Marketplace of the Marvelous (26 page)

Franklin's gout and other illnesses made travel difficult, so Deslon agreed to perform experiments at Franklin's home in Passy outside Paris. In one experiment, a blindfolded woman was told that Deslon was in the room magnetizing her. Almost immediately, she began shuddering and crying out in pain, lapsing into crisis within minutes. The only trouble was that Deslon was nowhere near her—he was not even in the same room. Another experiment had Deslon supposedly magnetizing a woman from behind a door. Even when he was not present, the patient showed visible changes. When the reverse experiment was conducted on the same woman with Deslon trying to magnetize her but without her knowledge, nothing happened.
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On another day, Deslon magnetized an apricot tree in Franklin's backyard with his special magnetized cane. He then blindfolded his subject, a twelve-year-old boy suffering from an unspecified illness. Once blindfolded, the boy stumbled clumsily around the yard toward the trees. “They made him embrace several trees for two minutes,” wrote Franklin's fourteen-year-old grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, observing the proceedings. “At the first three trees . . . he said that he felt a numbness which redoubled at each tree.”
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Besides numbness, at the first tree, nearly thirty feet from the magnetized tree, the boy began to sweat, cough up phlegm, and complain of severe head pain. At the second tree, still further from the magnetized tree, his head pain increased. He appeared dazed and bewildered. Moving on, the boy claimed that the magnetic force felt even stronger. He complained of a tingling sensation like a light electric shock that increased with each tree, even as he walked farther and farther away from the magnetized tree. The experiment ended suddenly when the boy fainted.
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These experiments suggested to the commissioners that those people who felt the effects of the treatment had high expectations and vivid imaginations. “If the symptoms are more considerable and the crisis more violent at the public exhibition, it is because various causes are combined with the imagination, to operate, to multiply and to enlarge its effects,” wrote the commissioners. They concluded, “This agent, this fluid has no existence.”
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Released in August of 1784, the
Rapport des Commissaires
became an immediate sensation. More than twenty thousand copies sold, and summaries of the commission's findings appeared in publications ranging from
Gentleman's Magazine
to the
London Medical Journal
. The report itself was notable for being one of the first, if not the first, instance of blinding of subjects in a medical trial, a practice now essential to modern medicine. Mesmer, unsurprisingly, refused to accept the commission's report. He argued that it was unfair and politically motivated since the commission's scientists had the most to lose from the veracity of his claims. He was particularly infuriated that the commissioners had based their results on treatments administered by Deslon, though Mesmer himself had refused the commission's invitation to participate. Many of Mesmer's followers also protested the commissioners' conclusions. They claimed vivid memories of the animal magnetism entering and leaving their bodies, if little else of the actual experience, and asserted their belief in the mystical power of the baquet. Mesmer soon left Paris and traveled through Europe before spending his final years near his birthplace in Germany, where he died in 1815.
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Mesmerism itself was far from dead, however—it was just getting started. The same year that the commission's report appeared to discredit magnetism, Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puységur, made a spectacular discovery that breathed new life into the movement. The eldest of three brothers in a respected aristocratic family, Puységur began experimenting with magnetism on the peasants who worked his estate in Buzancy in northern France in 1784. They proved willing subjects for his new healing art. Among the first to come to him was a young shepherd named Victor Race who had spent several days in bed with what appeared to be pneumonia. Puységur magnetized Race, but rather than experiencing the crisis that Puységur expected, he instead found that the young man fell into a
strange peaceful sleep. This wasn't like any sleep Puységur had seen before. Although he appeared to be sleeping, Race soon began to talk about his problems. Puységur worried that these unhappy thoughts might aggravate Race's illness, so he tried to change the subject to happier topics. He suggested that Race might imagine himself dancing at a party and taking part in a shooting contest. Puységur's suggestions set Race into motion. He stood up and began walking. He pantomimed dancing. He shot a gun. Race not only appeared to be awake and aware of his surroundings, he also seemed more intelligent and well spoken than normal. After an hour experimenting with this new kind of magnetic crisis, Puységur calmed Race down and brought him back to consciousness. Race recalled nothing that had happened.
