Lewis H. Anderson: What the Record Shows

Lewis H. Anderson sold hypnotism, magnetism and “the key to power” to America in the 1890s. Europe was putting the same ideas on trial. Greece was translating them. A reconstruction from the documents.

Some authors are remembered for what they argued. Lewis H. Anderson is remembered, to the extent he is remembered at all, for what he printed on his title pages: grand institutional names, edition counts in the tens of thousands, and the honorific “Professor.” No archive has yet produced his letters, no newspaper profile has surfaced, and no court has left a file bearing his name. What survives is a shelf of books, a federal library catalogue entry, and the publishers who keep reprinting him. This is an attempt to read that shelf carefully, place it beside what Europe and Greece were writing on the same subjects at the same moment, and separate what can be documented from what is only repeated.

Part OneThe man behind the initials

The firmest fact is his name. The NLM catalogues Hypnotism, Its Uses and Abuses under “Anderson, L. H. (Lewis H.),” published in Chicago in 1894 by the National Hygienic and Hypnotic Institute, 96 illustrated pages with portraits, filed under Hypnosis and treated as public domain.¹ Everything else about his life comes from the specialist publisher Odd Enough Books, which reissues his work and gives his dates as 1857 to 1914, describing him as a writer, hypnotist and lecturer whose books dealt with personal magnetism, suggestion, mental and physical power, self-mastery and health.² We could not confirm those dates in any census, death record or library authority file, and we flag them accordingly.

The institutions on his title pages tell their own story. In 1894 his imprint is the National Hygienic and Hypnotic Institute.¹ A reprint of his 1895 book places its first publication with “The National Institute” in Chicago.⁶ By 1897 the title page reads “Professor L. H. Anderson,” published by the National Institute of Science, Chicago.³ Whether these “institutes” were teaching bodies, mail-order houses or simply imprints, the documents do not say.

The numbers deserve the same care. The 1894 manual is marked “7th ed., 100 thousand.”¹ The 1897 volume is marked “Second Edition, 15,000.”³ Those figures were printed by the seller of the book. They tell us how Anderson wished to be seen, a bestselling authority, and they are reported here as exactly that.

Part TwoThe shelf, title by title

Read as a sequence, the titles trace a recognisable arc. He begins with success (1893), moves to the mechanics of hypnotism (1894, 1896), widens into magic and “psychic forces” (1895), turns philosophical with occultism (1897), addresses male health (1898), and returns to success through suggestion (1909). Hypnosis is the hinge on which every other subject turns.

Part ThreeWhat he actually argued

The fullest description of his ideas concerns the 1895 book. Its current publisher describes seventeen chapters that travel from the “magnetic” hand and eye to the training of the will, the states between sleeping and waking, and what Anderson believed the Egyptian priesthood and the Kabbalists had known of the same power. He writes about healing, about influence, about who possesses this force and who does not.⁵ Another reissue summarises his central claim: that wonders once called miracles, sorcery or black and white magic are not breaks in nature but rare workings of laws already present in the human constitution.⁶

One question in that book stands out. According to its publisher, Anderson asked whether a person acting under another’s will can be held responsible for what they do.⁵ It is the most consequential question in the entire literature of hypnotism, and in the five years before his book appeared, a Paris jury had been asked to answer it.

His 1897 Key to Mental and Physical Power, per its reissuing publisher, treats strength as the product of harmony between mind and body: mental discipline feeding physical vitality and the reverse.² That publisher places him in a lineage running toward the twentieth-century self-improvement writers; that is the publisher’s framing, and we leave readers to weigh it.

Part FourMeanwhile, in a Paris courtroom

On 26 July 1889 a Paris bailiff named Gouffé was killed in an apartment; his body was found near Lyon on 13 August, carried there in a trunk. A young woman, Gabrielle Bompard, surrendered to police on 22 January 1890; her lover Michel Eyraud was arrested later. Their trial opened on 16 December 1890. Bompard’s lawyer argued that she had acted under Eyraud’s hypnotic control.⁹

The courtroom became a contest between two medical schools. Jules Liégeois, a law professor from Nancy who had already presented a paper in 1884 on hypnotic suggestion in civil and criminal law, testified that crimes could be committed under suggestion. The Paris experts Paul Brouardel and Gilbert Ballet answered for the Salpêtrière view that no real murder under hypnosis existed, and concluded that Bompard was not ill. Eyraud was sentenced to death; Bompard received twenty years.⁹ Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Charcot’s disciple, published a pamphlet in 1891 titled L’épilogue d’un procès célèbre (“Epilogue to a Famous Trial”), proclaiming the Salpêtrière position vindicated.¹⁰

The story did not end in court. In December 1893 a former patient, Rose Kamper, shot Gilles de la Tourette in the head at his Paris home. She claimed hypnotism sessions had changed her and that she had been hypnotised “at a distance.” The wound was not serious; she was examined by Brouardel, Ballet and Jules Falret and returned to the Sainte-Anne asylum, and there was no trial.⁹

Medical opinion in Germany was likewise divided. The Berlin professor Emanuel Mendel, who had used hypnotism therapeutically since 1881, warned in 1889 that it could provoke serious nervous disorders, and concluded it seldom produced a true cure.¹¹

Part FiveThe Greek shelf, translated

We searched Greek-language library catalogues, university repositories and the Greek web for any trace of Anderson himself: a translation, a review, a mention. We found none. What we did find was a substantial Greek literature on the same subjects, written in the same decades, that has rarely if ever reached English readers. Here it is, translated.

