Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [61]
Riding the wave of his fame, Mesmer gave well-attended lectures and demonstrations in a number of cities. In Vienna, however, the flamboyance with which he publicized his cures offended the city’s influential doctors. They were further scandalized in 1777 by his claims concerning one patient, Maria Theresa von Paradies, the blind pianist for whom Mozart wrote his B-flat piano concerto, K.456. She came to Mesmer when she was eighteen, having been blind since the age of three. He claimed that under his care she regained partial vision but was able to see only in his presence and never when another witness was present. It is possible that her blindness was psychosomatic and that he did have an influence on her, but in 1778 her parents stopped the treatment, Viennese doctors denounced Mesmer as a charlatan, and he abruptly left everything behind, including his aging wife, and decamped for Paris.
In that jittery, fad-ridden city, Mesmer, with his talent for self-promotion, swiftly achieved great fame and, in time, notoriety. At first he treated patients individually, but as his practice burgeoned, he found it profitable to treat them en masse by means of his own invention, the baquet or oak tub, which dispensed magnetic fluid through the iron bars. Since he could also affect his patients by touch, gestures, or long intense looks, he began to think that neither magnets nor iron filings were essential and that his own body must be unusually magnetic, capable of transmitting invisible magnetic fluid directly.
“Mesmerism,” as the treatment was soon called, became the dernier cri; people flocked to Mesmer’s salon, acolytes studied under him, and his disciples wrote at least two hundred pamphlets and books about his treatment in less than a decade. But the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris and other orthodox medical institutions considered him a fraud and said so. If he had known himself to be a faker, he would surely not have responded as he did. Through his aristocratic connections, in 1784 he induced the King to appoint a special commission composed of distinguished doctors and academicians, including the chemist Lavoisier and the American ambassador, Benjamin Franklin, to investigate his claims.
The commission conducted a careful study, including an experiment of a kind common in modern psychology. They told some subjects that they would be magnetized through a closed door, but then did no magnetizing. The tricked subjects responded exactly as they would have had magnetization been performed. After consideration of all the evidence, the commission reported correctly that Mesmer’s magnetic fluid did not exist, incorrectly that the effects of magnetic treatment were nothing but “imagination.” With that, the popularity of mesmerism waned and the movement broke up into quarreling groups. Mesmer eventually left the scene of his disgrace and spent most of his last thirty years in Switzerland in relative seclusion.
For half a century, mesmerism remained a quasi-magical and thoroughly misunderstood phenomenon practiced by outright charlatans like Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (the pseudonym of a mountebank named Giuseppe Balsamo), sideshow performers, and a number of adventurous laymen and unorthodox doctors in France, England, and America. Most mesmerists gradually abandoned the use of magnets— Mesmer himself had been moving in that direction—claiming that they were able to transmit magnetic fluid by means of rituals and incantations, eye contact, and other procedures. These did, in fact, provoke trances and “crises” and yield relief from certain symptoms.
In England in the 1840s, mesmerism began to gain some respectability when John Elliotson, a physician, used it to treat neuroses, and W. S. Ward, a surgeon, amputated the leg of a patient anesthetized by mesmerism. James Braid, a Scottish physician, after performing a number of experiments with mesmerism, said that its major effect was due not to magnetism flowing from the mesmerist but, rather,