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Intrigued, Puységur magnetized Race again some days later to similar effect. Puységur soon found that many of his workers fell into these unusual, sleeplike states of consciousness. Lacking a baquet of his own, Puységur mesmerized a group of peasants tied around a magnetized tree and observed the results. Like Race, these entranced patients appeared brighter and more receptive to their surroundings and to other people. They recalled long-forgotten memories in minute detail and answered questions with an intelligence unexpected in those with a peasant's education and background. Even better, when Puységur asked them about their illnesses, many could offer a complete case history and diagnosis that usually held up under further investigation. These patients claimed they could see their own insides like human X-rays. Some even prescribed remedies and could predict the day the illness would finally pass. A select few achieved what Puységur called “extraordinary lucidity” and could perform feats of telepathy and clairvoyance. Once, Puységur claimed he used magnetism to bring a supposedly dead dog back to life. Puységur named these unusual effects “mesmeric somnambulism” or “magnetic sleep.”
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Quite inadvertently, Puységur discovered the human unconscious, a strange new world just below the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Mesmer, perhaps feeling spurned by the attention lavished on Puységur, claimed that he had actually discovered somnambulism many years before, but it seems unlikely. Although Mesmer's name is the one remembered, Puységur's discovery dramatically shifted the debate over mesmerism and the substance of animal magnetism. The
remarkable effects produced by mesmerism now seemed to have not a physical cause, as Mesmer had claimed, but a psychological origin, the mechanisms of which would consume many scientists, philosophers, and doctors in the nineteenth century.
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The relationship between patient and healer, always important but secondary to the actual fluid itself under Mesmer, became the primary component of Puységur's brand of magnetism. Mesmer himself had paid little attention to psychological factors. He did not concern himself with questions about the patient's attitude or belief going into treatment, or the effect the magnetizer might have on the patient.
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Puységur rejected Mesmer's claim that the redistribution of the physical fluid of animal magnetism induced the healing crisis. He instead explained his therapeutic success as a mental effect produced by the mesmerist's will over the vital power. The crucial variable in the mesmerizing process, according to Puységur, was the magnetist's ability to gain some control over the patient that then allowed the patient to slip into the somnambulistic state.
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“I believe in the existence within myself of a power. From this belief derives my will to exert it,” explained Puységur in a 1785 address to the Strasbourg Masonic society. “The entire doctrine of Animal Magnetism is contained in the two words:
Believe
and
want
. I
believe
that I have the power to set into action the vital principle of my fellow-men; I
want
to make use of it; this is all my science and all my means.”
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Patients had internal capabilities that he as the magnetizer could activate and manipulate through the magnetizing process. And that control changed the role and responsibilities of the patient. Where before, Mesmer had treated a seated and mostly passive patient, Puységur's method demanded the active involvement of the patient in the healing process. Mesmerized patients needed to move, talk, and, most important, discern illness in themselves and others, becoming both performer and diagnostic tool.

Intrigued by Puységur's discovery, some regular doctors experimented with using somnambulistic trance in their own practice. Alexandre Bertrand, Ambroise Liebault, and Hippolyte Bernheim were among the scientists who further examined Puységur's theory and claimed to have proved the existence of an unconscious mental state.
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Alleviating the pain of surgery seemed like the most promising application of somnambulism. The need was great as anesthetics did not exist until the introduction of ether in 1846; most surgical patients endured
the terrible pain of surgery with little more than a strong drink and a broom handle held between clenched teeth. Parisian mesmerist Pierre Jean Chapelain participated in one of the first mesmeric surgeries in April 1829. He entranced a sixty-four-year-old woman known as Madame Plantin while surgeon Jules Cloquet successfully removed her cancerous breast. Cloquet recounted his accomplishment before the Section on Surgery of the French Royal Academy of Medicine a few days later. Several members of the Academy questioned Cloquet's story, even though a later account of the surgery by a Scottish authority on somnambulism, John C. Colquhoun, reported that the woman “continued to converse quietly with the operator [magnetizer], and did not exhibit the slightest sign of sensibility” during the procedure. When she awoke, she “did not appear to have any idea, any feeling of what had passed in the interval.” The success of the surgery spurred further investigations of mesmerism in medical treatment.
