![]() He began his cures at Busancy in the same year that animal magnetism was officially turned down. The next important development is attached to the name of Marquis de Puys égur. ![]() It marked the discovery of the human element in animal magnetism. He claimed to have discovered something -animal heat -that radiated from the human body and could be directed and intensified by willpower. De Jussieu was the only member who dissented. The committees, in their verdict, stated that they found no evidence of a magnetic fluid, and the cures might be due to vivid imagination. The operator, with an iron rod in his hands, walked around and touched the patients they fell into convulsions, sweated, vomited, cried -and were supposedly cured. The patients were tied together by a cord that passed around the circle. The rods were bent and could be applied to any part of the body by the patients who sat in rows. The baquet was covered, and iron rods projected from the lid through holes therein. This baquet was a large circular tub filled with bottles that dipped into the water. The delegates restricted their activity to the search for evidence of a new physical force that was claimed as the agent of the cure.Īs part of their investigation, they observed Mesmer's use of the famous baquet. Lavater four more commissioners were added from the Royal Society of Medicine. Nine commissioners convened under the presidency of Benjamin Franklin, including Jean Sylvain Bailly and J. In 1784 the French government charged the Faculty of Medicine and the Societ é Royale de M édicine to examine animal magnetism. Mesmer refused, but two years later accepted a subscription of 340,000 livres for lectures to pupils. In the meantime public enthusiasm grew to such a high pitch that in March 1781 Minister de Maurepas offered Mesmer, on behalf of the king, 20,000 livres (francs) and a further annuity of 10,000 livres if he established a school and divulged the secret of his treatment. The proposal was rejected, and d'Eslon was told that his name would be struck off the rolls at the end of the year if he did not recant. In September 1780 d'Eslon asked the Faculty of Medicine to investigate Mesmer's ideas and practices. His first convert was Charles d'Eslon, medical adviser to Count d'Artois. In 1778, after a bitter public controversy over the cure of a blind girl, Mesmer went to Paris. The arousal of public attention was due to a bitter controversy between Mesmer and a Jesuit priest Maximilian Hell, professor of astronomy at the University of Vienna, who claimed priority of discovery. "It is communicated, propagated and augmented by the voice."īy applying magnetic plates to the patient's limbs, Mesmer effected his first cures in 1773. "Similarly to light it is augmented and reflected by the mirror. ![]() "It acts from a distance without the intermediary of other bodies. "This property of the animal body which renders it susceptible to the influence of celestial bodies and to the reciprocal action of the environing ones I felt prompted to name, from its analogy to the magnet, animal magnetism. "It particularly manifests itself in the human body with properties analogous to the magnet there are poles, diverse and opposed, which can be communicated, changed, destroyed and reinforced the phenomenon of inclination is also observable. "It is by this operation (the most universal in nature) that the active relations are exercised between the heavenly bodies, the earth and its constituent particles. "The result of this action consists of alternating effects which may be considered fluxes and refluxes. "This reciprocal action is subject to as yet unknown mechanical laws. "The means of this influence is a fluid which is universal and so continuous that it cannot suffer void, subtle beyond comparison and susceptible to receive, propagate and communicate every impression of movement. "There is a mutual influence between the celestial bodies, the earth and animated bodies. A system of healing, founded by Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1815), an Austrian doctor who received his degree at Vienna in 1766 and expounded the main principles of his discovery of animal magnetism in De Planetarum Influxu, his inaugural thesis in which he summarized his position in a series of statements: ![]()
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