Mesmerism

   , MESMERIZE

   Franz Anton Mesmer, born in Germany on May 23, 1733, studied for the priesthood, then law. Finally he took up the study of medicine and became a serious student at the University of Vienna. He ultimately became a faculty member there.

   Dr. Mesmer was convinced that magnets had curative properties. He believed in it so deeply that he even kept a magnet in a little sack around his neck. Unaware of his own hypnotic powers as a mesmerist, he attributed success to the stroking of his patients with a magnet. Throughout his adult life he also believed that a magic fluid, magnetic and invisible, surrounded everything animate and inanimate. This fluid had beneficent effects on human beings. He was convinced of its existence, even though he could not prove it. In later years, however, Mesmer, in an about-face, came to believe that his patients who had recovered had done so, not from his magnet, but from his stroking manipulations. Also he maintained that his hands held a healing power, which he called "animal magnetism." His claim attracted considerable interest in Paris, where he had moved in 1778. Patients flocked to his healing sessions, and Mesmer did achieve remarkable success, especially with hysterical patients. But when he sought the approval of the medical profession, some doctors denounced him as a faker, a charlatan. His refusal to divulge his secrets to a medical commission militated against acceptance of his theories.

   In 1784, a board of commissioners, including Benjamin Franklin, the U.S. commissioner to France, Antoine Lavoisier, and Joseph Guillotin, was appointed by King Louis XVI to investigate Mesmer's claims. The commission concluded that the supposed magnetic fluid could not be perceived by the senses and that its existence could not be inferred from a study of the patients. It branded the theory of animal magnetism a fraud, and stated that "Imagination without magnetism produces convulsions, and magnetism without imagination produces nothing." Mesmer retired from his medical practice, the report having damaged his reputation, and his prominence declined into obscurity. He died on March 5, 1815, near his German birthplace, at Meersburg, Baden. Mozart immortalized Mesmer in his Cosi fan tutte.

This magnetic stone

Should give the traveler pause

Once it was used by Mesmer,

Who was born

In Germany's green fields,

And who won great fame

In France.

   A pupil of Mesmer's, Puysegur, is credited with the first use of the term mesmerism to indicate Mesmer's practice, a form of hypnotism, which is the art of producing trance-sleep.