The advantage of magnetism involved accelerating such crises without danger. To cure an insane person, for example, involved causing a fit of madness. Mesmer aimed to aid or provoke the efforts of Nature. When Nature failed to do this spontaneously, contact with a conductor of animal magnetism was a necessary and sufficient remedy. Overcoming these obstacles and restoring flow produced crises, which restored health. Illness was caused by obstacles to this flow. These propositions outlined his theory at that time.Īccording to d'Eslon, Mesmer understood health as the free flow of the process of life through thousands of channels in our bodies. In 1779, with d'Eslon's encouragement, Mesmer wrote an 88-page book Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, to which he appended his famous 27 Propositions. He found only one physician of high professional and social standing, Charles d'Eslon, to become a disciple. In his first years in Paris, Mesmer tried and failed to get either the Royal Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society of Medicine to provide official approval for his doctrines. Paris soon divided into those who thought he was a charlatan, who had been forced to flee from Vienna, and those who thought he had made a great discovery. The following year Mesmer moved to Paris, rented an apartment in a part of the city preferred by the wealthy and powerful and established a medical practice. The scandal which followed Mesmer's unsuccessful attempt to treat the blindness of an 18-year-old musician, Maria Theresa Paradis, led him to leave Vienna in 1777. This confrontation between Mesmer's secular ideas and Gassner's religious beliefs marked the end of Gassner's career as well as, according to Henri Ellenberger, the emergence of dynamic psychiatry. Mesmer said that while Gassner was sincere in his beliefs, his cures were due to the fact that he possessed a high degree of animal magnetism. In 1775 Mesmer was invited to give his opinion before the Munich Academy of Sciences on the exorcisms carried out by Johann Joseph Gassner ( 1727- 1779), a priest and healer. He soon stopped using magnets as a part of his treatment. He felt that he had contributed animal magnetism, which had accumulated in his own body, to her. Mesmer did not believe that the magnets had achieved the cure on their own. She reported feeling streams of a mysterious fluid running through her body and was relieved of her symptoms for several hours. Mesmer had her swallow a preparation containing iron, and then attached magnets to various parts of her body. In 1774 he used a magnet to produce an "artificial tide" in a patient. Mozart later immortalized his former patron by including a joking reference to Mesmer in his opera Cosi fan tutte. When court intrigue prevented the performance of Bastien und Bastienne, the first opera composed by the twelve-year-old musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mesmer offered his own gardens for the production. He lived on a splendid estate and patronised the arts. Soon after receiving his degree, Mesmer married a wealthy widow and established himself as a physician in Vienna. Pattie suggests that Mesmer plagiarized his dissertation from a work by Richard Mead ( 1673- 1754). In 1766 he published a doctoral dissertation with the Latin title De planetarum influxu, which discussed the influence of the moon and the planets on the human body and on disease. After studying at the Jesuit universities of Dillingen and Ingolstadt, he took up the study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1759. Mesmer was born in the village of Iznang, Swabia. The evolution of Mesmer's ideas and practices led James Braid ( 1795- 1860) to develop hypnosis in 1842. Franz Mesmer Franz Anton Mesmer ( March 5, 1815) discovered what he called animal magnetism and others often called mesmerism.
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