Franz Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: From Paris to Hypnosis

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734 to 1815) was a German physician who claimed that an invisible fluid, which he called animal magnetism, flowed through all living things and that illness came from blockages in its flow. In 1784 a French royal commission that included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier tested the claim and found no such fluid. The effects, it concluded, came from the imagination. That verdict ended Mesmer's career in Paris, but his followers went on to discover the trance state later named hypnosis, and mesmerism became one of the roots of American mental healing.

A Doctor from Lake Constance

Mesmer was born on May 23, 1734, in Iznang, a village on Lake Constance in Swabia, the son of a forester. After Jesuit universities at Dillingen and Ingolstadt he studied medicine in Vienna. His 1766 doctoral thesis, On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body, built on Isaac Newton's theory of the tides to argue that the sun and moon move tides in the body as well. Evidence gathered by the researcher Frank Pattie suggests that much of it was copied from an earlier work by the English physician Richard Mead.

In 1768 Mesmer married a wealthy widow and set himself up as a doctor in Vienna. He moved in musical circles, knew Haydn and Mozart, and is said to have hosted an early performance of Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne in his garden, though that has never been proven. Mozart later poked fun at "Mesmer's magnet" in Così fan tutte.

The Birth of Animal Magnetism

In 1774 Mesmer treated a patient, Francisca Österlin, by having her swallow a preparation containing iron and then placing magnets on her body. She reported feeling streams of a mysterious fluid and her symptoms eased for several hours. Mesmer decided the magnets were not the real cause. The healing force, he concluded, came from him, a magnetism of living bodies that he could pass to others. He soon stopped using magnets.

His fame grew, and so did the controversy. After only partial success in treating the blindness of an 18-year-old musician, Maria Theresia Paradis, he left Vienna under a cloud and arrived in Paris in February 1778. In 1779 he published a short memoir on his discovery with 27 propositions setting out his theory. Health, in his view, was the free flow of the fluid through the body. Treatment provoked a "crisis," often convulsions, that cleared the obstruction.

Demand soon outran his time, and he began treating groups around the baquet, a large covered tub from which bent iron rods reached each patient. Patients were linked by a rope, Mesmer moved among them making passes with his hands, and the sessions were often accompanied by the glass harmonica, an instrument invented by Franklin. Fashionable Paris split between those who saw a great discovery and those who saw a charlatan.

The 1784 Royal Commission

In 1784 King Louis XVI appointed two separate commissions to investigate. The better known, appointed on March 12, joined four physicians from the Paris Faculty of Medicine, among them Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, with five members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, among them the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, Lavoisier and Franklin, then the American ambassador. A second commission drew five physicians from the Royal Society of Medicine. Neither examined Mesmer himself. Both studied the practice of Charles d'Eslon, a Paris physician who had been his most prominent disciple.

Lavoisier designed much of the procedure. The logic was simple: magnetize people without their knowledge, and tell others they are being magnetized when they are not. If the effects follow belief rather than the supposed fluid, the fluid is not doing the work. Subjects were blindfolded. In the garden of Franklin's house at Passy, d'Eslon magnetized one of five trees, and a sensitive subject led among them fainted at the foot of one of the other four. Again and again, people who believed they were being magnetized showed the effects, and people who did not know they were being magnetized showed none.

The Franklin commission presented its report to the king on August 11, 1784, and it was printed at once and widely read in France and beyond. It found no evidence of any magnetic fluid and attributed the effects to touch, imagination and imitation. The medical society's report, delivered five days later, reached the same conclusion, though one of its members, the botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, wrote a dissenting opinion. A secret report, given privately to the king and not published until 1800, warned of moral dangers in the intimate treatments. The investigation is now often cited as one of the first blinded experiments and an early recognition of what we call the placebo effect.

Puységur and Artificial Somnambulism

Mesmer left Paris soon after and spent his later years in Switzerland and Germany. He died in Meersburg on Lake Constance on March 5, 1815. His ideas, however, had already moved beyond him.

On May 4, 1784, while the commissions were still at work, the Marquis de Puységur was magnetizing a 23-year-old peasant named Victor Race on his estate at Buzancy, northeast of Paris, when Race fell into a strange sleep-like trance not seen before in mesmerism. Puységur compared it to sleepwalking and called it artificial somnambulism. He went on to treat crowds around a large elm on the estate, and summed up his method in two words: believe and want. The historian Henri Ellenberger called him "one of the great forgotten contributors to the history of the psychological sciences."

James Braid Names Hypnosis

In 1841 James Braid, a Manchester surgeon known for operations on clubfoot and squint, went as a skeptic to a demonstration by the traveling magnetizer Charles Lafontaine. One detail held his attention: some subjects could not open their eyes. Braid ran his own experiments and found he could produce the same state by having a person stare at a small bright object, with no contact and no fluid. By late November 1841 he was demonstrating it in public lectures.

He called the state neuro-hypnotism, from the Greek for sleep, soon shortened to hypnotism, and set out his views in Neurypnology in 1843. Braid treated it as a matter of attention and the nervous system, not of magnetic force. That reframing moved the subject toward medicine and psychology, and today the word mesmerism is used mostly as a synonym for hypnosis.

The Line to American Mental Healing

Mesmerism reached the United States in the 1830s through lecturers such as the Frenchman Charles Poyen, who lectured in New England in the 1830s. Demonstrations of trance were popular entertainment, and they set some watchers thinking about the power of belief over the body. One was a Maine clockmaker, Phineas Quimby, who toured as a mesmerist in the 1840s before dropping trance altogether and teaching that false beliefs cause disease. His patients and students, among them Warren Felt Evans and Mary Baker Eddy, carried the idea into the New Thought movement and Christian Science.

Mesmerism fed a second current as well. Historians of Spiritualism note that Mesmer's trance techniques, combined with the visions of Emanuel Swedenborg, gave Americans a method for seeking contact with the dead. The clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis, a practicing mesmerist, merged the two. The séance culture that followed was the setting in which Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society appeared in 1875.

What Mesmer Left Behind

The fluid was never real, and the commissioners were right about that. What they called imagination turned out to deserve study in its own right. Expectation, attention and suggestion measurably change how people feel, a field now covered by research on hypnosis and placebo, and touched on by William James in his writing on mind cure. Mesmer's theory failed, but the experiences his patients reported, and the methods used to test them, belong to the early history of the psychology of the mind and body.

Sources and further reading

• Franz Mesmer (Wikipedia)
• Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism (Wikipedia)
• James Braid (surgeon) (Wikipedia)