Step-by-step explanation:
Since at least the eighteenth century, the classic oppositions between superstition and religion on the one hand and between superstition and science on the other, have been recomposed, with the lines between them becoming blurred. Nicole Edelman has shown for France how a few great men leading doctrinal renewal with a scientific impact—such as the German Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) or the Frenchman Allan Kardec (1804-1869)—restored respectability to clairvoyance throughout Europe. For instance, a sleepwalker immersed in a magnetic state could become, in the hands of the learned hypnotist Mesmer, a source of progress. While mesmerism was not considered a superstition, the sleepwalker was seen as a superstitious woman whose penchant was rectified by the man of science. Similarly, the powers of the medium guided by spiritualist doctrine developed by Kardec from 1857 onwards were no longer related to age-old necromancy, but rather to spiritual telegraphy, which was not at all superstitious.
Of course, superstition is still considered as the sign of a primarily feminine weakness, and the biologization of the sexes helps strengthen the idea that women have too much imagination and not enough comprehension. They are supposedly more religious and more superstitious beings, and more sensitive to beliefs—like children and adolescents. In fact, it was frequently doctors who examined those who presented disturbing gifts, even though Lavater had opened the way beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. For example, in 1846, thirteen-year-old Angelique Cottin, nicknamed the “electric girl,” was one of the young girls closely examined by the Académie des sciences in its search for disorders, extraordinary abilities, and unknown forces. It was also doctors who examined, over a long period of time (1857-1877), individuals “possessed by Morzine,” whose convulsions, visions, and other trances were interpreted as symptoms of a collective hysteria, an illness that was strongly feminine.