Charles Lloyd Tuckey: medical hypnotist and ‘amiable necromancer’

Charles Lloyd Tuckey (1854–1925) was one of the leaders of the British ‘New Hypnotism’ movement of the late nineteenth century. This neglected figure is important because of his contributions to the early psychotherapies in Britain, ushering in the concept of suggestion to British medicine from Europe. Through his networks and clubs, Tuckey demonstrates the bewildering range of institutions that shaped and spread the novel theory of suggestion and the nascent talking therapies at this time. His affiliations to psychic investigation and ceremonial magic societies demonstrate his intellectual curiosity rather than backwards primitivism. Tuckey played an important role in establishing the term ‘psychotherapeutics’ and legitimising medical hypnotism, a precursor of the psychological therapies of the early twentieth century.


Introduction
Charles Lloyd Tuckey was born in Canterbury to an Anglo-Irish medical family.His father, Charles Caulfield Tuckey, was a medical homeopathist who trained in Dublin before moving to England with his wife and young family.Charles Lloyd attended Canterbury school between 1865 and 1869.He was a good student, winning a bursary and prize in Classics but he did not progress to Oxford or Cambridge University like his younger brother, James (Bates, 2021).
He followed his father into the medical profession, attending King's College Hospital medical school between October 1870 and July 1873 (University of Aberdeen Medical Schedule, 1862).As was conventional, he left London after three years and went to Aberdeen University to start his clinical training.At the time, it was generally accepted that the Scottish medical schools were more prestigious and provided better clinical training.However, the choice of Aberdeen was a strange one for the son of a medical homeopath, because, less than 20 years earlier, the Medical School had been involved in a dispute about homeopathy.This was a fringe and contested area of medicine, opposed by the medical institutions.The Aberdeen Medical School had refused to allow medical students to graduate if they believed in homeopathy or practised it (Atkin, 1853: 51).In his final year (1874-5), Lloyd Tuckey returned home to Kent and undertook six months' medical and six months' surgical training at Canterbury General Hospital.

Early medical career
Tuckey was appointed as an assistant physician at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (RLHH) in 1878.Despite the opposition of medical orthodoxy, homeopathy was already popular with the aristocracy and wealthy.He worked in the outpatient department and in private practice.His chances of employment at the RLHH were probably being helped by the fact that his father was a senior homeopath who had contributed and raised funds for the newly established hospital, founded in 1859.Over the next few years, Tuckey contributed case reports for the homeopathic journals and eventually completed his MD in 1884.Sadly, there is no record of his thesis or even its title.It would be fascinating to know whether Aberdeen Medical School would have accepted a doctoral thesis focused on homeopathy, Tuckey's principal clinical work.In 1885 he was promoted to physician at the RLHH.
Tuckey's first brush with serious medical controversy came in 1887.He was appointed as a physician to the Margaret Street Infirmary in London after the board of the hospital had been replaced by the homeopathy supporters, Robert Dudgeon and the wealthy Edmund Beckett (Baron Grimthorpe).Seven of the original medical staff had resigned rather than be associated with a hospital that offered homeopathy, claiming that Tuckey was appointed as one of three dubious replacement doctors to the hospital, all of whom were sympathetic to homeopathy.This led to six months of angry recrimination and debate about the legitimacy of homeopathy in the correspondence section of The Times which became known as the odium medicum 1 (Clarke, 1888).Tuckey's name was not prominent in the newspaper debate but the episode highlights the contentious place of nonorthodox or heterodox therapies in Victorian Britain.

A trip to Nancy
Having settled in independent practice, Tuckey went to visit a doctor, Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, at his rural practice in Fauburg St. Pierre just outside Nancy in France.He alleged that the visit was by chance, during his summer holiday in 1888.Liebault's pioneering work with therapeutic hypnotism had been made famous by his colleague Hippolyte Bernheim in his book Suggestive Therapeutics (1884/1889) which Tuckey had read in its original French.Tuckey was so taken by what he saw there that he next went to Amsterdam, visiting two Dutch physicians, Frederik van Eeden and Albert van Renterghem, who were using the therapeutic hypnotism they had learned from Liébeault, but with a more sophisticated urban clientele.Tuckey found that they were getting similarly positive results.
