Not that anyone asked, but... Mesmerism popped back in my head for a moment, along with our discussion of transcranial magnetic stimulation, and I was motivated to track down some sources as to what was going on in those wackadoo late 1700s. This is from a semi-published book by a former advisor of mine, Doug Candland. I am pretty sure that earlier drafts had several more magnet-use examples... and I have the hard copies somewhere... but this is what I could find in the latest draft he put on the web:
------------------------- <[email protected]> *Vienna, 1779: Young Mozart, Dr. Mesmer, and Fraulein Franzl* While visiting Vienna in 1779, staying with longtime family friends, the young musician Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father, who was in Salzburg at the time, the following: “Dear Father, Can you guess from where I am writing this? In the garden of Mesmer’s house in the Landstrasse. Frau Mesmer is not at home, but Fraulein Franzl, now Frau von Bosch, is here. On my honour I would not have recognized her, she is so fat and healthy, and she has three children!”[1] Mozart was awed by the change in the person he had known during previous visits as Fraulein Franzl, for before she had been disturbed by many illnesses, including convulsions, vomiting, an inability to urinate, toothaches, ear aches, depression, trances, temporary blindness, paralysis, and hallucinations. The ministrations of physicians did little to heal, so she turned to Frau Mesmer, the husband of a close friend. Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer was a physician, practitioner, and researcher on the notion of a magnetic ‘fluidum’, an invisible spirit that held the universe and the individuals in it in place. When the natural flow of the fluidum was disrupted, he postulated, illness resulted. The task of the healer, he taught, was to reestablish the natural spirit by altering the magnetic field both inside and outside the sick person. Dr. Mesmer’s treatment of Fraulein Franzl consisted of passing three magnets over her body. Two of them were shaped as splints and the third was shaped as a heart. He tells us: “I finally decided to produce an artificial ebb and flow in the patient’s body with the help of some magnets. . . I tied two magnets to her head and hung another, a heart-shaped one around her neck so that it touched her breast. Suddenly a hot piercing pain rose along her legs from her feet, and ended, with an intense spasm, on the upper rim of the iliac bone. Here this pain was united with an equally agonizing one which flowed from both sides of the breast . . . in turn, pains shot up to the head and united in the parting of the hair. When those pains ceased, the patient felt a burning sensation, like glowing coal, in all of her joints . . . This lasted throughout the night. The entire side of her body, which had been paralyzed during the last attack, perspired freely, and in this part of the body the pain gradually ceased.” [2] Repeated treatments were applied during the next five years, and when Mozart met her again, as he described in the letter to his father, he found her well, happy, fat, married to Mesmer’s stepson, and three times a mother. What Dr. Mesmer did for Fraulein Franzl, he did for many others seeking his cure for a variety of ailments. Indeed, Dr. Mesmer’s healings became so well-known, the demands on his time so great, and his attention so splintered, that he had little time to observe some of the ‘side-effects’ of his healings. One of these side effects, however, was noted with fascination by a follower of Mesmer, the Marquis de Puységur [1751-1825], and has become better known than Mesmer’s intended effects. *France, 1784: Puységur Cures Victor Race* In 1784, five years after Mozart had written about Fraulein Franz, Victor Race, a 23 years old peasant, took himself to the estate-owner, the Marquis de Puységur, in the hope of being relieved of the burning within his lungs. The Marquis, eldest of three brothers from a family known for their military commands and land holdings, was fascinated by Dr. Mesmer’s achievements. He thought the medical establishment had been much mistaken in its dismissal of Dr. Mesmer’s ideas and practices. The Marquis was himself an important figure in the ‘Society of Harmony’, a more or less secret society that supported and continued Dr. Mesmer’ s works after professional medical groups had attacked and punished them. Puységur undertook for Victor the treatment called ‘animal magnetism’, a treatment he had learned from Dr. Mesmer. An important characteristic of the treatment was that the patient sometimes underwent a ‘crises’, as it was called by the French, a period when the patient seemed unaware of her or his own consciousness or, at times, adopted another identity. Often, those who experienced the *crises* were then cured of their complaints, so the state of the crises was considered a positive step toward cure. However, instead of passing into the expected crises, Victor went to sleep; it was a particular and most unusual kind of sleep, one that Puységur had not witnessed or attended to before. The trance-state was what later times would call ‘hypnosis’. The medical historian, Henri Ellenberger, writing two centuries later, in our times, describes the event: “There were no convulsions, no disorderly movements, as was the case with other patients: rather, he fell into a strange kind of sleep in which he seemed to be more awake and aware than in his normal waking state. He spoke aloud, answered questions, and displayed a far brighter mind than in