For many, a salon healer in the twilight of the Old Regime; to others, a visionary of the Hippocratic arts. Franz Anton Mesmer came into the world in the spring of 1734 in Meersburg, an idyllic town located on the shores of Lake Constance. The son of a humble forester in what is now Germany, he was educated first in his native Swabia, then in neighboring Bavaria, and finally in Vienna, from whose prestigious university he earned his doctorate in medicine in 1766.
Once graduated, he opened a practice. For this he had the generous support of a wealthy widow older than him, mother of an adult son, whom he ended up marrying. His marriage to Anna Maria von Posch allowed him to lead a more than comfortable life. He enjoyed luxuries such as a superb baroque mansion in the vicinity of Vienna, endowed with gardens with sculptures, a marble pool and even a small theater.
A lover of the arts, the young doctor allowed himself the aristocratic pleasure of exercising patronage there. He became a patron and friend of Haydn, Mozart and Gluck, as well as a glass harmonica player himself, and not bad in Amadeus’s father’s opinion.
The patient who would mark a before and after for the doctor went to that artistic home one day. Franziska Österlin suffered from what at that time was diagnosed as hysteria or melancholy, depending on whether it presented more frenzied or languid manifestations. Her crises included, randomly, everything from vomiting, otitis, blindness, spasms and fainting to phenomena of a more psychiatric nature, such as depressive and hallucinatory symptoms.
Dr. Mesmer cared for Franziska for a couple of years in the conventional way. That is to say, with procedures as useless, painful and strenuous as bleeding, plasters, emetics and enemas. Until, fed up with making her suffer without results, he decided to approach it from a perspective that today would be described as alternative medicine. He made her drink a preparation with iron filings, and then he applied magnets to her neuralgic points. To everyone’s surprise and joy, the woman herself felt much better.
Actually, it was not a new technique. Magnetotherapy had already been lauded two centuries earlier by the physician and alchemist Paracelsus. It was also being tested by the manufacturer of the special instruments used by the German doctor, the Jesuit astronomer Maximilian Hell.
Nor was Mesmer’s penchant for healing innovations recent. His doctoral thesis, in fact, had been entitled On the influence of the planets on the human body. It was a therapeutic adaptation, perhaps too free, of Newtonian gravity. Especially from the astral influence on the tides, which the doctor transferred to the organic.
Coinciding with his relationship with Maximilian Hell and Franziska’s improvement, his theory of animal gravitation had evolved into a version based more on the physics of magnets. But shortly after, as he stated in a new essay in 1775, he would take another turn, the definitive one.
Perhaps due to the influence of the Hungarian priest, although changing spirituality for scientism and surpassing magnetotherapy, Mesmer affirmed that the healing power was an inner force. That vital energy was present in all forms of life, but in some beings more than in others. In himself, without going any further, it was exceptionally intense. With which he could restore balance, that is, health, to whom the internal fluid did not circulate well, an obstruction that caused all illness. He had been born, in short, what he baptized as animal magnetism.
Unfortunately for him, when he wanted to share this extraordinary progress with the Vienna medical establishment, he ran into a wall of misunderstanding. Although not everyone thought he was a charlatan. The Magyar baron Hareczky, for example, was able to forget about his chronic asthma after barely half an hour of Mesmer’s laying on of hands. When word got out about him, he had no choice but to adapt his alternative therapy to group formats.
In his palace on the outskirts, converted into a clinic, he rubbed himself against the trees to magnetize them. He also magnetized clothes, dishes, and drinking and bathing water, as well as filling the pool with iron filings and magnets.
The patients were also reenergized in circles with magnetized wands in the garden and in group sessions in the living room, with dim lights, mirrors and the ghostly music of the glass harmonica. People were going into convulsions, rolling their eyes, waving their arms, and screaming uncontrollably. But after these kidnappings they said they really felt better.
The doctor was weighed down, however, by the contempt of his peers. Hence, he accepted an unprecedented challenge. He took as a patient, from 1776 to 1777, the young pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis, trained by Salieri and performer of concertos recently written by Haydn and Mozart.
