Hey, I just found German Wikipedia has a really good biography article about Eberhard Gmelin's plural patient from 1791! There's even a painting of her! https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Heigelin The article doesn't machine-translate into English very well at all, but it gives context to Gmelin's book. How sad, it says everyone involved died very shortly after the book was written.
When I was looking for info about Gmelin just now, I also found this English-language article that gives a longer summary of that book (pp. 1-2). It tells about another, unrelated plural case from 1791 (p. 3)! It says:
"There was another case also reported in 1791. It concerned a young man of eighteen who lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. Benjamin Rush discussed it in his lecture to the medical students at the University of Pennsylvania and concluded his two personalities occurred '. . . as if they depended upon two minds.' Rush did not mention hypnosis in relation to this unusual state but his attempted explanation sounded very much like Gmelin, even though it is almost certain he did not know of Gmelin’s account."
no subject
When I was looking for info about Gmelin just now, I also found this English-language article that gives a longer summary of that book (pp. 1-2). It tells about another, unrelated plural case from 1791 (p. 3)! It says:
"There was another case also reported in 1791. It concerned a young man of eighteen who lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. Benjamin Rush discussed it in his lecture to the medical students at the University of Pennsylvania and concluded his two personalities occurred '. . . as if they depended upon two minds.' Rush did not mention hypnosis in relation to this unusual state but his attempted explanation sounded very much like Gmelin, even though it is almost certain he did not know of Gmelin’s account."
Carlson E. T. (1989). Multiple personality and hypnosis: the first one hundred years. Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 25(4), 315–322. https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6696(198910)25:4<315::aid-jhbs2300250402>3.0.co;2-h Full text via Sci-Hub: https://sci-hub.st/10.1002/1520-6696(198910)25:4%3C315::aid-jhbs2300250402%3E3.0.co;2-h
Which, in turn, was citing this, which fortunately happens to be available to us to read in the Internet Archive:
Patricia Noel, Benjamin Rush’s Lectures on the Mind (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), pp. 668-672. Full text: https://archive.org/details/benjaminrushslec0144rush/page/668/mode/2up?q=668