Franz Mesmer

Franz Anton Mesmer

File:Franz Anton Mesmers Grabstein 01 Gesamt.jpg

His Grave

Franz Anton Mesmer (May 23, 1734 – March 5, 1815] discovered what he called magnétism animal (animal magnetism) and others often called mesmerism. The evolution of Mesmer's ideas and practices led James Braid (physician) (1795 - 1860) to develop hypnosis in 1842.

Biography

Franz Anton Mesmer was born and raised in the Swabian village of Iznang auf der Höri, near the Bodensee (Lake of Constance) in Germany. His father was a forester employed by the archbishop of Konstanz; his mother the daughter of a locksmith. It was a large family—Franz Anton was the third of nine children—and not particularly prosperous.

After preliminary studies in a local monastic school in Konstanz, Mesmer commenced the study of philosophy at the Jesuit university of Dillingen, Bavaria, changing in 1752 to theology, presumably as a scholarship student preparing for the priesthood. He continued his studies from 1753 at the University of Ingolstadt, where he soon abandoned theology. It is not known when and where he obtained his doctorate in philosophy.

In 1759 Mesmer went to Vienna, first studying law, but then changed to medicine under Gerard van Swieten (1700-1772) and Anton de Haen (1704-1776). He received his medical doctorate on May 27, 1766 with a dissertation on the influence of the planets on the human body: “Dissertatio physico-medica de planetarum influxu”. At the time of its defense, however, the thesis did not strike the Viennese authorities as a revolutionary new theory of medicine. On the contrary, it showed a common tendency to speculate about invisible fluids, which derived both from Cartesianism and from the later queries in Newton’s Optics as well as from Newton’s remarks about the "most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies" in the last paragraph of his Principia.

A year later he began to practice as a member of the faculty of medicine in what was one of Europe’s most advanced medical centers; for the Vienna school was then in its prime, owing to the patronage of Maria Theresia and the leaderships of Gerhard van Swieten and Jan Ingenhousz (1730-1799).

On January 16, 1768 he married a wealthy widow, Maria Anna von Posch.

At the end of his celebrated and problem-laden practice that led him from Austria to France and Germany, Mesmer finally settled in Switzerland and died in Meersburg on March 5, 1815.

Work

By the time he began to propound his theory of "animal magnetism," or "mesmerism," Mesmer had risen through the educational systems of Bavaria and Austria and had advanced to a position of some prominence in Viennese society through his marriage.

While a medical student at the University of Vienna, Mesmer was impressed by the writings of the Renaissance mystic physician Paracelsus (Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541) and attempted to rationalize a belief in astrological influences on human health as the result of planetary forces through a subtle, invisible fluid. It was a friend of his, Maximilian Hell (1720-1792), a court astronomer and Jesuit priest, who used magnets in the treatment of disease, who influenced Mesmer to conduct his first attempts at healing with a steel magnet. This learned man was convinced that every body possessed a magnetic force which connects all human beings.

Mesmer applied magnets to his patients’ bodies and produced remarkable results, especially in the case of a young woman suffering from hysteria. Unlike Hell, Mesmer did not attribute his cures to any power in the magnets themselves. Instead, he argued that the body was analogous to a magnet and contained a fluid that ebbed and flowed according to the laws of magnetic attraction.

The immediate source for an explanation of Mesmer’s fluid was Richard Mead’s (1673-1754) De imperio solis ac lunae in corpora humana et morbis inde oriundis (London, 1704), a work upon which Mesmer’s thesis drew heavily. Mead had argued that gravity produced "tides" in the atmosphere as well as in water, and that the planets could therefore affect the fluidal balance of the human body.

Having moved from "animal gravitation" to "animal magnetism," in 1775 he announced his new theory in Sendschreiben an einen auswärtigen Arzt(Mesmer 1775). This work was reprinted several times.

By this time Mesmer had moved into a comfortable town house in Vienna, which he used as a clinic. His marriage brought him enough wealth to pursue his experiments at his leisure and enough leisure to indulge his passion for music. Mesmer knew Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787); he seems to have been acquainted with Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), and saw a great deal of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The first production of a Mozart opera, the Bastien and Bastienne, took place in Mesmer’s garden, and Mozart later made room for mesmerism in a scene in Cosi fan tutte.

