WHO WAS DR MESMER?

Evening Star, Issue 21823, 12 September 1934, Page 10

WHO WAS DR MESMER?

INFLUENCE OF MIND ON BODY IN HEALING [By Hamilton- Ftfb, in ‘John o’ London’s Weekly.’] In one of Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s books about Labrador he tells of a fisherman who went to him complaining of toothache. He pointed out the tooth and asked the doctor to charm the pain away. Grenfell laughed. He knew all about the islanders’ superstitions. He knew they distrusted his treatment (they soon got over that). “ I haven’t got any charms,” he said. “ You’d better have the tooth out.” The man refused. “ Why won’t you charm it?” he asked plaintively. “Is it because I am a Roman Catholic?” Grenfell laughed again. “ Come here, then,” he said, and he put his finger on the tooth, ready to take it out again quickly, for the fisherman had jaws like a crocodile. As he touched the painful spot he muttered any nonsensical gibberish that came into his head. The patient walked about for a few minutes. Then he declared the pain had gone. He met the doctor months afterwards and assured him it had never returned.

Ten thousand years ago that would have been called magic. Two thousand years ago men would have said it was a divine miracle. A hundred and fifty years ago such cures were attributed to' “ animal magnetism.” Now we say they are due to the influence of the mind over the body. There is growing up a science of psychology as distinct from physiology. The latter _is concerned with our “ phusis,” which literally means nature, but has come to mean our bodies. The former deals with the “psyche,” often translated “ soul,” though it really denotes the part which (as we say) thinks, reflects, directs. It may. be that in time phusis and psyche will be recognised as one. ANIMAL MAGNETISM.

If this book (‘ Franz Anton Mesmer, the Story of an Idea,’ by Margaret Goldsmith (Barker, 10s), is read with all that in mind, it is of enthralling interest. But I am bound to say that readers of it must supply a good deal of the interest themselves. As a life of Mesmer, it is tedious. Miss Goldsmith has immense industry but little discrimination, and no charm of style. She leaves to a few hurried chapters at the end the development of Mesmer’s theories, which is really all that matters. In themselves the theories were rubbish, or at any rate his. deductions from them were. He imagined a mysterious, invisible fluid permeating the universe and influencing animal bodies, and he thought this might be in its turn influenced by magnets. Hence the hardly be said of his memory) by being term animal magetism, by which his method of treatment was known.

