Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer
Around 1770, a physician from Austria, Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), investigated an effect that he coined “Animal Magnetism” (as in the Magnetism of living beings), later to be called “Mesmerism”.
Legend has it that Mesmer was a student of Father Hell and obtained his first magnets from him. It is well accepted that Mesmer acknowledged the healing work Father Hell. *21. In 1774 Mesmer for the first time had witnessed Animal Magnetism when he watched Father Hell apply Magnets to the bodies of persons suffering from various ailments. An early medical influence of his may have been the fifteenth-century book by physician Dr. Thomas Fienus.
Mesmer developed his own theory and experiments; he would wave a magnet at a person; many would believe they were cured. Mesmer was limited by the size of magnet, so he rubbed a stick and concluded that the stick was now magnetized. He could use the stick to point at a crowed of people. Soon after, he discovered that he didn’t really need the stick and attributed the healing ability to an “Animal Magnetism”.
Mesmer became a popular person in France especially within the French aristocracy for his use of Magnetism to cure illness. Mesmer’s popularity was wide enough that on March 1784 the king of France Louis XVI appointed a Royal Commission to investigate Mesmer’s claims. This commission included well-known individuals such as the chemist Lavoisier who recognized and discovered Oxygen and Hydrogen, Benjamin Franklin one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America and Joseph Ignace Guillotin who was a French physician that opposed the death penalty and proposed a machine that beheads painlessly.
Dr. d’Eslon & the Royal Commission
This Royal Comission could be the first placebo controlled experiment in the history of healing. This experiment was put together by Benjamin Franklin in which his Mesmer’s disciple Dr d’Eslon Magnetized a tree and it was shown that a blindfolded patient showed as much response to a non Magnetized (or non-prepared) tree as to one that had been Magnetized. Mesmer himself refused to cooperate with this investigation. As a result of this experiment, the Board of Inquiry commission declared that Mesmerism worked by the action of the imagination.
Mesmer retired to Switzerland in obscurity where he died in 1815. Even though Magnetism was forgotten during the French Revolution, Mesmerism and Magnetic therapies remained fairly known in history; even today some Magnetic therapies remain popular as a form of alternative medicine.
The concept of Mesmerism introduced the idea that people, and the social order at large, were “suggested” and thus could be changed or over turned. It is worth noting, that many of the first Mesmerists were also signatories to the first declarations proclaiming the French revolution in 1789.
