Mesmerism

MESMERISM

“a natural influence between celestial bodies, the earth, and animated bodies; that this influence has as its agent a fluid universally diffused and of incomparable susceptibility, apt to receive, to propagate, to communicate, all the impressions of motion; that, thanks to this fluid, which he can manage as he wills, the physician will be enlightened on the use of medicines; he will perfect new actions, and will excite and direct salutary crises in such a manner as to become a master of them.”

Also known as 'animal magnetism', but given the name Mesmerism after its founder, Franz Anton Mesmer, by his followers.

Mesmerism is a curative/therapeutic concept - whereby Mesmer believed that by manipulating the liquid substance that is present in all matter, spiritual and earthly, he could cure all ills. His work found popularity in France - it seemed to offer science and progress, as well as appealing to religion and magic - the former and the latter were not such "strange bedfellows" during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, there was still much controversy, and pamphlet war surrounding the concept. In England, unlike in France, belief in mesmerism failed to take hold for around the first forty years of the nineteenth century, until it became allied with the increasingly popular science of phrenology (the measuring of the skull to reveal certain character traits and intellectual faculties). Advocated by Dr. John Elliotson, chair of the London Phrenological Society, he began in 1837 to experiment with mesmerism on the ward on patients and held public exhibitions supposedly displaying the wonders of mesmerism. This incited much controversy, with The Lancet publication maintaining the notion of mesmerism as "quackery". The pressures of this controversy eventually caused Elliotson to resign his post, and stop his public propounding of Mesmer's theories.

An article on Mesmerism from the British Medical Journal in 1873 presents the science as almost completely discredited, appearing sometimes under different names, but largely now a thing of the past. The author of the article confirms that "no magnetizer has ever been able to demonstrate that he possessed any action on certain persons", and that "the magnetic theory does not rest on any scientific basis." It seems that by the end of the nineteenth century in England, Mesmer's theories had failed to take substantial hold on the medical and scientific community.