Mesmer, Franz Antoine
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
An Austrian doctor, born at Weil about the year 1733. In 1766 he took a degree in medicine Metempsychosis at Vienna, the subject of his inaugural thesis being De planetarum Influxu (De l'influence des Planettes sur le corps humain). The influence of the planets he identified with magnetism. On seeing the remarkable cures of Gassner he supposed that the magnetic force must also reside in the human body, and thereupon dispensed with magnets. In 1778 he went to Paris where he was very favourably received-by the public, that is, for the medical authorities there, as elsewhere, refused to countenance him. His method was to seat his patients round a large circular vat or baquet, in which various substances were mixed. Each patient held one end of an iron rod, the other end of which was in the baquet. In due time the crisis ensued. Violent convulsions, cries, laughter, and various physical symptoms followed, these being in turn superseded by lethargy. Many claimed to have been healed by this method. In 1784 the government appointed a commission of members of the Faculté de Médecine, the Societé Royale de Médecine, and the Academy of Sciences, the commissioners from the latter body including Franklin, Bailly, and Lavoisier. The report of the Committee stated, in effect, that there was no such thing as animal magnetism, and referred the facts of the crisis to the imagination of the patient. It had the effect of quenching to a considerable extent the public interest in mesmerism, as animal magnetism was called, for the time at least, though it was afterwards to be revived. Mesmer died in 1815.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The biography still broadly stands, though modern scholarship dates Mesmer's birth precisely to 23 May 1734 at Iznang on Lake Constance rather than "Weil about the year 1733." What has shifted most is the standing of the 1784 royal commission the Encyclopaedia of Occultism reports in 1920: Franklin, Bailly and Lavoisier's tests, in which patients were blindfolded and given sham magnetised objects, are now routinely cited as one of the first blinded, placebo-controlled experiments in medical history, and their conclusion that the effects lay in "the imagination of the patient" is the accepted one. The 1920 account's hope that animal magnetism "was afterwards to be revived" did not come true as a physical force; instead Mesmer's crises are understood as suggestion, and the practice was reworked into hypnotism, a name coined by James Braid in the 1840s. Hypnosis survives today as a recognised adjunct in pain management and psychotherapy, but no magnetic fluid is thought to be involved.
Written for this edition, 2026.