MESMERISM

When he arrived in Paris in February 1778, the Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) introduced a new healing art that rapidly became a transatlantic sensation. Theorizing that all natural bodies were permeated by a rarified fluid akin to electricity or magnetism, Mesmer argued that illness was the product of obstructions in the flow of this fluid. The task of the physician, then, was to manipulate these fluids by massaging and manipulating the bodily "poles" to overcome blockages and restore the natural electromagnetic flow. Sometimes en masse, patients responded dramatically to mesmeric treatment, falling into convulsive fits (the "crisis") that signaled the cure.

Mesmerism's authority stemmed from its mingling of the science of electrical theory with familiar notions of bodily balance. Although it developed a strong following among the French elite and among social reformers, it remained controversial. Worried by its reputed connection with political radicals, a skeptical Louis XVI appointed a commission of eminent scientists in 1784 to investigate its claims. Headed by Benjamin Franklin, the commission ultimately concluded that although some patients had indeed improved, the phenomena were merely a product of the "force of imagination." When asked by his grandson whether this report would be the end of mesmerism, however, Franklin was doubtful. "Deceptions as absurd," he wrote, "have supported themselves for ages."

As Franklin predicted, mesmerism flourished despite the verdict, diversifying in theory, practice, and application. Even as many practitioners clung to some version of a universal fluid that was analogous (or equivalent) to electricity and magnetism, others charted new theoretical terrain. By the 1820s almost the only feature uniting mesmerists and their peers, animal magnetists and electrical physicians, was the contention that the mind was capable of sympathetically exerting influence on other bodies and minds. In the United States, mesmerism found particularly fertile ground. From the time that the Marquis de Lafayette delivered a paper on the subject before the American Philosophical Society in 1781, it swelled in popularity, reaching its apex during the 1830s and 1840s.

Instead of crises, however, American somnambules (the subjects of animal magnetism) exhibited a range of remarkable phenomena that seemed to confirm the reality of the universal fluid predicted by Mesmer. Some were brought into a cataleptic state so profound as to permit them to undergo surgery without experiencing pain. Others entered a state of mutual sensation with their mesmerists, and still others exhibited the capacity to read thoughts, to experience religious ecstasy, to see and diagnose illnesses within others, or to make clairvoyant voyages to other cities or planets. Most famously, the "Poughkeepsie seer," Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), experienced visions of the afterlife and other worlds while mesmerized that echoed the visions of the Swedish scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Davis would become an important figure in the Spiritualist movement of the 1850s. In short, mesmerism promised a world of unseen sympathetic connections between individuals and became a powerful means of conceptualizing nature and society and the relations of individuals within society.

The antebellum years, however, also marked a significant juncture in the history of animal magnetism. Although it remained enormously popular, it was increasingly marginalized by the medical community, its practices coopted and incorporated into the new field of hypnotism.

bibliography

Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1968.

Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Robert S. Cox