Marketplace of the Marvelous (25 page)

Based on his new discovery and his experiences treating Oesterlin, Mesmer revised his theory to center on this “magnetic substance.” Sticking to vitalism, he claimed that human health depended on the unimpeded flow of animal magnetism, which he believed to be a real physical albeit invisible substance, through the body. Interruptions or imbalances in the stream caused organs to falter, deprived of sufficient amounts of this vital force to operate properly. Disease was the inevitable result.
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Removing the obstacle became the key to healing.
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His theory had a beautiful simplicity. Tracing disease back to a disturbance in the body's supply of magnetism meant that all disease had one cause and thus one treatment, a universal method of healing like Thomson's goal of restoring bodily heat. Mesmer's theory reduced medical science to a straightforward set of procedures aimed at supercharging the nervous system with the life-giving energy that would keep people healthy, no drugs required.
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Armed with his new
theory, Mesmer resolved to “dedicate my remaining life” to saving his fellow man from disease.
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Excited about his discovery and a bit prone to excess, Mesmer decided that if some animal magnetism was good, then more must be even better. He infused magnetism into every aspect of the patient experience. Patients napped between magnetized sheets, bathed in magnetized water, ate from magnetized plates and silverware, and strolled the grounds of his estate in magnetized clothing. Mesmer also played a magnetized glass armonica, a musical instrument that essentially mechanized the experience of rubbing the rim of a crystal glass with a wet finger. Mesmer was a virtuoso on the instrument, which was invented by Benjamin Franklin, who would, ironically, later lead an investigation that condemned Mesmer's scientific claims. Franklin's armonica consisted of a series of glass bowls in graduated sizes that turned on a foot-powered spindle. Players touched the rotating rims with moistened fingers to produce high and haunting pitches with a slight vibrato. Thousands of glass armonicas were built and sold. For Mesmer, music was not just ornament or background accompaniment: rather, the music communicated, propagated, and reinforced the flow of animal magnetism.
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Word of Mesmer's healing success spread rapidly throughout Vienna, but scandal erupted when Mesmer claimed to have restored the sight of the talented pianist Maria Theresia Paradis. Eighteen-year-old Paradis had been blind since age three. Her parents had tried everything to cure her, summoning the best medical talent in the city, who applied leeches and plasters, prescribed purgatives and diuretics, and shocked her eyes with Leyden jars. Nothing worked. As a diversion from her malady, Paradis began music lessons and so impressed Austrian empress Maria Theresa with her musical skills as an eleven-year-old that she earned a government stipend for her musical education. Mesmer had known Paradis's family for several years when he boldly proposed to her parents in 1777 that his animal magnetism might restore the young pianist's vision. They agreed with his assurance that he was up for the challenge. After a series of treatments, Mesmer declared her sight restored. But vision turned out to be troubling and confusing to Paradis, and her piano skills dramatically declined. Some said she also might have fallen in love with Mesmer and maybe he with her, rumors that outraged and scandalized Viennese
society. Her angry parents snatched Paradis away from Mesmer, worried about losing her pension and perhaps also the loss of her marketing cachet as the blind pianist. Once she was away from Mesmer, her blindness quickly returned. The incident sparked responses both vitriolic and gleeful from critics who jumped at the chance to ridicule Mesmer and his method. Discredited in the eyes of the medical profession, Mesmer abandoned Austria for Paris in 1778.
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One year later, Mesmer reflected on the Paradis incident in his
Memoir on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism
. “I was being taxed with eccentricity,” he wrote, “my tendency to quit the normal path of Medicine was being construed as a crime.”
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Despite his troubles in Vienna, Mesmer's reputation and fame as an extraordinary healer preceded him to Paris. His worldly manners, intellect, sturdy good looks, and unabashed confidence gave Mesmer quick access to Parisian social circles even with his strong German accent and scandal-tinged character (though this being Paris, it may have intrigued more than it repelled). Soon, more patients than Mesmer could possibly treat individually besieged his office.