The attitude towards hypnotism was much more positive in mainland Europe than in Britain.The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had sanctioned its usefulness and scientific credibility by using it as a diagnostic tool to demonstrate hysteria, which he believed to be a neurological disorder.In the late 1870s and 1880s, physicians from all over Europe had flocked to the Salpêtrière to witness Charcot's demonstrations.He and his colleagues induced the trance state using a procedure initially described by a Scottish physician James Braid (1795-1860), whose work had gone unrecognised in the UK.His book Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep (1843) provided a new scientific terminology and had moved trance away from the mystical and theatrical passes of Franz Mesmer.While Charcot's eminence had decontaminated trance from its associations with the name of Mesmer and his fashionable but fraudulent treatment, Charcot believed that susceptibility to trance indicated an underlying neurosis and that the trance state itself was pathological.The work of Liébeault and Bernheim and the Nancy school was to challenge these assumptions.They showed that the majority of people could be hypnotised, and that it could be used therapeutically, not just diagnostically.As a result of Bernheim's insight that the mode of action was suggestion, Nancy superseded the Salpêtrière as the international centre for the study and practice of medical hypnotism.Most of Europe's leading physician hypnotists made the journey to Nancy.
On his return, Tuckey wrote a 6000-word essay, describing what he had witnessed and his early experience of using the therapy in England (Tuckey, 1888a).As a predecessor to the first edition of his main work Psycho-Therapeutics, or Treatment by Sleep and Suggestion published in 1889, it outlines his views in depth and his ideas about its mode of action, barriers to legitimacy and the principles of safe use.Strangely, the essay 'Faith healing as a medical treatment' was aimed at a lay audience rather than a specialist medical audience and was published in Nineteenth Century, a monthly literary magazine with short stories and poems as well as factual articles.
The choice of journal was deliberate, but the title was an accident.It transpires that he wished to call the piece 'Psycho-therapeutics: a new departure in medical treatment', but he says 'it was rechristened without my knowledge or consent' (Tuckey 1888b).Faith-healing would have suggested a religious or prayer-based treatment, which was far from his intention.The Nineteenth Century was sympathetic to spiritualist topics and had previously featured an article on mesmerism by Edmund Gurney and Frederic Myers (1883), who belonged to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), an elite society of spiritualists and academics (see below).It is clear that Tuckey thought that he had a greater chance of getting published in a general rather than medical journal, as British medicine had taken a decidedly materialist turn and was highly sceptical of immaterial phenomena and intolerant of fringe medicine.
Tuckey's article and book were the first in a sustained wave of magazine features, hypnotism manuals and medical articles about hypnotism throughout the 1890s.In his obituary in the British Medical Journal, 37 years later, Lloyd Tuckey was described as 'one of the pioneers of hypnotic treatment in England' (Anon., 1925).His courage in writing about hypnotism at this time was acknowledged by most of the subsequent British writers on hypnotism.His friend George Kingsbury (1891: 14) wrote: The first English medical man, so far as I know, to take up the Nancy treatment, was Dr C. Lloyd Tuckey, of London, and to him undoubtedly belongs the honour of first daring to challenge public opinion, by publishing a book advocating the adoption of it.

Clubs and networks
It could never harm a doctor's prospects to be socially well-connected, and Victorian doctors were often members of many clubs and societies.Tuckey was no exception and his clubs clearly reflected his interests: he was a freemason and also became a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1894.This secret ceremonial magic group, which had been founded by the physicians William Woodcote and William Westcott, used the trance state in many of their self-development rituals, and they warned adherents about psychic attack from malign wills, which could operate hypnotically.It seems likely that Tuckey joined to see whether or not the arcane group could offer an alternative understanding of the action of hypnotism.He was fully initiated into the order, but remained a member for only a year.Tuckey was not alone in his mystic researches: Robert Felkin, another of the New Hypnotists (see below), maintained a lifelong interest in hypnotism and the occult, eventually leading a splinter group.
