Mesmer, Franz Anton

The first evaluation of a medical procedure using placebo controls occurred some 200 years later. The procedure was mesmerism - now more commonly called hypnosis - as practised by the disciples of the 18th-century Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmer believed that many illnesses were caused by a bodily imbalance of an invisible magnetic fluid that permeated the universe. Just as antidepressants are used today to restore a presumed chemical imbalance, so Mesmer and his followers used magnetic treatment to restore the magnetic imbalance that they believed was the cause of their patients illnesses. 

Mesmerism had been conceived by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) as a medical practice. He attempted to use magnets and then simply his own hands and will to amplify what he saw as a kind of fluid that connects all beings and things to each other. He also tried to heal disease by increasing this fluid s circulation in the patient s body and by transferring his fluid to his patient via an act of his own will. (He named... 

Another important early contribution to the evolving proliferation of modernist esoterica was Mesmerism, named after its founder Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). At well-attended seances, Mesmer practiced what we would today call hypnotism. In the early Romantic period hypnosis seemed a kind of white magic, offering proof for the existence of the soul, of a hereafter, and all forms of prophetic, mentally superior Spiritual Vision, in... 

The idea that magnetic fields are associated with biological systems was not always an acceptable one. It had a rather rocky start with an Austrian physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, who treated hysterical patients in Paris in the late 1700s by what he suggested was an ubiquitous magnetic power concentrated in himself but what is now known to be hypnosis, or as it is sometimes called, mesmerism. Mesmer, who referred to his curative powers as animal magnetism, eventually fell into disrepute and spent the last years of his life in obscurity. 

FIGURE 56. A depiction of the trki prima (Sophie Mercury, Sulfur, and Salt) from Della Tramutatione Metallica hy Giovanni Battista Nazari (Brescia, 1599). A very similar figure, depicting Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer, appeared in an anti-Mesmer pamphlet published in 1784- ... 

The famous German writer Thomas Mann, in his 1930 novel Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician, 1930), explores how hypnosis relates to the mesmerizing power of Fascist political leaders. In a 1956 article, professor Frank A. Pattie claimed that Franz Anton Mesmer, one of the fathers of hypnosis, plagiarized his dissertation from a work by the English physician Richard Mead, an acquaintance of Sir Isaac Newton. 

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