Animal magnetism and blind female ‘miracle’

In general, the ten years years between Mesmer’s marriage in 1768 and his departure from Vienna in 1778 seem to have been a time of prosperity and some prominence. He built up a repertoire of techniques and cures; he gave lectures and demonstrations; and he travelled through Hungary, Switzerland, and Bavaria, where he was made a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciencess at Munich in 1775. Mesmer also developed a taste for publicity. He staged and announced his cures in a manner that offended some of Vienna’s most influential doctors.

In 1777 an 18 year old, blind, female pianist, singer, and composer Maria-Theresa von Paradies, was brought to Mesmer. Her father had close relations to the court of the empress dowager, Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary, with whom the girl was a favorite. The girl had been blind since birth, but no physician had been able to find anything wrong with her eyes.

Under the hands of Mesmer, mademoiselle Paradies gradually regained the sight she supposedly never had. She recovered her sight after treatment by Mesmer, despite the fact that she had been under the care of Europe's leading eye specialist for ten years without improvement.

From the medical world of Vienna people flocked to witness this "miracle", and Mesmer enjoyed a period of interst in and respect for his epoch-making methods. But then the patient, who had received an artist's scholarship from the empress, lost her ability to play the piano during the therapy, possibly due to the inundation of visual stimuli ruining her nerves. Influenced by jealous doctors, the child's mother took her away from Mesmer's care before the cure was complete. In an emotional scene, the mother struck her child across the face because she resisted leaving Mesmer's clinic, and the hysterical blindness reasserted itself.

The result obtained by Mesmer in his treatment of the blind pianist, seen in hindsight, was probably a result of the effect of hypnosis in psychotherapy. Mesmer's fiercest opponents in this case were doctor Anton Freiherr von Stoerck (1731-1803), life physician to the empress Maria Theresia (1717-1780) and emperor Franz I (1708-1765, reigned from 1745); and the eye specialist Joseph Barth (1745-1818).

Mesmer’s Paris’ career and mesmeric fluid

Eventually accused of the practice of magic, Mesmer decided to leave Austria and also his wife, who did not accompany him through the later episodes of his career.

The next and most spectacular episode began with Mesmer’s arrival in Paris, France in February 1778. He set up a very lucrative clinic in the Place Vendôme and the nearby village of Créteil and then began an elaborate campaign to win recognition of his "discovery" from France’s leading scientific bodies.

Helped by some influential converts and an ever-ancreasing throng of patients who testified that they had been cured of everything from paralysis to what the French then called "vapeurs," Mesmer seized the public’s imagination and alienated the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, the Royal Society of Medicine, and the Academy of Sciences. His patrons, however, included Louis XVI (1754-1793) and members of the royal court.

The defenders of orthodox medicine took offense at what the public found most appealing about mesmerism - not its theory but its extravagant practices. Instead of bleeding and applying purgatives, the mesmerists ran their fingers over their patient’s bodies, searching out "poles" through which they infused mesmeric fluid.

Magnetic baquet

In 1779 Mesmer wrote Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, to which he appended his famous 27 Propositions. These propositions outlined his theory at that time.

According to his close friend d'Eslon, Mesmer understood health as the free flow of the process of life through thousands of channels in our bodies. Illness was caused by obstacles to this flow. Overcoming these obstacles and restoring flow produced crises, which restored health. When nature failed to do this spontaneously, contact with a conductor of animal magnetism was a necessary and sufficient remedy. Mesmer aimed to aid or provoke the efforts of nature. To cure an insane person, for example, involved causing a fit of madness. The advantage of magnetism involved accelerating such crises without danger.

By 1780, Mesmer had more patients than he could treat individually and he established a collective treatment known as the baquet. An English physician, who observed Mesmer, described the treatment as follows:

In the middle of the room is placed a vessel of about a foot and a half high which is called here a baquet. It is so large that twenty people can easily sit round it; near the edge of the lid which covers it, there are holes pierced corresponding to the number of persons who are to surround it; into these holes are introduced iron rods, bent at right angles outwards, and of different heights, so as to answer to the part of the body to which they are to be applied. Besides these rods, there is a rope which communicates between the baquet and one of the patients, and from him is carried to another, and so on the whole round. The most sensible effects are produced on the approach of Mesmer, who is said to convey the fluid by certain motions of his hands or eyes, without touching the person. I have talked with several who have witnessed these effects, who have convulsions occasioned and removed by a movement of the hand.

