James Esdaile

From November 1839 to December 1841 Esdaile also served as the Principal of the prestigious Hooghly College,[23] located in the palladian mansion in Chinsurah that had been originally designed and built for "General Perron".

[28] In 1846, Esdaile's work with pain-free surgery at Hoogly had come to the attention of the Deputy Governor of Bengal, Sir Herbert Maddocks.

It is an objective matter of record[36] that, over a six-year period (from April 1845 to June 1851), James Esdaile, an Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon employed by the East India Company -- a colonial official employed as both "Civil Surgeon" to the East India Company’s Hooghly Imambara Hospital, and as the medical officer responsible for the hospital at Hooghly Gaol -- performed 'pain-free' major surgery on more than 300 cases (amputations, removal of cataracts, removal of massive tumours,[37][38] firstly at Hooghly, and, later at Calcutta.

According to Winter (1998, p.197), who notes that "the persuasiveness of [Esdaile's] work actually relied upon the lowly status of his patients", Esdaile "thought nothing" of routinely subjecting his (from-the-prison) surgical patients -- "the great majority [of whom] were impoverished Indian subjects: peasants, sidar bearers, husbandmen, and cart drivers" (loc.

cit) -- "to indignities and even tortures that were highly effective in validating [their freedom from pain] but that no high-caste Indian or member of the European community would tolerate" (loc.cit, emphasis added).

This inmate -- who "was the person destined to become my first mesmeric victim [was] none other than a Hindoo felon of the hangman caste,[43] condemned to labour on the roads, in irons" (p.40) -- was "mesmerised", by Esdaile, without any warning or explanation, on 4 April 1845.

Inspired by his experimental success, and aware of the need to have his surgical subjects lying on the operating table, he made the extraordinary decision, decided to experiment with the "native" procedure known as Jhar-Phoonk.

[46] Jhar-Phoonk -- a secular, "white magic", folk treatment procedure,[47] derived from an Islamic exorcism ritual known as Ruqyah -- was routinely performed upon poor, illiterate, impoverished Northern Indian rural workers by itinerant fakirs or dedicated practitioners (known as Jhar-Phoonk Walas) to alleviate distress, dispel illness and infirmity, and treat disease.

The entirely mistaken, generally held, and widely published view that (the otherwise highly significant) Esdaile used "mesmerism" to produce the pain-free condition under which he conducted completely pain-free surgery,[53] not only significantly muddies the already far-from-clear waters in relation to the historical (in)accuracy of the modern accounts of the history of mesmerism, anaesthesia, and hypnotism,[54] but is so far from the objective historical truth that, to use Wolfgang Pauli’s expression, "[it] is not only not right, it is not even wrong".

[56] However, as Yeates (2018, pp.128-129) observes, when viewed from a 19th-century Eurocentric perspective -- and, especially, given the physical invasive nature of, say, the surgeon's scalpel, the apothecary's mixture, the herbalist's decoction, the barber-surgeon's blood-letting, and the physician's emetics and purgatives -- it is easy to see how "mesmerism à la d'Eslon" could have been considered, by contrast, to be some sort of 'energy field manipulation' (in accord with some as-yet-to-be-discovered "law of nature"); and, given that perspective (and despite the absence of d'Eslon's implements and apparatus), it could be said that, when viewed from a sufficiently abstract "level of analysis", Esdaile's Jhar-Phoonk -- despite its non-"mesmeric" roots -- also involved some sort of analogous process of manipulating an 'energy field'.