Mesmer The Maligned Healer

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 25, 29 July 1933, Page 16

Mesmer The Maligned Healer

Some scientists seem destined to arouse throughout their lives the fervent admiration of the general public and the passionate dislike of their professional colleagues. Such a one was the founder of mesmerism—Franz Anton Mesnier, tlio . bi-centenary of whose birth, near the Lake of Constance, occurred recently, says the "Daily Mail."

The theory which was to perpetuate his name first appears in a dissertation written in 1766 for his degree at the University of Vienna. Its theme was the effect of the planets on the human body, and' in the course of it he is found maintaining the existence of a "subtle and mobile fluid," through which all organised bodies could be "affected" by the sun, moon, and stars.

His ideas soon found practical expression in a series of sensational "cures" which made him the most hated man in Vienna among membors of the medical profession. A final breach occurred when he restored the sight of Mine. Paradis, whose optic nerve had long been paralysed.

In disgust Mesmer moved to Paris, but he found there no abatement of professional jealousy. y Again and again the Royal Society of Medicino refused to test the genuineness of his amazing experiments. They were unmoved even by the case of a Major de Hussay, whom Mesmer's "animal magnetism" relieved of a bad headache, a paralysed tongue, an involuntary laugh, and. a drunkard's gait, and who experienced in turn, in the course of his cure, intense cold, great heat, and perspiration.

After , spmo abortive negotiations with Marie Antoinette, in the course of which he declined a pension of 20,000 francs a year, Mesmer found his experiment subjected to a Royal Commission of Inquiry. No charge of fraud was substantiated against, him, but" two out of the three Commissioners, while not denying Mesmer's results, found that they were due, not as he himself believed to the passage of some mysterious fluid, but rather to the "power of man to act upon man by* striking his imagination." In other words, for animal magnetism the Com-

mission substituted what we should now cajl simple suggestion. Mesmer's last years were not devoid of honour. The King of Prussia, having begged him in vain to settle in Berlin, appointed a Professor of Mesmerism and founded a hospital with 300 beds, where only mesmerism was permitted. In 1815 Mesmer passed peacefully away in Switzerland. Mesmer liked to effect cures by the uso of the hands alone, but the vast extent of his clientele compelled him to resort to the "baquet"—a large oak tub filled with magnetised water, round which his patients sat, maintaining magnetic contact by holding on to iron rods projecting from the tulp. ■ The "baquet," the silk rig-out in which he officiated, and occasional musical accompaniments laid Mesmer apento the charge of charlatanry. But whatever modern science may think of his animal magnetism and subtle fluid, there is no disputing the historical authenticity of his cures.