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Never one to miss a potential business opportunity, Mesmer introduced a magnetized instrument known as a baquet to meet the demand for his services. He had discovered a few years earlier that he could magnify his powers by standing with one foot submerged in a bucket of water. The baquet was simply a larger wooden bucket with a cover. Flexible iron rods that concentrated the flow of energy passed through the lid for patients to apply to specific body parts. Most important for Mesmer's business, though, the baquet allowed as many as twenty patients to gather around and receive treatment at the same time. Mesmer kept four in his treatment rooms in Paris. One baquet was reserved for the poor who received treatment at no cost, while the other three had to be reserved far in advance and cost roughly the same price as a ticket to the Paris Opera.
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Patients gathered around the tub and joined hands to form a complete “magnetic” circuit. Once they were settled, the treatment—and show—could begin.

A flashy and theatrical entertainer, Mesmer entered the darkened room wearing gold slippers and flowing lilac robes. He circled the room, sometimes stopping to play the glass armonica to prepare the patients for the flow of magnetism. Large mirrors on the walls reflected any errant fluid back toward the assembled patients. Mesmer then passed slowly from patient to patient and gazed deeply into their
eyes. His intense and enthralling stare immobilized and entranced clients, literally mesmerizing them and giving birth to a new term in connection with Mesmer himself. Passing his hands and magnetized wand over each patient, Mesmer provoked screams, sweating, fits of hysterical laughter, dramatic convulsions, and fainting. Mesmer, like hydropathy's Priessnitz, called these extreme effects the “crisis,” and he considered them the goal of the treatment. Nerve fluid must be pushed to its maximum velocity and intensity to dissolve and expel the obstruction from the body while simultaneously reactivating the life force of the patient. The frenzied responses passed like a chain reaction around the baquet and sent everyone into fits, an effect that emphasized Mesmer's control over the room and his subjects.
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To help him with his growing practice, Mesmer took on associate Charles-Nicolas Deslon, a medical professor at the University of Paris and the private physician to the Count d'Artois, brother to King Louis XVI. Deslon's credentials brought prestige and visibility to Mesmer's practice, but more important, it brought him into contact with the French aristocracy, who would prove to be some of his most ardent and faithful supporters in Europe.
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More than one hundred patients a day, women, men, and children, aristocratic to working class, passed through his doors and under his hypnotic gaze. By 1784, only six years after settling in Paris, Mesmer estimated that he had treated more than eight thousand people.
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Patient accounts of what it felt like to be mesmerized are scarce since most patients claim that it's difficult, if not impossible, to credibly witness an altered state in one's self. To do so, an individual would have to be astute and alert at the exact moment the intended phenomenon, insensibility through crisis, took effect. Most patients awoke from the experience remembering nothing.
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Even so, in the mid-nineteenth century, a Lady Rosse described her experience under the care of British clergyman and mesmerist William Scoresby. Anxious at first, “the moment I was settled on the sofa, with my hands in his—all apprehension vanished,” she claimed, as “a calmness, a delightful resignation to his will came over me. My eyes were irresistibly drawn to his and in vain did I combat the superior power of my Mesmerist. A pleasant thrill ran from my fingers throughout my body towards my feet—my heard pounded with joy.” Seconds later, “the faces and figures of those around me dissolved, one melting into another until the last vision of them seemed to vanish in Dr. Scoresby's eyes. He
was no longer Dr. Scoresby to me, but my all, part of myself; what he wished, I wished. In fact the attraction astonished me. The cares, the interest in this life ceased. I felt no longer a common mortal but infinitely superior and yet felt my Mesmeriser far superior to myself.”
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English writer Harriet Martineau recorded similar sensations in the 1840s at the hands of mesmerist Spencer Hall. Twenty minutes into her session, she “became sensible of an extraordinary appearance” that “seemed to diffuse itself through the atmosphere,—not like smoke, nor steam, nor haze,—but most like a clear twilight, closing in from the windows and down from the ceiling, and in which one object after another melted away.” The experience left her feeling hot, sick, and suffering from a “disordered stomach” for several hours after her session. But those sensations were gone by evening. Martineau soon found herself feeling a “lightness and relief” from the sickness that had kept her bedridden for several years.