Later, Mesmer "magnetised" a tree, so that patients could be healed by holding ropes hanging from its branches. The most noticeable effect of these devices was to induce a "crisis"—convulsions. He reasoned that his own body acted as an animal type of magnet, reinforcing the fluid in the bodies of his patients. Mesmerizing broke through the obstacle by producing a "crisis," and then restoring "harmony," a state in which the body responded to the salubrious flow of fluid through all of nature.

Mesmerism becoming a cause célébre

Mesmerism presented itself to the French as a "natural" medicine at a time when the French cult of nature and the popular enthusiasm for science had reached a peak. Mesmer did not produce any proof of his theory or any rigorous description of experiments that could be repeated and verified by others; but, like contemporary chemists and physicists, he seemed able to put his invisible fluid to work.

Scores of Parisians fell into "crises" at the touch of Mesmer’s hand and recovered with a new sense of being at harmony with the world. The mesmerists published hundreds of carefully documented and even notarized case histories. And they produced an enormous barrage of propaganda, at least 200 books and pamphlets, more than were written on any single subject during the decade before the opening phase of the Revolution in 1789.

Thus mesmerism became a cause célébre, a movement which eventually eclipsed Mesmer himself. He limited his parts in the polemics to two pamphlets, written by or for him: Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal (1779) and Précis historique des faits relatifs au magnétisme animal (1781). The first contained twenty-seven rather vague propositions, which is as close as Mesmer came to systematizing his ideas. He left the system-building to his disciples, notably Nicolas Bergasse (1750-1832), who produced many of the articles and letters issued in Mesmer’s name as well as his own mesmeric treatise, Considérations sue le magnetisme animal (1784). The disciples also formed a sort of masonic secret society, the Société de l’harmonie universelle, which developed affiliates in most of France’s major cities.

At this society, Mesmer lectured and educated some 300 pupils, who soon were active in 40 societies all over France. Mesmer again achieved a tremendous success with the public, and with the subscription connected to his name by his pupils, he became a rich man . In 1785 one of his pupils, in a breach of confidence, published the doctrines of Mesmer, which were to be kept a secret (Aphorismes des M. Mesmer 1785).

Evaluation of Mesmer’s fluid theory

The spread of the new medicine alarmed not only the old doctors but also the government, and in 1784, on the initiative of king Louis XVI, a commission of the French Academy of Sciences was established to evaluate his practice. The commission was composed of distinguished doctors and academicians, including Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793), Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), Joseph-Ignace Guillotine (1738-1814),and Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).

The report of the commission concluded that far from being able to cure disease, Mesmer’s fluid did not exist. They termed him a deceiver and ascribed Mesmer's "healings" to the fantasy of the individual, and physicians using his method were threatened with the loss of their practice. The only member of the commission to speak for Mesmer was the famous botanist Adran Laurent de Jussieu. Another report, of the Royal Medical Society, presented the same conclusion. The report badly damaged the movement, which later dissolved into schisms and heresies. In 1785 Mesmer was forced to leave the city, leaving his followers to their quarrels.

Mesmer’s downfall in France

Despite his bellicose colleagues from the commission, however, it was the French revolution that ruined Mesmer’s practice. During the revolution he lost his entire fortune and fled to England. After a period of travelling through England, Austria, Germany, and Italy, he settled in Switzerland, where he spent most of the last thirty years of his life in relative seclusion. During 1792/1793 he was in Karlsruhe, then in Wagenhausen bei Stein am Rhein and some other places in Switzerland.

In 1798 Mesmer returned to France in order to attempt to regain his fortune. In 1802 he moved to Versaille and made a settlement with the French government, which granted him a small pension.

In 1803 Mesmer left France for good, first living in Meersburg am Bodensee, and then retired to Frauenfeld in Thurgau, where he, forgotten, practiced medicine in all quiet from 1807. Here he seems to have led a quiet and contented life, doing a little medicine, playing his glass harmonica, and remaining detached from the outside world.

Mesmer’s second career in Germany

In the meantime, however, animal magnetism was practiced as a therapy all over Germany. In 1812, professor Karl Christian Wolfart (1778-1832) from Berlin visited the lonely Mesmer at the request of the Prussian government in order to be educated in his methods. At the same time Johann Ferdinand Koreff (1783-1851) was already in Paris on a similar mission.

Wolfart remained Mesmer’s staunchest supporter, and instigated the printing of Mesmer’s main work, Mesmerismus, oder System der Wechselwirkungen, . . . in Berlin in 1814.

