● ● ●  from him who magnetizes, and is conveyed to the person magnetized, in the direction given it by the will.” He explained that although the magnetic fluid escaped from all the body and the will sufficed to give it direction, “the external organs by which we act are the most proper to throw it off,” and therefore “we make use of our hands and of our eyes to magnetize.”¹

The work of Deleuze was translated by a Rhode Islander, Thomas C. Hartshorn, in 1837, and in that same year appeared another significant book by a Frenchman, Charles Poyen, called Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England. Poyen claimed that when he had begun lecturing on the subject nineteen months earlier it was virtually unknown in New England but that it was now the subject of popular discussion and experiment everywhere. The New Hampshire Patriot, which the Baker household at Sanbornton read so sedulously, bore witness to the mounting tide of public interest in the subject during those years. A book published in 1843 stated that there were by then “two or three hundred skilful magnetizers in the city of Boston,” as well as “some twenty or thirty public lecturers in New England.”²

At this very time in England James Braid was approaching hypnotism, as he called it, in a more soberly scientific spirit, but the researches of Charcôt and Bernheim still lay a generation ahead, and the public exhibitions of New England lecturers were untouched by the methodology or conscience of the psychological laboratory. Nevertheless the rudiments of scientific curiosity were to be found among some of these popular magnetizers, and the gross deficiencies of the prevailing systems of medicine gave impetus to their crude explorations in the field of psychotherapy.

Notable among these early experimenters was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who was first drawn to the subject in 1838 by attending a lecture and exhibition by a popular mesmerist.