“If mesmerism challenged boundaries, one of those most often impugned was the boundary between the classes. From its beginnings mesmerism was always associated with radical class politics. Indeed its comfortable coexistence with revolutionary France was one of the key reasons it did not flourish in either Britain or the United States until the 1830s. When its impetus did bring it to those shores, mesmerism remained progressive and reformist, most especially in the United States where it also remained free of British pragmatism. Certainly by the 1840s, however, mesmeric practice was confronting accepted notions of class hierarchy and interaction in ways that would not have been acceptable in other fields of cultural inquiry. If mesmerism was a higher form of knowledge then its enactment by working class mesmerists surely said something about the natural order of nineteenth-century society, if not about the supposed superiority of both mind and body as one moved from the lower to the higher classes? Mesmerism was important and also dangerous in so radically highlighting democracy through scientific investigation. Of course, the principles of mesmerism could also be used to support the status quo: the power of the medical practitioner’s mesmerism over his working-class patients, for example, went a long way towards reinforcing the existing hierarchies. Whether radical or reactionary, reformist or conservative, mesmerism undoubtedly brought the ideologies of class into the public consciousness.”