THE PHILOSOPHY OF MESMERISM AND ELECTRICAL PSYCHOLOGY, COMPRISED IN TWO COURSES OF LECTURES, (EIGHTEEN IN NUMBER) COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME
Book Details + Condition: James Burns, Progressive Library (London). First Edition, 1886. 216 pages, with advertisements in rear. Green publisher's cloth boards, gilt-lettered on spine and front board. Embossed design on front. Author Dr. J. Bovee Dods helped to spread the gospel of mesmerism throughout the eastern United States in the 1840s. Dods describes six degrees of mesmerism, the sixth being clairvoyance. He also mentions surgical uses for mesmerism. Dods believed that electricity was the connecting link between mind and matter, and that magnetized subjects could be placed into an "electro-psychological" state (which Dods distinguished from mesmeric sleep) in order to affect cures. [Gault, A History of Hypnotism]. Contents include: Mental Electricity, or Spiritualism; The Philosophy of Clairvoyance; The Philosophy of Disease and Nervous Force; The Number of Degrees in Mesmerism; An Appeal in Behalf of the Science; Doctrine of Impressions and The Subject of Creation Considered; and more. An overall firm and clean copy, with tight binding; lightly rubbed corners; interior is clean and free of markings save owner's name on front endpaper and title page.