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Some people found themselves so taken with Mesmer's powers that they wanted to become practitioners of animal magnetism themselves. Mesmer was at first reluctant to share his system with anyone, convinced that he alone truly understood animal magnetism. He eventually agreed to share some parts of his system—but not without a monetary and psychological price to those who wished to learn. Mesmer's more affluent disciples paid an enormous amount of money for the honor of membership in the Society of Universal Harmony, a semisecret organization founded in 1783 that mixed business, mesmeric education, and fraternalism. Like Thomson, Mesmer demanded absolute devotion from his disciples, but he felt no need to show any gratitude of his own in return. No one was allowed to add, modify, or subtract anything without his permission. Anyone who suggested alternative or contrary ideas was thrown out. Despite these strict conditions, chapters of the society soon existed in most major French cities. Men from some of France's most illustrious and aristocratic families joined, including the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. Benjamin Franklin's grandson William Temple Franklin also joined, though he would later tell his grandfather that he was merely curious.
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The society made Mesmer rich. It also transformed what had begun as one's man closely guarded secret into the common knowledge and shared enthusiasm of an influential group of men.

But despite his success and incredible wealth, Mesmer remained
dissatisfied. He was desperate for official recognition of his discovery from a scientific institution that would validate its importance to current understandings about life.
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“I dare to flatter myself that the discoveries I have made will push back the boundaries of our knowledge of physics as did the invention of microscopes and telescopes for the age preceding our own,” boasted Mesmer in his memoir.
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Members of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin did not agree with Mesmer, however, and they rejected his theory as nonscientific and “unworthy of the smallest attention” after witnessing his cures.
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The Royal Society of Medicine ignored his requests to present his ideas to its members, as did the Faculté de Médecine at the University of Paris.
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Even outside these institutions, regular doctors remained largely unimpressed with Mesmer and his magical force. Although some regulars acknowledged that he likely did succeed in curing some patients, they argued that these patients suffered from psychological rather than real, physical ailments so any attention would likely produce positive results. Not to mention the fact that his drugless system and single healing method made the medical profession largely superfluous, never an easy path to medical legitimacy. One English doctor scoffed that mesmerism bore as much relation to medicine “as astrology does to astronomy.”
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Mesmer's biggest challenge came in 1784 when King Louis XVI set up a royal commission to investigate his claims. Far less enamored of Mesmer than his wife Marie Antoinette and eager to determine the veracity of a theory inflaming both widespread acclaim and condemnation in Paris, the king appointed five members of the Academy of Sciences and four prominent physicians from the Faculté de Médecine to the case. Chaired by the witty and worldly Benjamin Franklin, the only foreign member of the team, the commission comprised most of France's leading scientists of the time, including the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who was to achieve greater fame for an invention that would later cost his fellow commissioners Lavoisier and Bailly their heads. The subject of their investigation would not be Mesmer himself, who refused to cooperate, perhaps feeling the investigation biased from the start, but Mesmer's disciple Charles Deslon, who gave them full access to his practice.
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The commissioners first spent one day a week in Deslon's clinic receiving treatment. They each sat around the baquet while Deslon tried
to magnetize them. Nothing much happened over three months of weekly visits. “Not one of the commissioners felt any sensation, or at least none which ought to be ascribed to the action of the magnetism,” read the report.
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Observing Deslon's work with other patients, the commission recognized that a number of patients showed what appeared to be the crises Mesmer described. The effects impressed even the jaded commissioners: “nothing can be more astonishing than the sight of these convulsions.”
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But the commission's charge was not to determine whether Mesmer's treatment had any beneficial effects but whether animal magnetism—a new force of nature—actually existed.