The 2025 Psychiatriki article, by authors from the Sleep Research Unit at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and from Tashkent, records that hypnosis entered Greek medicine in the late nineteenth century chiefly through neurologists who were students of Charcot, and that it appears in many articles in Simonidis Vlavianos’s Psychiatric and Neurological Review (1902–1911), including a 1904 paper by S. Damoglou, “Hypnosis as a Means of Treatment.”¹³ In other words, Greece received the Paris school’s teaching directly, through its own doctors.

The same Greek article defines the phenomenon in a single line: «τεχνητά επαγόμενη (δια της υποβολής) τροποποίηση του επιπέδου συνείδησης», “an artificially induced modification of the level of consciousness, through suggestion.”¹³ The authors report that electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings during hypnotic catalepsy show increased delta and theta activity and marked asymmetry between the hemispheres, which they read as a state distinct from both sleep and full wakefulness. They also insist that hypnotherapy belongs only in the hands of clinicians trained in psychotherapy.¹³ That last point is, in its way, the modern answer to Anderson’s “uses and abuses.”

Part SixThe oldest layer

Anderson looked to Egypt and the Kabbalah for the ancestry of his “power.” The Greek record offers its own. The Psychiatriki authors note that roughly 300 sanctuaries of Asclepius existed across the Greek and Roman world, and that at Epidaurus three marble slabs dating to around 320 BCE record the cases of some seventy patients, many with reference to their dreams during temple sleep, «εγκοίμησις», which the authors describe as induced either by substances or by suggestion.¹³ Behind that lie the oldest Greek words on sleep and on the magnet:

Plato offered the magnet as an image for how inspiration passes from one person to the next. Twenty-three centuries later, Anderson sold the same image as a method.

Part SevenThe afterlife of a forgotten author

Anderson’s name returned in the mid-twentieth century bound to a far better-known figure. Occult Science or Hidden Forces, issued by the Philosophical Publishing Company with a 1954–55 imprint, joins his work with that of Gérard Encausse (“Papus”) and R. Swinburne Clymer.⁸ The publisher describes it as a union of Anderson’s and Encausse’s works on developing inner forces for health and success, with a history of secret schools and a glossary.¹⁸ Encausse was a Paris-trained physician, defender of occultism and co-founder of the Martinist Order in 1891, the very year of the Bompard epilogue.¹⁹ So the American hypnotist and the French occultist, contemporaries who as far as the record shows never met, ended up sharing a single binding.

Today his books circulate again: in a free federal scan, in handmade small-press editions, and in a run of new paperback reissues. The demand is real enough that a publisher limited one hand-finished edition to 600 copies.⁴

What, then, can be said with confidence? That a Chicago author named Lewis H. Anderson published, between 1893 and 1909, a coherent body of work arguing that the mind holds a trainable power of influence; that he posed the question of responsibility under suggestion in print; that Europe was litigating the same question in the same years; and that Greek physicians and translators were writing the Greek chapter of that story in parallel. The rest is for readers, with the sources in hand, to judge.

Endnotes

1. National Library of Medicine (NLM), Digital Collections, Hypnotism, its uses and abuses, Anderson, L. H. (Lewis H.), Chicago: National Hygienic and Hypnotic Institute, 1894. digirepo.nlm.nih.gov
2. Odd Enough Books, “L. H. Anderson and the Lost Science of Personal Power,” June 2026, and L. H. Anderson collection. oddenoughbooks.com
3. Odd Enough Books, edition details for Philosophy of Occultism; or, The Key to Mental and Physical Power (1897). oddenoughbooks.com
4. Odd Enough Books, edition details for Ancient Magic, Magnetism and Psychic Forces (1895). oddenoughbooks.com
5. Publisher’s description, Ancient Magic, Magnetism & Psychic Forces: The Key to Power (reissue). amazon.com/dp/B0HF45SD3X
6. Publisher’s description, Ancient Magic, Magnetism and Psychic Forces: By L.H. Anderson 1895 (reissue). amazon.com/dp/B0HG3XWCVP
7. Goodreads, author listing “L.H. Anderson.” goodreads.com
8. Google Books, Occult Science Or Hidden Forces, Philosophical Publishing Company, 1955. books.google.com
9. Bogousslavsky, J. (Clinique Valmont, Switzerland) and Walusinski, O. (France), “The forgotten Gilles de la Tourette: Practitioner, expert, and victim of criminal hypnotism.” baillement.com (PDF)
10. Gilles de la Tourette, G., L’épilogue d’un procès célèbre (Affaire Eyraud-Bompard), Paris, 1891; scan from the BIU Santé collection (Paris). BIU Santé scan (PDF)
11. “Prof. Mendel’s Views of the Therapeutic Value of Hypnotism,” October 1889 (historical journal text). archive copy
12. University of Patras Library (Greece), record: Foustanos, Ioannis A., 1885. search.library.upatras.gr
13. Sakellion, D., Sultanov, S., Irgashev, D., Alimov, U., Tsoutsi, V., Dikeos, D., «Ύπνωση: Αρχαία θεραπευτική πρακτική που αναβιώνει και στη σύγχρονη επιστήμη» (Hypnosis: An ancient therapeutic practice revived in modern science), Psychiatriki (Athens), 2025. psychiatriki-journal.gr (PDF)
14. Kozani Municipal Library (Greece), record: Wundt, W., «Υπνωτισμός και υποβολή», trans. Antigoni P. Polymeri, Athens: Fexis, 1912. catalogue.kozlib.gr
15. Homer, Iliad 14.231. Translation by Cat House Meow.
16. Aristotle, De Anima I.2, 405a19–21 (Bekker). Translation by Cat House Meow.
17. Plato, Ion 533d–e (Stephanus). Translation by Cat House Meow.
18. Philosophical Publishing Company, Occult Science or Hidden Forces. philosophicalpublishing.org
19. Encyclopædia Universalis (France), “Papus, Gérard Encausse dit (1865–1916).” universalis.fr