Robert Hanham Collyer
Robert Hanham Collyer
Robert Hanham Collyer
Born1814
St Helier, Jersey
Diedc. 1891
New Orleans, US
Occupation(s)Phrenologist, mesmerist, lecturer, author, inventor
Years active19th-century

Robert Hanham Collyer (1814 – c. 1891) was a British phrenologist, mesmerist, lecturer, author, and amateur inventor mostly active on the east coast of America and Canada during the 19th-century. Collyer was known for his showmanship and became a popular traveling lecturer. He developed the idea of "phreno-magnetism", a portmanteau of the words phrenology and animal magnetism, but disavowed his own idea by mid-1843. He was also involved in a number of scandals and rivalries, including a claim that he originated anesthesia for surgery before William T. G. Morton, who is generally credited with the discovery.

Biography

Collyer's book Early History of the Anaesthetic Discovery (1877) where he again credited himself with the discovery of anesthesia

Robert Hanham Collyer was likely born in St Helier, Jersey to Ann Dujardin and Robert Mitchell Collyer,[1] although details of his early life are hazy.[2][3] He studied phrenology under Johann Gaspar Spurzheim in Paris, and attended classes at London University where he studied with John Elliotson, an early advocate of mesmerism in England, but he did not graduate.[1][2][4]

In 1836 he emigrated to America, where he traveled along the east coast of the United States and Canada giving lectures on phrenology.[1][4][5] In-between lecturing he received a "quickie" degree from Berkshire Medical College.[6] After receiving his degree, Collyer became more and more interested in mesmerism, and added mesmeric demonstrations to his lecture circuit.[4][7] He also began serving as editor of Mesmeric Magazine,[4][lower-alpha 1] and developed what he called "phreno-magnetism", which aimed to activate specific "phrenological organs" through mesmeric influence, or animal magnetism.[8][9][lower-alpha 2] Eventually he mostly abandoned phrenology, including his own ideas of phreno-magnetism, and focused exclusively on mesmerism by mid-1843.[4][8][11]

Collyer was known for his showmanship and self-promotion.[1][6][12] For instance, one of his tours of the southern United States involved a cast of nearly naked artists in painted body stockings.[13] He was also known for a very public scandal in which his wife was found in bed with another man, and he married another woman without divorcing his first wife, making him guilty of bigamy.[1][13] In another scandal, phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler accused Collyer of being "utterly destitute of moral principle", and Collyer countered with a libel suit.[14] He also frequently clashed with rival phrenological-mesmerists La Roy Sunderland[15][16] and Joseph Rodes Buchanan.[17] Other mesmerists such as K. Dickerson and Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who got his start after seeing a lecture by Collyer, were inspired by him.[12][18] Many thought of him as the "the Champion of Mesmerism in America," a view which he encouraged.[12] Public opinion of Collyer varied so widely and was so antithetical that one historian believed there were two Robert H. Collyers lecturing on mesmerism, though this is unlikely.[19]

Collyer knew Edgar Allan Poe,[19] and was one of those who believed Poe's short story "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" to be factual, writing to Poe saying he had accomplished similar feats as the fictional mesmerist in the story.[1][20][21] Collyer had more likely revived his own patient, a drunken sailor, by means of a cold bath and prolonged massage.[22][23]

Collyer was also an amateur inventor, who created a new covering for electric telegraph cables, a method for crushing quartz, and an improvement to breech loading cannons.[1][24] He also claimed to have invented ether for anesthesia before William T. G. Morton, who is generally credited with the discovery, but never produced evidence of his claims.[25] Collyer was not the only claimant to the invention, which was very much in demand to the point that Congress considered a $100,000 reward for a method of painless surgery.[26] Despite most in the medical profession dismissing his involvement, The Lancet gave credit to Collyer for the invention in 1868 and 1870, even though they too had dismissed the idea in 1847.[27] However, it is likely that the author of at least the 1868 article giving Collyer credit was Collyer himself writing under a pen name.[28]

Eventually Collyer turned to more conventional medicine, and Taylor Stoehr writes that "the anesthesia controversy of 1847 was the last major pseudo-scientific effort of his career" as far as medicine was concerned, although he "never turned his back on the pseudo-science of the psyche".[24] He practiced medicine for some time in Jersey, joined the California Gold Rush, and was in charge of a cholera hospital in Mexico before returning to England to focus on his more profitable inventions.[24] Collyer occasionally wrote for publications such as The Spiritualist Magazine, and publicly defended the medium Henry Slade who had been convicted of fraud.[29] He acquired a jawbone known as the "Foxhall Jaw" in 1863, and promoted it as "the oldest relic of the human animal now in existence"; but archeologists disputed the claim.[30] Collyer seems to have died sometime around 1891 in New Orleans,[1] although like his early life, the end of his life is hazy.[2]

