Konviktstraße 11, 89407 Dillingen an der Donau, Germany
After preliminary studies in a local monastic school, Mesmer spent four years at the Jesuit University of Dillingen presumably as a scholarship student preparing for the priesthood.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
Ostenstraße 26, 85072 Eichstätt, Germany
Mesmer attended the University of Ingolstadt for a brief period.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien, Austria
In 1759 Mesmer entered the University of Vienna as a law student. Having changed to medicine and completed the standard course of studies, he received his doctorate in 1766. Mesmer’s dissertation De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body), which borrowed heavily from the work of the British physician Richard Mead, suggested that the gravitational attraction of the planets affected human health by affecting an invisible fluid found in the human body and throughout nature.
Career
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
1780
Vendome Square, Paris, France
Magnetism session by Franz Anton Mesmer in his hotel on Vendome square in Paris, engraving by Vintraut after Dunkin circa 1780.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
1784
Paris, France
Print satirizing Mesmer.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
Portrait of Franz Anton Mesmer.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
Illustration of Mesmer demonstrating Mesmerism.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
Portrait of Franz Anton Mesmer.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
Portrait of Franz Anton Mesmer.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
Portrait of Franz Anton Mesmer.
Gallery of Franz Mesmer
Portrait of Franz Anton Mesmer.
Achievements
Membership
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Franz Anton Mesmer was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Konviktstraße 11, 89407 Dillingen an der Donau, Germany
After preliminary studies in a local monastic school, Mesmer spent four years at the Jesuit University of Dillingen presumably as a scholarship student preparing for the priesthood.
In 1759 Mesmer entered the University of Vienna as a law student. Having changed to medicine and completed the standard course of studies, he received his doctorate in 1766. Mesmer’s dissertation De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body), which borrowed heavily from the work of the British physician Richard Mead, suggested that the gravitational attraction of the planets affected human health by affecting an invisible fluid found in the human body and throughout nature.
Mesmerism: Being the First Translation of Mesmer's Historic Memoire sur la Decouverte du Magnetisme Animal to Appear in English
(Mesmer's theory attracted a wide following between about ...)
Mesmer's theory attracted a wide following between about 1780 and 1850 and continued to have some influence thereafter. 1843 the Scottish doctor James Braid proposed the term hypnosis for a technique derived from animal magnetism; today the word "mesmerism" generally functions as a synonym of "hypnosis". This publication is a reprint of the first English translation in 1948 of Mesmer's historic Memoire sur la Decouverte du Magnetisme Animal to appear in English.
Franz Mesmer was a German physician. His system of therapeutics, known as mesmerism, was the forerunner of the modern practice of hypnotism.
Background
Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer was born on May 23, 1734, in Iznang, Bishopric of Constance (now Iznang, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) to the family of master forester Anton Mesmer and his wife, Maria/Ursula Michel. His father was employed by the archbishop of Constance; his mother was the daughter of a locksmith. The family was large (Franz Anton was the third of nine children), Catholic, and not particularly prosperous.
Education
After preliminary studies in a local monastic school, Mesmer spent four years at the Jesuit University of Dillingen presumably as a scholarship student preparing for the priesthood. He then attended the University of Ingolstadt for a brief period and in 1759 entered the University of Vienna as a law student. Having changed to medicine and completed the standard course of studies, he received his doctorate in 1766. Mesmer’s dissertation De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body), which borrowed heavily from the work of the British physician Richard Mead, suggested that the gravitational attraction of the planets affected human health by affecting an invisible fluid found in the human body and throughout nature.
After graduation Mesmer had moved into a comfortable townhouse in Vienna, which he used as a clinic. He built up a repertoire of techniques and cures; he gave lectures and demonstrations; and he traveled through Hungary, Switzerland, and Bavaria, where he was made a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences at Munich in 1775. Mesmer also developed a taste for publicity. He staged and announced his cures in a manner that offended some of Vienna’s most influential doctors. Offense developed into open hostility in 1777 during a dispute over Mesmer’s treatment of Maria-Theresa von Paradies, a celebrated blind pianist who was eventually removed from Mesmer’s care by her parents. In these circumstances, Mesmer decided to leave Vienna and perhaps also to leave his wife, who did not accompany him through the later episodes of his career.
The next and most spectacular episode began with Mesmer’s arrival in Paris in February 1778. He set up a clinic in the Place Vendôme and the nearby village of Créteil and then began an elaborate campaign to win recognition of his “discovery” from France’s leading scientific bodies. Helped by some influential converts and an ever-increasing throng of patients, who testified that they had been cured of everything from paralysis to what the French then called “vapeurs,” Mesmer seized the public’s imagination and alienated the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, the Royal Society of Medicine, and the Academy of Sciences. The defenders of orthodox medicine took offense at what the public found most appealing about mesmerism - not its theory but its extravagant practices. Instead of bleeding and applying purgatives, the mesmerists ran their fingers over their patients” bodies, searching out “poles” through which they infused mesmeric fluid. By the 1780s Mesmer had given up the use of magnets; but he had perfected other devices, notably his famous “tub,” a mesmeric version of the Leyden jar, which stored fluid and dispensed it through iron bars that patients applied to their sick areas. Mesmer transmitted his invisible fluid through all sorts of media - ropes, trees, “chains” of patients holding hands - and he usually sent it coursing through the air by gestures with his hands. He reasoned that his own body acted as an animal type of magnet, reinforcing the fluid in the bodies of his patients. Disease resulted from an “obstacle” to the flow of the fluid. Mesmerizing broke through the obstacle by producing a “crisis,” often signaled by convulsions, and then restoring “harmony,” a state in which the body responded to the salubrious flow of fluid through all of nature.