In 1814 the Abbe Faria suggested that the phenomena described by Mesmer were not due to animal magnetism, but actually due to suggestions. However, the popularity of Mesmer was so well established that Faria's hypothesis was soon forgotten.

In the early nineteenth century animal magnetism was in high fashion in Germany, where his system of therapeutics, mesmerism, had numerous adherents in all walks of society, and influenced both natural philosophy and Romanticism.

Mesmer’s legacy and open questions

Although many of his learned contemporaries regarded Mesmer's practice as quackery, his theory of animal magnetism laid the foundations of modern hypnosis and suggestion therapy.

As a scientific theory mesmerism offered only a thin and unoriginal assortment of ideas. Although Mesmer’s own writings contained little sustained theorizing, they provided enough for his enemies to detect all manners of occultist and vitalisstic influences and to align him with William Maxwell, the Scottish physician, author of De Medicina Magnetica (1779), Robert Fludd (1574-1637), Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1577-1644), and Paracelsus (1493-1541) - when they did not categorize him with Cagliostro.

This version of his intellectual ancestry seems convinving enough, if one adds Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and Richard Mead to the list.

But nothing proves that Mesmer was a charlatan. He seems to have believed sincerely in his theory, although he also showed a fierce determination to convert it into cash: he charged ten louis a month for the use of his «tubs; and he made a fortune from the Société de l’Harmonie Universelle, which, in return, claimed exclusive proprietorship of his deepest «secrets».

Later groups of hypnotists, particularly the mesmeric sects of Lyons and Strasbourg, abandoned the hypothesis of a cosmic fluid. In the nineteenth century hypnosis, shorn of Mesmer’s cosmology and perfected by James Braid and Jean-Martin Charcot, became an accepted medical practice; one should always remember Charcot's seminal influence on the, later, best-selling author, physician, psychiatrist and physician to the Swedish Royal Family, Axel Munthe of The Story of San Michele fame.

And finally, through Charcot’s impact on Freud, mesmerism exerted some influence on the development of psychoanalysis, another unorthodox product of the Viennese school.

One of those who embraced Mesmerism was John Elliotson (1791-1868), who was also a convinced follower of Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828). Elliotson advocated the doctrines of these two gentlemen in his own magazine, The Zoits, A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism and Their Application to human welfare.

References

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• Anonymous,Life and death of animal magnetism, Lancet, 1838, pp. 834-836.
• Anonymous, Mesmeric quackery. Lancet, 1848, pp. 45-46.
• Anonymous,Report of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the London Mesmeric Infirmary.

Library of the Royal College of Physicians, London, 1856.

• Bersot, Ernest, Mesmer et le magnétisme animal, Paris, 1853; 4th edition, 1879.
• Bergasse, Nicolas, Betrachtungen über den thierischen Magnetismum oder die Theorie der Welt und der organirsirten Wesen nach denen Grundsatzen des Hrn. Mesmer, nebst des Hrn. Marquis von Chatellux ... Gedanken uber die Bewegung. Mit einer Vorrede von Herrn H. M. Grafen v. Bruhl .

Dresden, In der Churfurstl. Hofbuchdruckerey [etc.] 1790. 146 pages.

• Bloch, G.,Mesmerism - A Translation of the Original and Scientific Writings of F. A. Mesmer, William Kaufmann Inc., Ca. 1980.
• Bramwell, Milne, Hypnotism: Its History, Practice and Theory, London, William Rider & Son Ltd, 1921.
• Crabtree, A.,Animal magnetism, early hypnosis, and psychical research, 1771-1925.

An annotated bibliography, , Kraus International Publications, White Plains N.Y. 1988 ( Describes 1905 works, mostly with detailed annotations)

• Dessoir, M., Vom Jenseits der Seele. Stuttgart, 1917.
• Fritschen, Friedrich, Tierischer Magnetismus und Medizin. Dissertation, Berlin, 1870.
• Kaplan F.,Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction,Princeton University Press, 1975.
• Kaplan, F.,John Elliotson on Mesmerism , Da Capo Press, New York 1982.
• Kerner, A. J. C.(1786-1862),Franz Anton Mesmer, der Entdecker des thierischen Magnetismus.

Frankfurt am Main, 1856.

• Kiesewetter C.,Frans Anton Mesmer’s Leben und Lehre, Leipzig, 1893.
• Mead, Richard (1673-1754),De imperio solis ac lunae in corpora humana et morbis inde oriundis. London, 1704.
• Lehmann, Aberglaube und Zauberei, German by Petersen, Stuttgart, 1908.
• Mesner, F.A., Dissertatio physico-medica de planetarum influxu in corpus humanum.