Tuckey was also a longstanding member of the SPR, an influential group of psychic investigators, with a membership of Nobel prize-winners and prime ministers.The SPR is acknowledged as the early home of institutional psychology in the UK and the formal study of what later became known as parapsychology.As early as 1883, the committee of the SPR had decided that the best way to research the potential of hypnotism was to recruit physicians whose scientific training and objectivity would be assets for the work and its dissemination.Tuckey joined in 1889 and remained a member for over 30 years until ill health prevented him from travelling to London.He led the hypnotism committee, conducting research on the psychic link and card prediction.In addition, he took a leading role on the society's council with Gurney and Myers for much of this time.
Tuckey's membership of these occult and quasi-scientific organisations did not represent some quaint or romantic leaning on his part, but shows that the boundaries between science and nonscience were not so clearly dichotomised as they have now become.The boundaries were much more porous, and ideas from one discourse could freely move to another.The institutions also served to shape his ideas about suggestion and provided an important support network to develop therapeutic hypnotism and suggestion in the UK.
Tuckey also joined the Sesame Club, a liberal and progressive society that was interested in the education of children.It was based in Piccadilly and, unusually for the time, accepted both male and female members.It had been formed by a group of friends who had children of their own and who wished to study and discuss how best to educate them.At the turn of the century, it had a membership of over 900, which included biologist T.H. Huxley, author and playwright George B. Shaw and the poet and critic Edith Sitwell.The ideas of the German educator Friedrich Froebel were well-represented by the group.Froebel believed in the importance of play and the experience of nature in learning.In the early years of the twentieth century, these views were considered alongside the emerging idea of the importance of using suggestion in schools for moral as well as factual teaching, and the novel pedagogy of the Italian physician Maria Montessori.The theories were discussed and promulgated by the opinion-formers of the day.Tuckey promoted suggestive therapy and advocated the importance of suggestion in moral education.

Persuading the doctors
Tuckey's early conflict with British medical orthodoxy did not dissuade him from studying and advertising a new therapy which had still to be legitimised in England.Although Charcot had already sanctioned the use of hypnotism for hysteria at the Salpêtrière, the hypnotic demonstrations were not received so well by the British medical or lay press.For British physicians, hypnotism was clearly linked to medical mesmerism, which had been most forcefully rejected from mainstream medicine in the 1840s, even at the expense of the career of one of the most prominent London physicians of his day, John Elliotson (Clarke, 1874: chs 14,15).He had a precocious talent, and had translated and then rewritten the standard physiology textbook of the day (Blumenbach, 1817).He had also worked out the cause of hay fever and had developed iodine treatment for thyroid disorder.Elliotson was one of the founders of University College Hospital (UCH) (Moore, 2017), and he promoted the use of the stethoscope, clinical examination, phrenology and mesmerism.But it was mesmerism that caused his expulsion from UCH and orthodox medical practice.He died in poverty in 1868, and he and his very public disgrace cast a long shadow over Victorian medicine.
The newly formed Psychology section of the British Medical Association discussed hypnotism at the Birmingham meeting of the British Medical Association (BMA) in June 1890.Lloyd Tuckey was one of the speakers in favour of the use of hypnotism, and provided a powerful demonstration of its efficacy.Despite accusations of hypnotism causing 'jellyfish slavery', the proposal to form a committee to make an official investigation of hypnotism and then report back was accepted unanimously (Anon., 1890).When the Executive Board of the BMA received the balanced and broadly positive final report in 1893, it chose to accept it, but this did not become the association's official position and the recommendations were not enacted.