Mesmerism presented itself to the French as a “natural” medicine at a time when the cult of nature and the popular enthusiasm for science had reached a peak. Mesmer did not produce any proof of his theory or any rigorous description of experiments that could be repeated and verified by others; but like contemporary chemists and physicists, he seemed able to put his invisible fluid to work. Scores of Parisians fell into “crises” at the touch of Mesmer’s hand and recovered with a new sense of being at harmony with the world. The mesmerists published hundreds of carefully documented and even notarized case histories. And they produced an enormous barrage of propaganda - at least 200 books and pamphlets, more than were written on any other single subject during the decade before the opening phase of the Revolution in 1787.
Thus mesmerism became a cause célèbre, a movement, which eventually even eclipsed Mesmer himself. He limited his part in the polemics to two pamphlets, written by or for him: Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal (1779) and Précis historique des faits relatifs au magnétisme animal (1781). The first contained twenty-seven rather vague propositions, which is as close as Mesmer came to systematizing his ideas. He left the system-building to his disciples, notably Nicolas Bergasse, who produced many of the articles and letters issued in Mesmer’s name as well as his own mesmeric treatise, Considérations sur le magnétisme animal (1784). The disciples also formed a sort of Masonic secret society, the Société de l’Harmonie Universelle, which developed affiliates in most of France’s major cities. The spread of the new medicine alarmed not only the old doctors but also the government. A royal commission composed of distinguished doctors and academicians, including Bailly, Lavoisier, and Franklin, reported in 1784 that, far from being able to cure disease, Mesmer’s fluid did not exist. The report badly damaged the movement, which later dissolved into schisms and heresies. Mesmer finally left his followers to their quarrels and, after a period of traveling through England, Austria, Germany, and Italy, settled in Switzerland, where he spent most of the last thirty years of his life in relative seclusion.
Franz Mesmer was raised and remained throughout his whole life as a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
Politics
Not being directly involved in politics Mesmer and his teaching were favored and opposed by a number of political figures including the representatives of the European Royal houses.
Views
Mesmer later traced his theory of animal magnetism to his doctoral thesis, Dissertatio physico-medica deplanetarum influxu. At the time of its defense, however, the thesis did not strike the Viennese authorities as a revolutionary new theory of medicine. On the contrary, it showed a common tendency to speculate about invisible fluids, which derived both from Cartesianism and from the later queries in Newton’s Opticks as well as from Newton’s remarks about the “most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies” in the last paragraph of his Principia. The immediate source of Mesmer’s fluid was Richard Mead’s De imperio solis ac lunae in corpora humana et morbis inde oriundis (London, 1704), a work upon which Mesmer’s thesis drew heavily. Mead had argued that gravity produced “tides” in the atmosphere as well as in water and that the planets could, therefore, affect the fluidal balance of the human body. Mesmer associated this “animal gravitation” with health: physical soundness resulted from the “harmony” between the organs of the body and the planets - a proposition, he emphasized, that had nothing to do with the fictions of astrology.
The proposition took on new life for Mesmer when he began treating his own patients. Inspired by the experiments of Maximilian Hell, a court astronomer, and Jesuit priest, who used magnets in the treatment of disease, Mesmer applied magnets to his patients’ bodies and produced remarkable results, especially in the case of a young woman suffering from hysteria. Unlike Hell, Mesmer did not attribute his cures to any power in the magnets themselves. Instead, he argued that the body was analogous to a magnet and that the fluid ebbed and flowed according to the laws of magnetic attraction. Having moved from “animal gravitation” to “animal magnetism,” he announced his new theory in Sendschreiben an einen auswärtigen Arzt (Vienna, 1775).
Considered as a movement, mesmerism suggests some of the varieties of pre-Romanticism and popular science in the late eighteenth century. It did not spend itself as an intellectual force for almost a hundred years, as the mesmerist passages in the works of Holfmann, Hugo, and Poe testify. But as a scientific theory mesmerism offered only a thin and unoriginal assortment of ideas. Although Mesmer’s own writings contained little sustained theorizing, they provided enough for his enemies to detect all manner of occultist and vitalistic influences and to align him with William Maxwell, the Scottish physician, author of De Medicina Magnetica (1769), Robert Fludd, J. B. van Helmont, and Paracelsus - when they did not categorize him with Cagliostro. This version of his intellectual ancestry seems convincing enough if one adds Newton and Mead to the list. But nothing proves that Mesmer was a charlatan. He seems to have believed sincerely in his theory, although he also showed a fierce determination to convert it into cash: he charged ten louis a month for the use of his “tubs”; and he made a fortune from the Société de l’Harmonie Universelle, which, in return, claimed exclusive proprietorship of his deepest “secrets.”
Quotations:
"Physicians are the depositaries of the confidence of the public in regard to everything which concerns the preservation of health, and the happiness of man."
"By the expression Animal Magnetism I mean one of the universal operations of Nature, the action of which, when directed on our nerves, offers a universal means of curing and preserving man."
Membership
Franz Anton Mesmer was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities
,
Kingdom of Bavaria
Personality
Mesmer's marriage brought him enough wealth to pursue his experiments at his leisure and enough leisure to indulge his passion for music. Mesmer knew Gluck, seems to have been acquainted with Haydn and saw a great deal of the Mozarts. The first production of a Mozart opera, Bastien und Bastienne, took place in Mesmer’s garden, and Mozart later made room for mesmerism in a scene in Cosi fan tutte. In general, the ten years between Mesmer’s marriage in 1768 and his departure from Vienna in 1778 seem to have been a time of prosperity and some prominence.
Interests
music
Music & Bands
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn, Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck
Connections
Mesmer advanced to a position of some prominence in Viennese society through his marriage to a wealthy widow, Maria Anna von Posch, on 16 January 1768.