Mesmerism / Animal Magnetism

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Mesmerism, or animal magnetism, is the healing theory and practice developed by the Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), built on the claim that a subtle, invisible fluid fills the universe and flows through every living body, and that disease is a disturbance in its movement which the right kind of treatment can set right. The name “animal magnetism” marked the fluid as a force proper to living things, distinct from the mineral magnetism of the lodestone, though Mesmer first arrived at it by way of magnets and only later set them aside.

Mesmer brought the practice from Vienna to Paris in the late 1770s, where it became a sensation. Patients gathered around a baquet — a covered tub of magnetized water fitted with iron rods they pressed to the afflicted parts of their bodies — while the operator moved his hands along them or fixed them with his gaze, directing the fluid. Treatments often built to a convulsive “crisis” taken as the sign of the cure working. The fashionable success of the cures, and the fees, drew both crowds and suspicion.

In 1784 the French crown appointed a royal commission to investigate, its members including Benjamin Franklin and the chemist Antoine Lavoisier. By careful tests — treating subjects who falsely believed they were being magnetized, and withholding treatment from others who believed they were receiving it — the commissioners concluded that the supposed fluid could not be detected and that the observed effects were produced by imagination. The verdict damaged mesmerism’s standing as medicine without ending its life as practice.

What survived the commission took a turn its founder had not intended. One of Mesmer’s followers, the Marquis de Puységur, found that magnetizing a patient could induce not a convulsion but a calm, sleep-like, suggestible state he called artificial somnambulism — the phenomenon later renamed and reworked as hypnotism. Through that channel mesmerism fed directly into nineteenth-century psychology and the study of suggestion. Along a second channel, its language of unseen fluids, heightened lucidity, and rapport carried into the spiritualist and occult movements of the following century, where magnetic healing, clairvoyance induced by the magnetic trance, and the idea of a vital force passing between bodies were absorbed and elaborated.

The figure of the mesmerist thus sits at a crossroads. To later science, Mesmer is remembered chiefly for an error that nonetheless opened a real subject: the power of expectation over the body. To the esoteric currents that took him up, the fluid was no error but a glimpse of a genuine vital medium, and the trance a doorway. Historically, what can be established is narrower than either reading — that a particular eighteenth-century practice provoked one of the first controlled investigations of a healing claim, and that its afterlife ran in two directions at once, into clinical hypnosis on one side and into the occult on the other.

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