His name became a verb. To be mesmerised is to be held spellbound, and that is exactly what Franz Anton Mesmer did to the fashionable society of two great cities. He was celebrated, mocked, investigated by a king, and died in obscurity. He was also completely wrong about what he was doing, and started something that mattered anyway.
Early life
Mesmer was born on 23 May 1734 in Iznang, a village near Lake Constance in what is now southern Germany, the son of a forester. He studied at Jesuit universities and then, from 1759, took up medicine at the University of Vienna.
His doctoral dissertation of 1766 was titled On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body. It argued that the moon and planets affect health through an invisible fluid, in the way the moon moves the tides. The idea stayed with him for life.
In 1768 he married a wealthy widow, which brought him into Viennese high society. He was a keen music lover and an acquaintance of the Mozart family.
Animal magnetism
In the 1770s Mesmer began treating patients with magnets, having heard of others doing so. He soon decided the magnets were unnecessary and that he himself could direct the force with his hands.
He called it animal magnetism: a natural energy passing between all living and non-living things. Illness, he believed, came from blockages in its flow, and a “crisis”, often a convulsion or faint, restored it.
The Paradis affair
In 1777 an 18-year-old pianist, Maria Theresia von Paradis, was brought to him. She had been blind since early childhood, was a favourite of the Empress, and had spent ten years under the leading eye specialist in Europe without improvement.
Under Mesmer’s treatment she reportedly began to regain some sight. Then matters turned sour. There were disputes with her family and with the medical establishment, the improvement did not last, and the affair became a scandal. In 1778 Mesmer left Vienna for Paris.
Paris
In Paris he became a sensation. To treat many patients at once he devised the baquet: a large wooden tub filled with water, iron filings and glass, with iron rods protruding. Patients sat round it, holding the rods and each other’s hands, in a dim room with soft music. Mesmer moved among them in a lilac robe, touching them with a wand or his hands. Many fell into convulsions and were carried to a padded “crisis room.”
The aristocracy flocked to him. Doctors were scandalised.
The investigation
In 1784 King Louis XVI appointed commissions to examine animal magnetism. One included Benjamin Franklin, then American ambassador, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
They ran a series of careful tests, including blindfolding subjects so they could not tell whether they were being “magnetised.” People responded when they believed it was happening, whether or not it was, and did not respond when they were magnetised without knowing.
The commission concluded that there was no magnetic fluid and that the effects were due to imagination.
Mesmer’s reputation collapsed. He left Paris, spent years moving around Europe, and eventually settled near the lake where he was born. He died on 5 March 1815 in Meersburg, aged 80.
What he got wrong
- There is no magnetic fluid.
- The planets do not influence health through one.
- Convulsions are not a route to cure.
- He claimed to treat conditions that suggestion cannot touch.
What he stumbled on
- People respond powerfully to expectation, ritual and a confident healer.
- Real changes in symptoms can follow, particularly in conditions affected by the mind.
- The relationship between healer and patient matters. Mesmer called it rapport, and the word is still used.
- Setting is part of treatment. The dim room, the music and the robe were theatre, and theatre works.
The commission thought it had debunked him. In fact it had run one of the first controlled experiments in medicine and demonstrated the power of suggestion. It took another century to see that as a finding and not merely an exposure.
From mesmerism to hypnosis
Mesmer’s followers carried on. One of them, the Marquis de Puységur, noticed that some subjects entered a calm, sleep-like state in which they could talk and respond, with no convulsions. He called it artificial somnambulism. It is much closer to what we now call hypnosis.
In the 1840s the Manchester surgeon James Braid threw out the magnetic theory, explained the phenomena by attention and suggestion, and gave hypnotism its name.
Why the story matters
The pattern has repeated ever since: a real effect, a mistaken explanation, extravagant claims, and a backlash that discards the effect along with the explanation. It is worth remembering whenever a new method appears with a confident theory attached. The effect and the theory need judging separately.
The bottom line
Mesmer was a showman with a false theory. He was also the first person to make a systematic practice out of something real: the capacity of expectation and attention to change what people experience. We are still working out the details.
Next in the series: Paris vs Nancy: The Feud That Decided What Hypnosis Is
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.