In attempting to legitimise hypnotism, Tuckey and a small group of medical hypnotists (John Milne Bramwell, George Kingsbury and Robert Felkin) were taking on the might of the BMA and the robust campaigning editor of the British Medical Journal, Ernest Hart.He was a powerful but controversial figure (Collins, 2022).He had transformed the BMJ from a newsletter for practitioners into a scientific periodical, thereby securing the future of the journal.His public heath campaigns persuaded the government to act to improve sanitation, support vaccination and prevent 'baby-farming' -the lucrative disposal of unwanted children.However, Hart could destroy careers, and he was a strident opponent of fringe medicine and quackery.He refused to publish positive papers about hypnotism in his journal and, under his editorship, reviews of medical books concerning hypnotism were universally negative.Eventually, he stopped publishing letters from the New Hypnotists when they tried to respond to his criticisms.With years of editorial experience of attention-grabbing writing, Hart, in his editorials and pamphlets, likened hypnotism to mesmerism and sorcery.Like Tuckey, he courted lay opinion by writing for lay journals.The title of one article for Nineteenth Century was 'The revival of witchcraft', which gives a flavour of his diatribe (Hart, 1893).Tuckey's (1893) response was 'A new hypnotism', from which the group of the New Hypnotists took their name.
The following year Hart (1894Hart ( /1896)), also wrote about the confidence trick or 'sting' that he had set up.He invited a group of senior medical hypnotists to his house, asking them to demonstrate the power of their hypnotism.However, the subject Hart had chosen was a professional stage hypnotism subject who had confided that he had found work in medical hypnotic experimentation after his stage career came to an end because he was being recognised.The visiting physicians were unaware of his background and assumed that he was a random patient subject.When they tried to induce the trance state, the actor kept waking up and was then able to feign all the signs of hypnotism outside the trance state.

Persuading the public
Suggestion and hypnotism were not just parochial medical concerns.They had become a focus of significant national interest and anxiety in the newspapers and general journals of the 1880s and 1890s.The public fascination with the subject is demonstrated by the scale of the 'Trilbymania', which followed the publication of George Du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894), and also the staging of the play, based on the book, which included the memorable hypnotic puppeteer, Svengali.Trilby was an instant bestseller and the USA and UK experienced one of the first international cultural crazes (Pick, 2000).Stoker's Dracula (1897) was another fiction of the time which made use of the idea of trance, telepathy and distant mind control as a key part of the plot.The 1890s showed a clear peak in hypnotic-and mesmeric-themed plots in fiction and drama (Hartmann, 1987).
However, the public fascination with hypnotism was not just in fiction.In 1892-3, The Times printed a three-part exposé of the work of the neurologist Dr Jules Luys in Paris (Bucknill, 1892(Bucknill, , 1893a(Bucknill, , 1893b)).Luys was an eminent neurologist, who had published the first photographic atlas of neuroanatomy (Luys, 1873) and launched the neurology journal, L'Encéphale.However, he had become interested in hypnotism and started investigating the findings of Mesmer and his followers.John Bucknill, a retired psychiatrist and a special correspondent for The Times, had visited Luys and was shown 'magnetic transference'.This was a mesmeric phenomenon and clearly fraudulent.It involved the passing of the illness from one patient to another by direct contact: an old man with a hand contracture passed this on to a young man with vertigo, whose symptoms were then passed on to a child with St. Vitus dance (a movement disorder) (Bucknill, 1893a).The accompanying editorial (Buckle, 1893) conflated mesmerism with hypnotism and scorned Luys' gullibility.Tuckey and his New Hypnotist and SPR colleagues provided a coordinated response, distancing Luys' mesmerism from modern hypnotism (e.g.Kingsbury, 1893).Tuckey adopted several strategies to influence public opinion positively.Firstly, he wrote clear, jargon-free essays which explained suggestion and suggestive therapy; these essays, aimed at the general public, appeared in gentleman's journals as well as Good Housekeeping (Tuckey, 1909) and the Occult Review (Tuckey, 1905).He wrote successive editions of his more technical textbook Psycho-Therapeutics, which were reviewed by the general journals; for example, the review in the Spectator (Anon., 1892a) which recommended it to physicians and non-medics alike.As a measure of its enduring popularity, Tuckey wrote seven editions of the book between 1889 and 1921.
