Franz Anton Mesmer

The teaching

Taught from his own writings, above all the Memoir of 1779 with its twenty-seven propositions.

A fluid through all things

Mesmer teaches that the heavenly bodies, the earth and living bodies act on one another, and that the means of their action is a fluid spread through the universe, so continuous that it leaves no void, finer than anything known, and able to receive, carry and pass on every kind of motion. This action follows mechanical laws not yet known, and it works by alternate effects, an ebb and a flow, more general or more particular according to its causes, as the heavens raise the tides of the sea. By it the heavenly bodies, the earth and its parts stand in a constant traffic of influence, and on it the properties of matter and of living bodies depend.

Animal magnetism

The living body feels the ebb and flow of this agent, which enters the substance of the nerves and acts on them directly. In the human body it shows properties like those of the magnet: there are poles in it, different and opposite, which can be passed on, changed, destroyed and strengthened. Because the body's power to receive the influence of the heavens and of the bodies around it resembles the magnet's, Mesmer calls it animal magnetism. It is not the magnet's own force: a lodestone can take up animal magnetism like any other body without its pull on iron changing in the least, which shows that the two principles differ.

How the force behaves

Animal magnetism can be passed to other bodies, living and lifeless, though not all take it equally. It can be strengthened and spread by them; it acts at a distance without any body between; it is increased and reflected by mirrors as light is; and it is carried and increased by sound. It can be stored, concentrated and carried from place to place. A few rare people have the opposite virtue, so that their presence destroys its effects in others, and that opposite virtue behaves in the same ways.

Health as harmony

On this ground Mesmer builds a teaching of health. Health is the free and harmonious flow of the fluid through the body, in tune with the universe; sickness is an obstruction of that flow, a place where it is stopped. The healer restores the harmony, and the sign that the obstruction is breaking is the crisis: convulsions, sweats, tears, laughter or sleep, which he takes for nature's own effort to clear the way, to be provoked and guided until it passes.

He claims that his principle heals disorders of the nerves directly and others by way of them, that it lets the physician judge the source and course of an illness and guide its crisis, and that with it the art of healing would reach its perfection. These are his claims. The royal commissions of 1784 found no fluid and put the effects down to imagination, and nothing here is a treatment: anyone who is ill should see a doctor.

Rapport and the passes

The healer first puts himself in rapport with the patient. He sits facing the patient, knees touching knees, holds the thumbs and looks into the eyes; then he draws his hands from the shoulders down the arms, and lays them on the region below the ribs, where he finds the seat of many nervous troubles. The passes follow: the hands, or a single finger, or a rod of iron, moved slowly down the body at a little distance from it, along the course the fluid is meant to take. Touch, gaze and pass serve one end, to carry the fluid from the healer's poles into the patient's.

The tub

To treat many at once he built the baquet, a covered tub of oak. Inside, bottles of magnetised water lie in rows among powdered glass and iron filings, and from holes in the lid bent rods of iron reach out, each to be laid on an ailing part of a patient's body. The patients sit round it in rows, joined by a cord passed about them and by holding one another's thumbs, so that the fluid runs through the whole chain, while music plays, often on the glass harmonica. Those who fall into crisis are taken to a padded room set apart for them.

The inner sense

In his later writings Mesmer explains the strange sleep that his pupils saw in some patients. In that sleep, he teaches, the outward senses rest and an inner sense wakes, in direct touch with the universal fluid, so that the sleeper may perceive what the eyes cannot, things far off or still to come, and the state of the body. He explains all of it by the fluid and its motions, never by spirits.