Mesmer managed to increase her visual perception, despite the fact that she was blind since she was little. But for her treatment, the virtuous, eighteen-year-old, had to live at the doctor’s house and accept that he placed her hands in unseemly places such as the breasts, epigastrium, and genitals.
Her father also did not see fit to put the pension he received for his daughter’s disability at risk. He was the Secretary of Commerce of the Empress Maria Teresa. So the girl’s previous doctor was quick to diagnose her as blind as ever, while Mesmer fled with the police on his heels.
The following year he reappeared in France, in charge of a small magnetotherapy center in the city of Créteil. However, soon after, his fame earned him clients enough to settle in a sumptuous mansion in neighboring Paris. There he flew to book hours the aristocracy of Versailles, always eager for news. In order to care as much as possible for these powdered patients, Mesmer devised around 1780 an elegant parlor version of his Viennese magnetized pool.
As Dr. Tomás Pinós details, it was a large metal vat that was filled with “magnetized” water and iron filings. “From the baquet –this contraption– twenty or more metal rods came out that the patient held at the other end” or placed in contact with the affected area of ??the body. In a circle around the device, everyone “had to establish contact by means of the thumb of one hand in the hand of the neighbor. It was what was called a “mesmeric chain.”
In addition to enjoying prosperity in Paris, Mesmer published some memoirs on the foundations of animal magnetism and added two priceless signings to his followers. A respectable doctor, Dr. Charles d’Eslon, and Queen Marie Antoinette herself, who assigned him a succulent life annuity.
This streak of fortune would be marred, however, by the persistent apprehension of the academy, ridicule of public opinion and, most seriously, an investigation ordered by Louis XVI. This did not obey so much, perhaps, Mesmer’s curious method as his inopportune republican whims in a France already in clear pre-revolutionary tension.
The committee of scholars commissioned to examine animal magnetism in 1784 was brimming with talent. Its nine members included electrical fluid expert and United States Newborn Ambassador Benjamin Franklin. Also the father of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier. And even the doctor Joseph Guillotin, five years before becoming famous, much to his regret, for promoting a machine to execute in the most painless way possible.
After analyzing reports and evidence, conducting independent tests, and listening to Dr. D’Eslon’s mesmerist plea, the royal commission concluded that the existence of animal magnetism could not be confirmed, as it is an imperceptible fluid. He conceded, however, that the German doctor had cured or relieved the sick. In this, he stressed the importance of suggestion, “that great power that moves and controls patients” and that “resides in the magnetist.”
Mesmer fell out of favor. His colleagues ended up turning their backs on him and he fell out of favor with the aristocracy. To top it off, the pianist Von Paradis reappeared, blind as a bat, and, to all this, the general ridicule turned fierce.
He tried to reopen his practice in Vienna, but was prevented by the police. He ended his days where he had begun them, facing Lake Constance, perhaps as a country doctor. He passed away in 1815 without further ado, but the seeds he had sown in Vienna and Paris would continue to germinate. In a somewhat strange way, like everything in Mesmer, they would somehow reach the present.
Mesmer set a valuable precedent in dynamic psychiatry, one that studies emotional processes and their origins based on underlying mental mechanisms, not observable behaviors and symptoms as in the descriptive one.
A disciple of his developed, from his magnetic cures, what he called the “convulsive dream”. The Marquis de Puységur managed to put a young shepherd to sleep on his property in Buzancy. This obeyed any order that was given to him in trance. The aristocrat optimized this technique, which he called mesmeric, until he managed to get the subjects to act upon awakening according to instructions given during “artificial sleepwalking.”
He also began to facilitate healing with this mental induction. It would receive another name when it was retaken half a century later, at the end of the 19th century. Paris and then Vienna would be, precisely, its main focuses. It was due to practitioners of hypnotherapy such as neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet or to a certain Sigmund Freud.
This text is part of an article published in number 658 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