If you asked a dozen people who Dr Mesmer was they would probably look blankly at you. One of them might ask: “ Did he invent mesmerism?” He certainly did not invent it, but he stumbled by accident on the possibility of “ putting people to sleep ” by movements with the hands or by making them stare at a bright object. However, he made little use of this; he did not bother his head about it. So his name is kept alive (though that can hardly b said of his memory) by being connected with a sideline of his lifework to which he attached no importance whatever. FAITH AND COLOURED WATER. This German physician of the eighteenth century was like a mining prospector who, in searching for iron, finds gold and does not recognise it. We are learning slowly that medicine can do little for a great many of those who suffer unless the sufferer can be induced to collaborate with the medicine man—or unless, as in the case of Dr Grenfell and the fisherman with toothache, the medicine man consents to collaborate with the patient. If a person believes that he can be cured by a “ charm,” it would be foolish and cruel to refuse to cure him that way, though it would be wise to try to explain to him how the remedy really ■worked. If a doctor sees that the best hope for a patient lies in a bottle of coloured water and a firm belief in its value, he ought to prescribe that. How far drugs can be altogether superseded is by no means yet established. Miss Goldsmith recalls an experience of Dr Quinby, the American magnetist who is sometimes called the inventor of Christian Science, though Mrs Eddy repudiated the idea that she had got the idea of it from him:— “ Quinby had occasionally prescribed drugs, as well as the restoring trance, to his patients. When the afflicted were poor and could not afford expensive medicines he recommended less costly and less potent mixtures. To his surprise he discovered that the poor profited quite as much from the weaker prescriptions as the rich did' from the stronger ones. He came to the logical conclusion that the sick people’s faith in his cure had a greater therapeutic effect than the drugs or any other part of the magnetic treatment he gave them. By the late ’fifties, therefore, he had given up the use of drugs altogether. To a certain extent, also, he had really abandoned animal magnetism; for when he now called himself a faith healer he referred to the patient’s faith and not his own.” CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALISM. Here was the embryo of Christian Ssienee, which was thus in direct descent from Mesmer’s teaching. For Quinby learned his method from a Frenchman who had been a pupil of one of Mesmer’s earliest disciples. Mrs Eddy had been cured by Quinby of a mysterious illness that had kept her in bed for seven years, hut she maintained that she had “ laid the foundation stones of healing ” before she made his acquaintance. At all events, it was her compound of faith healing with Christianity and what she called “ the scientific outlook ” which made the new religion popular. This was, as Miss Goldsmith says, a stroke of genius:— “ In ere „ iug science with health by faith hea1...., Mrs Eddy made a successful appeal to the sick who wanted to restore their vigour, to the religious who clung to' Christianity, and to many who, despite a secret or avowed mysticism, were still haunted by a desire to appear scientific. Mrs Eddy was not only a remarkable judge of the public; she knew bow to propagate her creed as well. Even in the United States there have been few men or women more highly gifted than she was as a publicity agent.” Another development from Mesmer’s notions was Spiritualism. The first traces of this were to be found while he still lived (he did not die till 1814), but here again it was left to Americans to take the movement up and give it a wide appeal:— “ The growth of Spiritualism was slow on the European continent as compared with the rapid development of this sect in the

United States. The quick acceptance of it in the States was partly due to that passion of Americans for itinerant speakers, a passion which was as great a hundred years ago as it in to-day, when the performances of j these speakers are called lecture tours. It was from animal magnetism that spirit rapping and the other features of “seances” grew. “.With almost no exception the early American mesmerisers turned to Spiritualism in some form or other.” PSYCHO-ANALYSIS. Yet another growth from the theories which Mesmer put forward, and which the doctors of his day derided and endeavoured to suppress, was the use of hypnotism in treating disease; and it was a pupil of the famous Dr Charcot at the Salpetriere Institute for the Study of Nervous Diseases in Pans who did more than anyone to put “ mental therapy ” on the map. Therapy simply means healing. Freud it was who made the exploration of the subconscious mind and tbe liberation or it from some influence tbat affected the body, a recognised branch ot medical science:— “Apart from anything else, breud emancipated nervous disorders and psychological conflicts from moral values. A mental maladjustment, however d may be expressed in action, is an illness, and should not therefore be judged by standards of ‘ right or ‘ wrong.’ This new point of view is as important a contribution as the one Mesmer made when he separated cures without drugs from medieval superstitions. Mesmer actually did what the psychotherapists of to-day do—without knowing what he did:— “ There was a young peasant who had lost his hearing during a violent thunderstorm. Mesmer placed his hands over the youth’s ears for half an hour without speaking, and the peasant’s hearing was restored. There was a young Jew who suffered from convulsions of the chest, and was so weak that he had to bo brought in a carriage. Mesmer held his finger against the man’s chest, also without speaking, and repeated this treatment several days in succession. The young Jew was completely cured, and there is no question but that this was a permanent recovery.” Mesmer was suggesting in each case that the ailment was not really there. He was using his mind or his personality, or whatever ■we may call it, to disperse some malign influence in the patient’s mind. And he could do this without personal contact, even from an adjoining room. Now it .is not considered impossible that from long distances one person’s Unspoken thoughts may have an effect on the mind and body of another:— “ It is impossible to say that Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind are the end of the road which has led ns from Mesmer to modern conceptions. We do not know what lies beyond, for human beings have only begun to explore that new science known as psychology.” We may find that psychology and physiology, mind and body, are one.