Tuckey was also a society doctor who practised in Mayfair.His patients included the members of the Guinness family, aristocrats and the newly rich.Probably his most famous patient was Alice James, the chronically invalid sister of the novelist Henry James and psychologist William James.Tuckey helped her to sleep despite her cancer pain by teaching her maid to hypnotise her at night; she memorably described him as her 'amiable necromancer' (James, 1891(James, /1981)).As a result of his clientele, Tuckey became a minor celebrity.He appeared with a full-page picture (see Figure 1) 2 in a contemporary celebrity magazine, and his attendance at exhibition openings was mentioned in gossip columns (Anon., 1892b).
Tuckey was happy to use celebrity status to promote hypnotism, and his opinion was sought by the press in relation to two high-profile European murders which involved hypnotism: the French Eyraud-Bompard case and the Dutch De Jong case.Hendrik De Jong was held by the Dutch authorities after the unexplained disappearance of two of his wives.The British interest stemmed from the fact that the first wife, Sarah Juett, was an English nurse.A reporter for the Illustrated London News stated that 'One would certainly like to hear what Dr Lloyd Tuckey would say about the proposal to hypnotise de Jong' (Anon., 1893).Tuckey showed a sophisticated grasp of public relations by choosing to give his comments to a newer, more upmarket journal, the Sketch.He gave an interview to his reporter 'friend' TH, revealing that it was impossible to hypnotise somebody against their will (TH, 1894).

Personal life
For most of his life, Tuckey was a sociable, culture-loving and Europhile bachelor who lived near Grosvenor Square, in the West End of London.'Tall, genial and handsome' (Allan, 1925), he was 'quite a contrast to the popular image of a hypnotist' (Anon., 1925).His political views were quite progressive: he supported female equality and children's education and saw alcoholism as an illness, not a moral failing (Tuckey, 1914).Despite his affluent clientele, he was never commercially minded and he struggled for money in retirement.Alice James described him to her brother Henry as 'a very sane, "pure" personage and a gentleman' (James H, 1891(James H, /1997)).According to his celebrity interview, he was 'quiet, studious and companionable' (Anon., 1892b).The article mentions his bravery in advocating hypnotism, but also his literary abilities and his connoisseurship for sixteenth-century Genevan Bibles.Since this was the primary Bible of contemporary English Protestantism, it seems an unusual interest, given his Irish Catholic heritage.His comments to the faith-healing commission suggest he did hold some religious beliefs and was not a wholly materialist atheist (Clerical and Medical Committee of Inquiry, 1914: 8).
Tuckey maintained his friendships through letter-writing, and his physician friends in the hypnotic community were British and European.On Liébeault's death in 1904, Tuckey arranged for a memorial statue to be erected in Nancy and he gave a eulogy in English at the memorial service (Bérillon, 1906: 18-19).He corresponded with the Dutch physician and author Frederic van Eeden for many years and the letters are held by the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam (Tuckey, 1888(Tuckey, -1913)).They display the personal, affectionate side, as well as the professional aspects of the man.
Tuckey first met Percy Allan when he and a group of Guy's Hospital medical students arrived at Tuckey's house requesting instruction in hypnotism in 1889.They remained lifelong friends and Allan, who became a general practitioner, later joined the SPR and the Medical Society for the Study of Suggestive Therapeutics (MSSST).Allan (1925) wrote Tuckey's obituary for the SPR in which he observed that Tuckey had never enjoyed good health, and his regular trips abroad support this: he had visited Spain, Australia, Canada, the Canary Islands and the USA.His death certificate indicates that he had valvular heart disease which could well have been a lifelong ailment (Certificate of Death, 1925).
