ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney came to be involved in psychical research and how they came to be interested in hypnotism, hallucinations, automatic writing, and various clinical cases reported in the French psychiatric literature. It examines the medical views of mental condition. Victorian medical men saw automatism and hypnotism as conditions akin to insanity, therefore subjects on which they were entitled to pronounce. Gurney and Myers were working just at the time of the explosion in hypnotism literature on the continent, especially in France, and thus they were led to the contemporary psychiatric literature, for hypnotism was recognized as being related to several clinical conditions. The chapter describes the research of Myers and Gurney and the development of their ideas. A comparison of the theories of Myers and Gurney with those of orthodox British medicine reveals the contingency of the interpretations; there was no 'right' answer determined simply by evidence and logic.