his normal condition. The Marquis, singing inaudibly to himself, noticed that the young man would sing the same songs aloud. Victor had no memory of the crisis once it had passed. Intrigued, Puységur produced this type of crisis again in Victor and tried it successfully on several other subjects.” [3] Adam Crabtree, also a modern historian of these events, provides a quotation translated from Puységur’s 1784 account: “He [Victor Race] spoke, occupying himself out loud with his affairs. When I realized that his ideas might affect him disagreeably, I stopped them and tried to inspire more pleasant ones. He then became calm, imagining himself shooting a prize, dancing at a party, etc. I nourished these ideas in him and in this way I made him move around a lot in his chair, as if dancing to a tune; while mentally singing it, I made him repeat it out loud. In this way I caused the sick man from that day on to sweat profusely. After one hour of crises, I calmed him and left the room. . . . He slept all night through. The next day, no longer remembering my visit of the evening before, he told me how much better he felt.” [4]. Mesmer himself had been aware of the fact that certain patients appeared to sleep: these were called ‘somnambulists’, but it was left to Puységur and other observers to notice that this sleep was of an unusual kind, for the mind of the subject appeared to be awake while the subject physically slept. Puységur noticed that young Victor seemed able to hear only Puységur’s voice. After Puységur told Victor that he, Victor, should place a magnetized cord on his chest, and that he would be thereby healed, Victor was told to awake and be healed. He did; and he was. ------------------------------ Dr. Mesmer celebrated his ideas and cures both as a scientist and as a physician. He became a celebrity, a status always dangerous for scholars and scientists, not to mention physicians, clergy, and authors. Patients were eager to see him, while his sympathy and policy of low or no fees for the poor gave him a reputation as a man truly interested in the welfare of his patients and humankind. Mesmer was celebrated for his humane-ness and healing. Mesmer’s written works showed decreasing interest in the workings of ‘animal magnetism’ and the ‘fluidum’, the force that was transferred between patient and physician and whose stability signaled good health. It was the curative aspect of the trance that came to hold his interest and to occupy his time. The doctor developed a method of animal magnetism for groups. The utility of group healing may have monetary motivations, of course, but there is an occasional claim that the group itself is a critical aspect of the healing. Mesmer’s mass healings required a baquet, this a large wood bucket into which twenty or so people could be contained and arranged. The tub contained iron rods connected to magnetized jars of water. Music was provided, often by Dr. Mesmer himself, who played the glass harmonica invented by Benjamin Franklin, in Paris at the time. Franklin would also come to be the chair of the Royal Commission appointed to assess the validity of Dr. Mesmer’s claims of animal magnetism. Some describers say the patients held hands. [2] In time, many patients fell suddenly into the crises, this being a disengagement of the mind exhibited by shaking, loss of consciousness, and eye-rolling. The crises were curative: those taken by it were removed to a room wherein they rested, recovered, reacquired their conscious selves, and often enough felt themselves healed. A splendid description of the group therapy is provided by Ellenberger. Note how the several elements of animal magnetism, hypnotism, electricity, healing, landscape, tree-worship, and the postulation of other worlds come together in this taut description from France in 1785. The number of patients became so great that Puységur soon organized a collective treatment. The public square of the small village of Buzancy . . . “was not far from the majestic castle of the Puysegurs. In the center of that square stood a large, beautiful old elm tree, at the foot of which a spring poured forth its limpid waters . . . Ropes were hung in the tree’s main branches and around its trunk, and the patients wound ends of the rope around the ailing parts of their bodies. The operation started with the patients’ forming a chain, holding one another by the thumbs. They began to feel the fluid circulate among them to varying degrees. After a while, the master ordered the chain to be broken and the patients to rub their hands. He then chose a few of them and, touching them with his or on rod, put them into ‘perfect crises.’ These subjects, now called physicians, diagnosed diseases and prescribed treatment. To ‘disenchant’ them [that is, to wake them from their magnetic sleep], Puységur ordered them to kiss the tree, whereupon they awoke, remembering nothing of what had happened. [3]. . . It was reported that within little more than one month, 62 of the 300 patients had been cured of various ailments. [4] Best, Eric ----------------------------------------- I'm not sure how it got on this thread... but I think it is worth noting as often as possible that TMS is "Mesmerism." Among other aspects of his early work, Mesmer waved extremely large magnets around people's heads, and created effects thereby. Gardens with enormous magnets that you would walk through became popular, etc. Then it was all discredited. Then it became fashionable cutting-edge science. The world is odd. Best, Eric
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