Doctoral dissertation, 1766.

• Mesner, F.A., Schreiben über die Magnetkur. np. 1766.
• Mesner, F.A., Sendschreiben über die Magnetkur an einen auswärtigen Arzt. Vienna, 1775.

The physician was Johann Christoph Unzer in Altona. This letter-paper went into several reprints.

• Mesner, F.A., Zweites Schreiben an das Publikum.

Appendix to the Wien Diarium, Nr. 6, January 21, 1775.

• Mesner, F.A., Drittes Schreiben an die Frankfurter. 1775.

French translation in the Journal encyclopédique, 1776; 4, 2: 324.

• Mesner, F.A., Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal.

Pamphlet. Geneva and Paris, 1779. German translation, Karlsruhe, 1781; also published in French in Karlsruhe.

• Mesner, F.A., Précis historique des faits relatifs au magnétisme animal jusqu’en avril 1781.

Pamphlet. London, 1781 (Translated into German, Karlsruhe, 1783).

• Mesner, F.A., Sammlung der neuesten gedruckten und geschriebenen Nachrichten von Magnet-Curen vorzüglich der Mesmerischen, Leipzig, 1798 ( Summing up his letter-papers of 1775 and 1776 )
• Mesner, F.A., Mémoires de F. A. Mesmer . . . sur ses découvertes.

Paris, 1799; 2nd French edition, Paris, 1826.. German translation; Jena, 1800.

• Mesner, F.A., Über den Ursprung und die wahre Natur der Pocken, sowie über die Möglichkeit der gänzlichen Ausrottung durch die einzig richtige Verfahrensart bei der Geburt.

Halle and Berlin, 1812.

• Mesner, F.A., Mesmerismus oder System der Wechselwirkungen, Theorie und Anwendung des thierischen Magnetismus als die allgemeine Heilkunde zur Erhaltung des Menschen.

( Mesmer’s main oeuvre, published on the instigation of Karl Christian Wolfart, Berlin, 1814. His description of the case of Maria Theresa Paradis is in chapter 11)

• Mesner, F.A., Allgemeine Erläuterungen über den Magnetismus und den Somnambulismus. Karlsruhe 1815 (This pamphlet on hypnosis, sleepwalking, and posthypnotic suggestion first appeared in 1812, three years before Mesmer's death and long after his medical practice had been put to an end )
• Mesner, F.A., Aphorismes de M. Mesmer, published by one of his pupils in Paris, 1785.

Reprinted several times and translated into German (Strasbourg, 1785).

• Pezold, Johann Nathanael (1739-1812),Versuche mit dem thierischen Magnetismus.

Archiv für die Physiologie, Halle, 1797; 2. Band, 1. Heft, pp. 1-18

• Podmore F., Mesmerism and Christian Science, Methuen and Co, London 1909.
• Scholz, W.: Mesmer. Zukunft, 1902, 10, p. 34
• Schürer-Waldheim, Anton Mesmer, ein Naturforscher ersten Ranges, sein Leben und Wirken. Seine Lehre vom tierischen Magnetismus und ihr Schicksal, Vienna, XVII, 1930.
• Sierke, Schwärmer und Schwindler zu Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1974.
• Tischner, R., Frans Anton Mesmer. Leben, Werk und Wirkungen, München, 1928.
• Tinterow, M. M.,Foundations of Hypnosis from Mesmer to Freud, Illinois, Charles C. Thomas, 1970, pp. 209-211
• Winter,Etheral epidemic mesmerism and the introduction of inhalation anaesthesia to early Victorian London, Society for the History of Medicine, 1991, 4, pp.7-8.
• Wurm, Darstellung der mesmerischen Heilmethod, München, 1857.
• Zweig, Stefan, Die Heilung durch den Geist, Leipzig, 1931, pp. 31-143.

External Link

• Mesmer's 27 Propositions <http://www.unbf.ca/psychology/likely/readings/mesmer.htm>
• Mesmer's 27 Propositions (Via archive.org)
• Pictorial web-exhibit based on a handful of works from the Bakken’s extensive collection of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and journals documenting the mesmerist movement.
• Memoires de Mesmer digitalized copy of Mesmer's memories written by himself (original version - in French)

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