Pulse

cause pain?’
    ‘None that I inflict myself. Though it is often the case that patients need to be brought to a certain … pitch before harmony can be restored.’
    ‘I mean, do your magnets cause electric shocks?’
    ‘No, that I may promise you.’
    ‘But if you do not cause pain, then how can you cure? Everyone knows that you cannot remove a tooth without pain, you cannot set a limb without pain, you cannot cure insanity without pain. A doctor causes pain, that the world knows. And that I know too.’
    Since she had been a small child the finest doctors had employed the most respected methods. There had been blistering and cauterising and the application of leeches. For two months her head had been encased in a plaster designed to provoke suppuration and draw the poison from her eyes. She had been given countless purges and diuretics. Most recently, electricity had been resorted to, and over the twelvemonth some three thousand electric shocks had been administered to her eyes, sometimes as many as a hundred in a single treatment.
    ‘You are quite sure that magnetism will not cause me pain?’
    ‘Quite sure.’
    ‘Then how can it possibly cure me?’
    M— was pleased to glimpse the brain behind the unseeing eyes. A passive patient, merely waiting to be acted upon by an omnipotent physician, was a tedious thing; he preferred those like this young woman, who displayed forcefulness beneath her good manners.
    ‘Let me put it this way. Since you went blind, you have endured much pain at the hands of the best doctors in the city?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And yet you are not cured?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then perhaps pain is not the only gateway to cure.’
    In the two years he had practised magnetic healing, M— had constantly pondered the question of how and why it might work. A decade previously, in his doctoral thesis De planetarum influxu , he had proposed that the planets influenced human actions and the human body through the medium of some invisible gas or liquid, in which all bodies were immersed, and which for want of a better term he called ‘ gravitas universalis ’. Occasionally, man might glimpse the overarching connection, and feel able to grasp the universal harmony that lay beyond all local discordance. In the present instance, magnetic iron arrived on earth in the form and body of a meteor fallen from the heavens. Once here, it displayed its singular property, the power to realign. Might one not surmise, therefore, that magnetism was the great universal force which bound together stellar harmony? And if so, was it not reasonable to expect that in the sublunary world it had the power to placate certain corporeal disharmonies?
    It was evident, of course, that magnetism could not cure every bodily failing. It had proved most successful in cases of stomach ache, gout, insomnia, ear trouble, liver and menstrual disorder, spasm, and even paralysis. It could not heal a broken bone, cure imbecility or syphilis. But in matters of nervous complaint, it might often effect startling improvement. Again, it could not overcome a patient mired in scepticism and disbelief, or one whose pessimism or melancholy undermined the possibility of a return to health. There must be a willingness to admit and welcome the effects of the procedure.
    To this end, M— sought to create, in his consulting room at 261 Landstrasse, an atmosphere sympathetic to such acceptance. Heavy curtains were drawn against the sun and external noise; his staff were forbidden from making suddenmovements; there was calm and candlelight. Gentle music might be heard from another room; sometimes M— would himself play upon Miss Davies’s glass armonica, reminding both bodies and minds of the universal harmony that he was, in this small part of the world, seeking to restore.
    M— commenced his treatment on 20th January 177–. An external examination confirmed that Maria Theresia’s eyes showed severe malformation: they were quite out of their normal alignment, grossly swollen and extruded. Internally, the girl seemed to be at a pitch where the passing phases of hysteria might lead to chronic derangement. Given that she had suffered fourteen years of disappointed hope, and fourteen years of unremitting blindness, this was not an unreasonable response from a young body and mind. M— therefore began by emphasising again how different his procedure was from all others; how it was not a matter of order being reimposed by external violence, but rather of