Reprint of the original, first published in 1843.

In the 1840s novelists such as Brontë and Dickens began to explore the inner world of the child. Simultaneously the first psychiatric studies of childhood were appearing. Moving between literature and science, Sally Shuttleworth explores issues such as childhood fears, imaginary lands, sexuality, and the relation of the child to animal life.

"This chapter considers the prevalence and causes of insanity in antiquity; insanity in modern life; and the self-prevention of insanity. Of the various social evils which present themselves in our age, those connected with the genesis of insanity are, it must be admitted, deserving of the consideration of all who care for their race, and wish to lessen the sum of human misery. I trust that the facts contained in this volume will tend to stimulate all social reformers in their great, and often discouraging, labours, whether carried on among the working or the higher classes, so it be not done in a narrow fanatical spirit, in other words, not judgingly, but with judgment"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

This book explores the improbable rise of medical hypnotism in Victorian Britain and its subsequent assimilation and neglect. It follows the careers of the ‘New Hypnotists’: Charles Lloyd Tuckey, John Milne Bramwell, George Kingsbury and Robert Felkin. This loosely knit group all trained with the Suggestion School of Nancy and published books on hypnotism. They had to confront the many public and medical prejudices against the trance state which had persisted after the scandalous disgrace of John Elliotson and medical mesmerism, fifty years before. Hypnotism was a highly contested technology and in the 1890s the debates about safety and utility were fought in the national newspapers as well as the medical journals. The new hypnotists took on the might of the medical institutions personified by Ernest Hart, Editor of the British Medical Journal. However their timing was propitious, as the rise of faith-healing forced the medical profession to confront the non-physical therapeutic aspects of the doctor-patient relationship. The hypnotic discourse was shaped by these developments, but also by the fascination of the general public, novelists, occultists, psychic investigators, educationalists and spiritualists in the myriad possibilities of the trance state. Despite growing interest in the prehistory of British psychology and talking therapies, and the recent challenges to the primacy of Freudian histories, there are few accounts of the development of British ‘eclectic therapy’. This book uses the New Hypnotists as a lens to examine Victorian medicine and society, exploring their role in establishing the term ‘psychotherapy,’ and legitimising medical hypnotism, a precursor of psychological therapies.