Free Trials of Passion by Lisa Appignanesi Page B

altogether unlike those used by beauticians and physiotherapists today – can be gauged from the numerous press advertisements that vaunt their efficacy and ever growing variations.
    â€˜Pulvermacher’s improved patent Galvanic chain bands, belts and pocket self-restorable chain batteries’ promise that ‘Galvanism – nature’s chief restorer of impaired vital energy’ – provides ‘effective rational treatment [of] nervous and rheumatic pains, debility, indigestion, nervousness, sleeplessness, paralysis, neuralgia, epilepsy, cramp, and the functional disorders’ (of which hysteria is one). By listing a host of professional supporters for the therapy, including the Paris Medical School and the Royal Society, the ad tries to circumvent the worry that these faradic and galvanic treatments may edge a little too close to quackery or mesmerism, which was touted by some as treatment and considered by others a popular spectacle, like hypnotism just a little later. Some have suggested that these electric treatments were equivalent, or at least akin to, the medical masturbation that doctors also occasionally practised on hysterical patients, bringing them to paroxysm or what we would call orgasm.
    Whoever the doctor that she saw in London might have been, it is likely that Christiana chatted a little about herself, was recommended a diet and baths, and was given a course of faradization, thought to be particularly useful for partial paralyses. Talking, touching, tapping, examining, stimulating, alongside the care that a stipulated regime evoked, all helped. It certainly helped more than the punishing and detrimental surgeries that were also undertaken. A side effect of this first course of treatment, however, could be that the doctor all tooeasily became a love object for the patient, with or without any reciprocity on his side. (Desire being ever a riddle, this sometimes happened even with the more punitive second form of treatment.)
    We don’t know whether Christiana developed an attachment to the doctor or doctors who treated her for the hysteria she suffered from in her twenties. Her later passionate obsession with Charles Beard may have been one he, at least initially, reciprocated. They may have kissed, as her letter to him suggests, or even gone further during one of his home visits – the usual way doctors were then seen. It may be that he used and emphasized his married state as an excuse for putting a stop to emotions that on Christiana’s side were growing rampant; and this excuse in turn became her internal justification for attempting to get rid of his wife. Alternatively, Christiana may have aggrandized an ordinary caring doctorly concern, which may or may not on occasion have slipped into physical contact, and transformed it into something other and bigger, something that became delusional – fantasizing that eliminating Emily Beard would bring the doctor to her alone.
    There is no record of what kind of ailments Christiana brought to Beard’s attention. Apart from what she chose to convey, it is unlikely that he knew much of her medical history. We can only guess at what he treated her for or whether he had much knowledge of hysteria, though as a medic practising in the affluent quarters of Brighton, he probably had some: hysteria was widely diagnosed for any woman who was visibly chafing at the feminine status quo – as evidenced in her words or her mysterious physical symptoms. During the subsequent trial at London’s Old Bailey, Christiana’s mother mentions in her evidence that ‘even now at times’ Christiana would come to her room and say she ‘had had a fit of hysteria and could not breathe’. Lack of breath and the sensation of a globus, or ball, in the throat, blocking it or causing nausea, were common hysterical symptoms. So perhaps Charles Beard had been called on to treat Christiana’s nerves, amongst other ills,