Selected writings

Footnotes

  1. ↑ See, for instance, Mesmeric Magazine, Vol.1, No.1, (July 1842).
  2. ↑ As Lindsay B. Yeates observes, "The principal consequence of ... [Collyer's] apparent blending of the disparate practices ... of mesmerism and phrenology ... was that, to supporters of both sides, the theoretical correctness of each ‘science’ was now confirmed by the other; [and,] further, in phreno-mesmerism, many saw a long overdue return to the metaphysical domain from which Gall’s materialist and mechanistic system of organology seemed to have diverted all and sundry."[10]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.
  2. 1 2 3 Stoehr 1987, p. 23.
  3. ↑ Osborn 1922, p. 128.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Crabtree 1994, p. 224.
  5. ↑ Moore 2017, pp. 204–205.
  6. 1 2 Stoehr 1987, p. 26.
  7. ↑ Stoehr 1987, p. 27.
  8. 1 2 Yeates 2018, p. 88.
  9. ↑ Anon 1855, p. 61-68.
  10. ↑ Yeates 2013, p. 110.
  11. ↑ Stoehr 1987, pp. 32–34.
  12. 1 2 3 Taves 1999, p. 130.
  13. 1 2 Moore 2017, p. 205.
  14. ↑ Stoehr 1987, p. 35.
  15. ↑ Stoehr 1987, pp. 33, 35–36.
  16. ↑ Crabtree 1994, pp. 224–225.
  17. ↑ Crabtree 1994, pp. 226–227.
  18. ↑ Melton 2009, p. 870.
  19. 1 2 Stoehr 1987, p. 36.
  20. ↑ Anon 1992, p. 6.
  21. ↑ Barnes 2009, p. 197.
  22. ↑ Silverman 1992, p. 295.
  23. ↑ Stoehr 1987, pp. 38–39.
  24. 1 2 3 Stoehr 1987, p. 41.
  25. ↑ Sykes 1960, pp. 45–60.
  26. ↑ Stoehr 1987, pp. 22–23.
  27. ↑ Sykes 1960, pp. 46–47.
  28. ↑ Sykes 1960, p. 46.
  29. ↑ Stoehr 1987, pp. 41–42.
  30. ↑ O'Connor 2021, p. 56.

Sources

Further reading

  • Albanese, Catherine L. (2007). A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11089-0.
  • Branson, Susan (2021). "Internal Improvements: Phrenology as a Tool for Reform". Scientific Americans: Invention, Technology, and National Identity. Cornell University Press. pp. 124–158.
  • Davies, John Dunn (1955). Phrenology: Fad and Science: A 19th-century American Crusade. New Haven, CO: Yale University Press.
  • Collyer, Robert H. (1867). "The Fossil Human Jaw from Suffolk". The Anthropological Review. 5 (17): 221–229. doi:10.2307/3025128. ISSN 1368-0382.
  • Gable, Harvey L. (1998). Liquid Fire: Transcendental Mysticism in the Romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Lang. ISBN 978-0-8204-3830-6.
  • Heartman, Charles F.; Canny, James R. (1943). A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm.
  • Ljungquist, Kent. P. (1997). "'Valdemar' and the 'Frogpondians': The Aftermath of Poe's Boston Lyceum Appearance". In Mott, Wesley T. (ed.). Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. pp. 181–206. ISBN 9781878822727.
  • McNeil, Keith (2020). A Story Untold: A History of the Quimby-Eddy Debate. Carmel, IN: Hawthorne Publishing.
  • Mitham, Peter J. (1996). "For 'the Honor and Dignity of the Profession': Organized Medicine in Colonial New Brunswick, 1793–1860". Canadian Bulletin of Medical History / Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la médecine. 13 (1): 83–108. ISSN 0823-2105.
  • Peyrouton, N. C. (1967). "Boz and the American Phreno-Mesmerists". Dickens Studies. 3 (1): 38–50. ISSN 0419-1099.
  • Thomas, Dwight; Jackson, David K. (1987). The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G. K. Hall & Sons.
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