Mesmerism

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Mesmerism is the doctrine and healing practice founded by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), Swabian-born and trained in Vienna, who held that an invisible fluid pervaded all bodies and that disease arose when its flow through a person was blocked or unevenly distributed. The cure, on his account, was to restore the balance — to channel the fluid by passes of the hands, by touch, or through magnetized objects, often driving the patient through a convulsive “crisis” that broke the obstruction. He called the force animal magnetism, by analogy with the mineral magnetism then newly fascinating to science.

Mesmer worked first in Vienna and then, from 1778, in Paris, where his salon treatments became a sensation. Patients gathered around a baquet, a tub of magnetized water bristling with iron rods, while the master moved among them in a lilac robe; the rooms were dimmed, the air was scented, and a glass armonica supplied unearthly music. Demand outran the tubs, so for the overflow he magnetized a tree, and patients bound themselves to it by cords. In 1783 his disciples organized the Société de l’Harmonie Universelle, which sold initiation into the secret of the method; by the eve of the Revolution it counted some 430 graduates, with satellite societies in the major provincial cities. The historian Robert Darnton has argued that mesmerism in the 1780s was less a fringe cult than the most fashionable science in Paris — and that in its lodges, talk of unblocking the body’s fluid shaded into talk of unblocking the body politic, feeding a current of pre-revolutionary radicalism.

The fashionable success drew official scrutiny: in 1784 Louis XVI appointed two royal commissions, Benjamin Franklin among the commissioners, to test whether the fluid existed. By controlled trials, including blinded ones — run on a disciple’s practice, since Mesmer would not submit his own — the commissioners concluded that the cures were real enough but the fluid was not: the effects came from imagination, expectation, and suggestion. That verdict is usually counted among the earliest formal uses of the placebo control, and Mesmer’s standing in Paris never recovered from it.

The practice outlived the theory. Mesmer’s disciple the Marquis de Puységur, magnetizing a young peasant named Victor Race on the family estate at Buzancy in 1784, found that the passes could induce not a crisis but a quiet, lucid trance — “artificial somnambulism,” in which the subject would speak, follow commands, and remember nothing on waking. This magnetic sleep, rather than the fluid, is what carried forward. In the 1840s the Scottish surgeon James Braid reframed the state in physiological terms and renamed it hypnotism, severing it from the magnetic doctrine; by century’s end it had entered clinical use and informed the early study of suggestion and the unconscious. The fluid itself found one last champion in the same decade: the chemist Karl von Reichenbach recast it for the laboratory in 1845 as the odic force, and it fared no better there.

A second lineage ran the other way, into the marvellous. The somnambulist’s apparent clairvoyance and rapport encouraged claims of thought-transference and contact with the dead, and the mesmeric séance fed directly into the spiritualism of the mid-nineteenth century and the psychical research that followed. One figure carries the thread almost alone: Andrew Jackson Davis, a young apprentice shoemaker from Poughkeepsie first put into magnetic sleep in 1843, whose trance discourses were published in 1847 — a year before the first spirit raps were reported in upstate New York — and handed the new movement much of its cosmology in advance.

In America the doctrine had a further career as a medicine of the mind. The French magnetizer Charles Poyen toured New England from 1836, demonstrating the magnetic sleep town by town; among those who took up the practice was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a Maine clockmaker who magnetized patients for years and gradually concluded that no fluid was at work — the cure lay in the patient’s own conviction. Quimby’s “mind cure” passed through his patients into wider movements: Mary Baker Eddy, who came to him as a patient in 1862, afterward founded Christian Science on a healing theology of her own, and the looser stream of New Thought carried forward the conviction that right thinking heals. What had begun as physics ended, in this line, as a faith in the power of thought over the body.

Esoteric movements absorbed the vocabulary as well: animal magnetism, vital fluids, and the operator’s projected will recur across later occult and New Thought writing, where they were read not as discredited physics but as glimpses of a subtle force. Whether anything answers to that force remains, for those traditions, an open conviction rather than an established fact — the historical record establishes the trance and the suggestion, not the fluid that was supposed to explain them.

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