Troubled by technology

In his The Subconscious Self and its Relation to Education and Health, published in 1897, the American pathologist and psychologist, Louis Waldstein (1853-1915), stated: 'the hallucinations of the insane to-day contain nothing alluding to the telephone, the phonograph, and other recent innovations, but those of twenty years hence may be full of wire messages from paradise or flash lights from hell.' 

Waldstein's prediction was way off target. Asylums across Europe and America had already been dealing with such patient delusions for years. It was often a matter of months not decades between the advent of new technologies and their appearance in patient case notes.

Most people embraced these technological wonders immediately and unquestioningly, even if they did not know how they worked. But some people were initially confused, suspicious, and disorientated and tried to make sense of technology within the language and framework of magic and the supernatural.

The asylum records suggest, though, that while techno anxieties were intense they were also usually fleeting. Familiarity soon allayed fears, although those with severe mental health issues would move on to fixate on some new subject of unseen agency or object of scientific terror.

The electrical body

By the end of the century, electricity had overtaken mesmerism as the main bogey of unseen agency amongst asylum patients. The idea of the electrical body, however vaguely understood or misunderstood, became engrained in the popular consciousness.

Electricity was a life force and so the body could be energised or sapped by its application: it could be life giving and life threatening. Electrical engineers and medical men used the same technology, and as electricity coursed through humans the link between electrical machines and the electrical body became wired together in the popular as well as the medical mind.

The telegraph lines that criss-crossed the landscape and the urban skyline were one such manifestation. While people soon became familiar with the concept of telegraphic communication, the wires were considered an unwelcome physical intrusion by some and a means for spreading invisible malign forces. In 1889, the case notes for Henry Staples, aged 59, report that he 'Fancies telegraph wires are over his head. That messages are being sent to people as to his character'. Mary Teresa Billington complained that 'wires follow her in the street & pull her bonnet off'.

Then, with the rise of domestic electric lighting and electrical appliances, the plague of wires spread from the streets and into the intimate spaces of the home. In 1908, Louisa Betsy Fleming, the 41-year-old wife of a Barrow dock worker, was much concerned that her house 'was underwired & surrounded by wires charging it [with] electricity.' She was released from Lancaster Moor Asylum after a few months. 

Two years later, factory labourer John Thomas McMullen, had delusions that his house was full of electrical wires that were charging him with electricity. Mathew Richardson, diagnosed with mania caused by influenza, 'thinks that his neighbours had an electric machine in the house next his own & that there was a fine wire going through the wall into his house & in this manner was affected by the electricity.'

Voices from a distance

From the 1880s onward, the growing influence of the telephone, from the Greek 'distant voice', provided a new cognitive paradigm for people to negotiate. People sometimes thought they heard voices communicating with them down the telegraph wires, though all it could actually do was transmit the sound of dits and dahs. With the telephone voices really were calling in from a distance. That must have been pretty mind blowing to deal with for some. When patients said they heard voices emanating from telephone were they now real or imaginary?

Another key difference between these two electronic forms of communication was in terms of the relationship between physical places and internal dialogues. The telephone would come to be in the home, in intimate spaces, blurring the psychical boundary between domestic security and external supernatural threat.

Elizabeth Ann Ainsworth believed a telephone had been placed down the chimney and connected to her ear. She said it 'caused her eyes to twist in her head' and she constantly got out of bed to look for the telephone and the men who had put it there. Around 1886, James Maguire, aged 60, pulled down the fireplace in his house looking for such a telephone and thought there was 'another in the downspout of his house' by which he heard all that his neighbours were saying.

A soul stealer, ghost machine

The phonograph represented another category shift in cognitive thinking compared with the telephone. It was not just the shock of hearing disembodied voices that had to be negotiated but the notion that the act of recording somehow captured the essence of being, created an archive of the self, that it was a soul stealer, a ghost machine.

Indeed, at the time, cultural commentators referred to the cylinder recordings as repositories or dungeons of ghosts that briefly haunted the spaces in which they were played – for as long as the machine was cranked. It attracted the same sorts of patient concerns as telephones, particularly with regard to aural hallucinations. People claimed they were controlled by phonographs or were possessed by them. 

In 1889, Mary Jane Dunkling, a patient in Lancaster Moor said her inside was a phonograph and that she consequently had the spirit of prophecy. A 39-year-old Dublin butcher, who had various hypochondriacal delusions, started to receive profound supernatural messages while in the workhouse. 'It all began through the phonograph', he explained. 'Some years ago when the phonograph was new I was asked to speak into the phonograph that I might hear my own voice. I did so, and they have got hold of my phonogram and are always interfering with it. I was sent here [the asylum] because my phonogram was exposed to the public and everybody could work upon it'.

While the older technology of photography captured the living it did not replicate life lived. That all changed with the arrival of the cinematograph ('writing in movement'). The world's first public demonstration of a movie, by the Lumières brothers in Paris, was in 1895. The technology developed swiftly and people's first viewing of projected film would have been at a fairground, town hall, or music hall. Permanent cinemas proliferated from around 1908 onward, by which time the wonder may have worn off and the new mass form of entertainment had established itself as a familiar fact of life.

It is between the first shows in 1896 and the rise of the cinema that we find asylum records indicating how the experience of seeing motion pictures helped some people explain the unusual mental impressions they experienced. A plumber in Richmond Asylum, Dublin, talked in 1903 of seeing 'animated pictures' on the walls of his room when alone. The man explained that they were just like the cinematograph pictures he had once seen in the Empire Music Hall. They were mostly figures of people, and he described them as 'thrown before' him by some kind of machinery. 

The plumber's understanding was shaped by a 'systematised' delusion of technology mixed with notions of sympathetic magic. 'If any enemy of yours get hold of your photograph,', he continued, 'they can use it in animation to injure and torment you.' At the Royal Asylum at Perth, Scotland, in 1907, there was a female patient suffering from 'mania' who professed that she could call up pictures in the fashion of a cinematograph – 'waving her hands in front of the wall of her room she asked for a subject, and, failing a suggestion, proceeded to describe moving pictures with great emotional display'.

The machinery of witchcraft

Irish psychiatrist Conolly Norman (1853-1908) was one of the very few superintendents to think deeply about the relationship between technological terrors and older beliefs in supernatural persecution. In an article entitled 'Modern Witchcraft: A Study of a Phase of Paranoia' (1905) he observed, with regard to his patients who believed they were controlled by phonograms and the like, that: 'in all we have so striking a coincidence with the machinery of witchcraft that it is difficult to believe that we are merely in face of an accidental resemblance'.

Norman reckoned that both mental phenomena were a recrudescence of an ancient, universal mental connection. This was perceptive, but with hindsight we can see a third way. Science and magic had never been incompatible or mutually exclusive notions, and the popular response to the technological revolution of the 19th and early 20th centuries provides further confirmation. The fears and concerns about technology were not primeval responses but essentially human and modern.

Adapted from Owen Davies, Troubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Owen Davies is Professor of Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. He has written extensively on the history of magic, witchcraft, ghosts, religion, and popular medicine.