Facts in mesmerism : with reasons for a dispassionate inquiry into it / By Chauncy Hare Townshend.
This is a mid-nineteenth-century English treatise on mesmerism by Chauncy Hare Townshend, published in London by H. Bailliere in 1841, addressed to readers weighing the claims of animal magnetism. The pictures in this selection are not illustrations from the text but later portrait photographs of young women in white nurses' caps and dark coats, set against black backgrounds in a pale, grainy halftone style that a designer might borrow for period portraiture.
