Franz Anton Mesmer

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Franz Anton Mesmer was a German physician, trained in Vienna, who held that health and sickness turned on the distribution of an invisible fluid pervading all bodies — a fluid he called animal magnetism, which a skilled operator could channel, concentrate, and set right. The word mesmerism descends from his name; so, more distantly, does the practice that became hypnosis.

He was born in 1734 at Iznang, a village on Lake Constance where his father kept forests for the Prince-Bishop. His 1766 medical dissertation argued that the planets act on the human body through a subtle tide, an idea he soon detached from astronomy and recast as a universal physical force; the thesis itself, later scholarship established, was lifted in large part from a 1704 work by the English physician Richard Mead. Marriage to a wealthy widow in 1768 made him a figure in Viennese society and a patron of music — the Mozarts were family friends, and tradition places the premiere of the twelve-year-old Wolfgang’s Bastien und Bastienne in Mesmer’s garden, though no proof survives. From 1774 he was treating patients first with actual magnets and then with the laying-on of hands and passes of the arm, having concluded that the magnetism lay in the operator rather than the iron. The treatment aimed at a crisis — convulsion, weeping, fainting — taken as the moment the blocked fluid broke through and rebalanced.

The cure that ended his Vienna years was the one he could not keep. In the winter of 1776–77 he took on Maria Theresia Paradis, an eighteen-year-old pianist blind since early childhood, and announced that her sight was partially restored; whatever had returned did not last, and her family withdrew her amid talk of scandal and fear for her disability pension. Driven from Vienna after the contested cure, he arrived in Paris in February 1778, where the therapy became a sensation. Patients gathered around the baquet, a covered tub of magnetized water and iron filings, gripping protruding rods while Mesmer, in a lilac robe, moved among them, often closing sessions with music on the glass armonica.

Paris divided over him; the court took notice. Mesmer was known to Marie Antoinette, and in 1781 the crown offered him a life annuity of twenty thousand livres, and ten thousand a year to train pupils of its choosing; he refused rather than accept oversight. The lawyer Nicolas Bergasse then organized a subscription that brought him some 340,000 livres, and out of it grew the Societies of Harmony — some twenty closed lodges across France whose initiates paid to learn the method and signed contracts never to teach it without leave; the Marquis de Lafayette signed one in 1784. Animal magnetism was now a fashionable therapy, a commercial secret, and something close to a movement.

Established medicine refused him. In 1784 Louis XVI appointed a royal commission of the Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine — Benjamin Franklin nominally at its head, Antoine Lavoisier and the astronomer Jean Bailly among its members — to test the claim; a second commission from the Royal Society of Medicine sat alongside it. Through blind trials, run on the practice of his disciple Charles Deslon, Mesmer himself refusing to take part, in which subjects were told they were being magnetized when they were not and the reverse, the commission concluded that no fluid existed and that the real effects were produced by imagination. This is often cited as one of the first controlled investigations of a medical claim, and as an early recognition of what later work would call suggestion. Mesmer’s reputation in Paris did not recover.

The fading took thirty years. He left France as the Revolution gathered, and the fortune Paris had given him, invested in French annuities, was destroyed by it; a 1798 petition recovered a pension of three thousand francs. In Vienna in 1793 he was denounced for Jacobin sympathies, held for weeks, then sent back to the region of his birth. The last decades passed quietly around Lake Constance — a practice at Frauenfeld in Switzerland, then Constance itself, treating the district’s poor mostly without fee. He died on 5 March 1815 at Meersburg, the old seat of the Prince-Bishops his father had served, on the lake where he was born.

The doctrine outlived its author. A disciple, the Marquis de Puységur, found that the passes could induce not a convulsive crisis but a calm, lucid, sleeping state — artificial somnambulism — in which subjects spoke, obeyed, and remembered nothing after. That observation is the thread the nineteenth century followed into hypnotism and, through figures investigating trance and clairvoyance, into the rise of spiritualism and psychical research. Whether anything physical answered to “animal magnetism” was settled against Mesmer; that something reliable happened around the baquet was not in doubt, and explaining it drove a long argument about mind, body, and the power of expectation. His system was discarded, and the questions it forced stayed open.

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