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In 1837, somnambulistic surgery came to England at the suggestion of John Elliotson, a well-respected regular doctor at London's University College Hospital. Mesmerism, he insisted, had a huge future in modern medicine. It was not Elliotson's first maverick act—he had also been the first doctor in England to use a stethoscope. Drawn to the new and exciting, Elliotson argued that medical progress required experimentation and risk. He amazed observers with his surgical demonstrations on deeply mesmerized patients. After witnessing one of his mesmeric displays, writer Charles Dickens became an Elliotson disciple and used his magnetic skills on his family and friends. He also wrote mesmerism into his unfinished novel,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
. Unfortunately, Elliotson's colleagues were less unimpressed with mesmerism than Dickens. In 1838, the University College Hospital passed a resolution banning the use of mesmerism within its doors, a move that essentially booted Elliotson out of his job. He left and eventually started a journal devoted to the study and promotion of mesmerism and phrenology. He also established the London Mesmeric Infirmary, a hospital devoted to mesmerism, in 1850.
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These medical experiments also gave mesmerism a new name. In 1841, Scottish physician James Braid began dangling bright objects before the eyes of his subjects to induce trance. Braid had first witnessed the phenomenon in a demonstration by Parisian showman and magnetist Charles Lafontaine. At first he wondered if the patients faked their trances, but he soon came to believe that the effects Lafontaine
caused were genuine. The real question then concerned the nature of the effects and the agent that produced them. Braid's observations and experiments led him to reject animal magnetism outright, concluding instead that somnambulism had a purely psychological and subjective source, most likely rooted in suggestion. Though most mesmerists disagreed with his theory, many began using the name he coined for the practice in 1842 as a way to dissociate his findings from mesmerism and the antics of traveling showmen: hypnosis. His method of inducing trance also inspired the popular image of the hypnotist waving an object before his patient.
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Mesmeric mania finally hit American shores in the 1830s, only a few years after phrenology had first suggested the wondrous possibilities of the mind. Although some educated Americans knew of it already from its introduction in the 1770s, mesmerism only gained widespread popularity in the United States with the arrival of Frenchman Charles Poyen de Saint Saveur. A twenty-year-old medical student and self-styled “Professor of Animal Magnetism,” Poyen came to Boston in 1836 to spread his magnetic faith. But much to his surprise and dismay, he found himself talking about a subject that few Americans knew anything about. It wasn't the first time a Frenchman had tried to introduce mesmerism to America. In 1784, General Marquis de Lafayette, an enthusiastic member of Mesmer's Society of Universal Harmony, wrote to his friend and mentor George Washington promising to reveal to him “Mesmer's secret, which, you can count on it, is a great philosophical discovery.” Though sincere in his enthusiasm, Lafayette had overstepped his bounds. Not only did he not have Mesmer's permission to make such an offer, even worse, when King Louis XVI heard of his letter, he scornfully asked Lafayette, “What will Washington think when he learns that you have become Mesmer's chief journeyman apothecary?” Washington chose not to get involved, perhaps heeding the advice of Thomas Jefferson, who, appalled by the irrational popularity of mesmerism in France, handed out copies of the negative conclusions reached by Franklin's royal commission that very year.
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Poyen had discovered mesmerism during his medical studies in Paris. Suffering from a nervous ailment that defied standard medical treatment, Poyen eventually sought the services of a mesmerist and was impressed with the effects. He then traveled to Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies and met French planters using magnetism
to heal their slaves in cases Poyen found “altogether remarkable.” Poyen stayed and studied magnetism and somnambulism for a year before deciding to move to New England for its cooler climate and healthful maritime air. His mesmeric study had also imbued him with a messianic message for the American people: the hidden secret to human happiness and well-being.
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