London’s innovative biomedical centre, the Wellcome Collection, have created a fascinating interactive story on how ‘mesmerism’ and hypnosis played an important role in the history of mind and madness.
It’s written by the fantastic Mike Jay, who has penned many excellent books on the high-strangeness of the early science of the mind in the 1800s, and has been wonderfully realised as an interactive web site.
It’s called ‘Mindcraft: a story of madness, murder and mental healing’ and rather curiously, but also rather usefully, it has its own trailer.
After you’ve gone to the website, you just need to keep scrolling down to work through the story and you’ll be diverted into video, narrative and text along the way.
Link to Mindcraft.
Mind Hacks 
I’m sure there already is a book on this, but it would be nice to see all these “myths” gathered in one place and explained in context of the time. Anyone who visits a grain storage, and sees bugs fly out of it could understand why people used to believe in spontaneous generation. Also interesting how charlatans were more likely to be doctors in those times; these days even with more awareness, you don’t have to be a doctor to sell snake oil.