyértéke’ (The Scientific and Therapeutic Value of Hypnotism), Klinikai Füzetek (Clinical Papers) 5 (1896): 1–17, esp. 10–11.
See Gyula Donáth and Pál Ranschburg on spiritism in Második Elmeorvosi Értekezlet Munkálatai (Works of the Second National Congress of Psychiatrists), ed. László Epstein (Budapest: Pallas, 1903), pp. 222–9.
A few days after the funeral, the court ordered exhumation and dissection of the whole body, which found the vascular and breathing systems intact. See András Jósa quoted in BH, 24 September 1894; also Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Kriminalpsychologische und psychopathologische Studien (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1902), pp. 131–4. According to Forel, however, these findings did not offer any explanation for the death; see Forel, Hypnotism, pp. 334–5.
For Schrenck-Notzing, see Kriminalpsychologische, p. 132. See also Schrenck-Notzing, ‘La suggestion et l’hypnotisme dans leurs rapports avec la jurisprudence’, in Deuxième Congrès international de l’hypnotisme expérimental et thérapeutique: Paris 12–16 Août 1902, ed. Edgar Bérillon and Paul Farez (Paris: Revue de l’hypnotisme, 1902), pp. 121–31, esp. 125. For Moravcsik, see BH, 20 September 1894.
See Jósa in BH and PN, 24 September 1894. See also Jósa, Barangolás; and Jósa, Eloadás a hypnosisról (Lecture on Hypnosis) (Nyíregyháza, 1916); Szilvek, Hypnotismus, pp. 192–209.
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© 2007 Emese Lafferton
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Lafferton, E. (2007). Murder by Hypnosis? Altered States and the Mental Geography of Science. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_16
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