Though there was certainly an element of entertainment in Raphaelle's performances, ventriloquism, or biloquism as the new science was called, represented far more than entertainment in early-nineteenth-century America.
() Possibly based on similar terms used by American novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) in Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale (1798) and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1805).