Before World War I, his health had started to deteriorate.This is likely to have led to his marriage in late life to Beatrice Marsland, because he needed a carer.In 1915, at the age of 61, he married the friend of his sister, who was 11 years his junior, in Eastbourne.Despite his failing health, he continued to follow the psychotherapy literature and completed his seventh and final edition of Psycho-Therapeutics with Allan's help in 1921.He died from complications of a gangrenous leg on 12 August 1925.

Meeting the mainstream
Interest in and the acceptance of hypnotism and suggestion continued to grow in both medical and public circles.The death of Ernest Hart in 1898 led to reduced medical press antipathy, and the number of medical and scientific papers on the subject slowly increased.There were specific journals for suggestive therapy and international medical meetings and societies.New experts, such as Edwin Ash, Hugh Wingfield and William MacDougall, emerged.They all joined the MSSST, the new medical society established in 1906 with Tuckey as the inaugural chair.The group provided education and support to doctors wishing to practise the more psychological medicine, initially suggestive therapy and hypnosis but later a range of eclectic and hybrid approaches, including hypnotic catharsis and Freudianism.
The meteoric rise of the Church of Christian Science from two to over a thousand churches over the ten years at the start of the twentieth century demonstrated the public appetite for faith-healing.The medical orthodoxy could no longer ignore non-materialist approaches to health and started to show more of an interest in suggestion, using it to explain the results of some religious faith healers.Such was the perceived threat that there was a joint commission between the British Medical Association and the Church of England to offer guidance to the church and the medical profession (Clerical and Medical Committee of Inquiry, 1914: 8).Tuckey was invited to contribute as an expert witness.
Other signs of change in medical attitudes come from the titles of public lectures.In 1904 the prestigious Hunterian Society oration was given on 'The Psychic Side of Therapeutics' by John Woods, who later joined the MSSST.The Harveian address of 1909 was given by Claye Shaw, another MSSST member, on 'The influence of mind as a therapeutic agent'.The coverage in the medical journals was positive.It was printed in full in the BMJ (Shaw, 1909) with an introduction suggesting that the medical profession needed to be 'aware of this trend of public opinion and to ascertain how far suggestion may operate in the treatment of morbid conditions'.Even the reactionary BMA came around to hypnotism and suggestion in the end.At the BMA national meeting of 1910, Dr Gardner's presidential address was remarkable for not only the acknowledgement of the importance of the science of psychology but also its recognition of the early pioneers at the SPR.He praised Myers, Tuckey and his SPR medical colleague John Bramwell for 'study [ing] these phenomena from a scientific standpoint and rescu[ing] the wheat of psychological therapeutics from the chaff and humbug of Christian Science and spiritual knavery' (Gardner, 1910: 363).
Arguably, the clearest indicator of the way that suggestion had reached the mainstream was in the attributes and teachings of Britain's leading physician of the era, William Osler.The Canadian doctor, who had been appointed the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford in 1905, was renowned for his bedside manner as much as his encyclopaedic medical knowledge.In 1910, an issue of the BMJ edition dedicated to faith-healing included his editorial view that a good doctor could influence outcomes through his demeanour: 'Confidence once won, the rest flows naturally; and with a strong faith in himself a man becomes a strong centre for its local radiation' (Osler, 1910(Osler, : 1470)).
In 1912, Tuckey was invited to join the medical staff of the Medico-Psychological Clinic (MPC), which was the first British hospital to offer inpatient and outpatient psychological therapies, mainly suggestive therapy (Raitt, 2004).Working here would have represented the pinnacle of Tuckey's life's work and professional wishes.However, the committee of the MPC (also called the Brunswick Square clinic) was initially chaired by Lord Sandwich who had a flair for fundraising but, at the launch of the hospital, he disastrously announced to the press that he was a faithhealer.This and the presence of several non-medical therapists on the staff were too much for Tuckey.Such were his concerns about professionalism that the non-medical therapists and links with spiritualist faith-healing led him to resign publicly before it had even opened (Tuckey, 1913).
Osler and Tuckey must have known each other or at least known each other's work.Osler was one of several eminent doctors, chemists and philosophers who wrote to the government requesting