“When a general audience sees the thing treated as a curious show on a stage, what wonder that the ignorant go home and make a curious show of it there! While the wise, in whose hands this power should be, as the priesthood to whom scientific mysteries are consigned by Providence, scornfully decline their high function, who are they that snatch at it, in sport or mischief, — and always in ignorance? School children, apprentices, thoughtless women who mean no harm, and base men who do mean harm. Wherever itinerant Mesmerists have been are there such as these, throwing each other into trances, trying funny experiments, getting fortunes told, or rashly treating diseases. It would be something gained if the honest among these lecturers could be taught and convinced that they had better be quiet, and let the matter alone, rather than propagate Mesmerism by such a method. If they have not the means of advocating Mesmerism without taking money for it, they had better earn their bread in another way, and be satisfied with giving their testimony and using their powers, (as far as their knowledge goes, and no further) gratuitously at home. The duty of those who understand the seriousness of Mesmerism is, clearly to discountenance and protest against all such exhibitions, to discountenance all who originate, and all who attend them, as false to the truth sought, through incompetence or worse.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-yvgBUWK1U