“that the discoveries I have made will push back the boundaries of our “I dare to flatter myself,” Mesmer boasted in his Memoir,
Of Mesmerism, Mesmer’s science never received the official recognition Somnambulistic trances, and thereby make uncannily accurateĭespite the popularity and rapid proliferation
Purported that their patients could see their own insides when in TheĬornflowers, too, might be interpreted symbolically-not as a cure forįailing eyesight but as triggers for the interior vision that a sessionĪt the tub was thought to inspire. Radiating sun with a pyramid embedded in its core, from which theĬopper ball of the Leyden jar emerges like an all-seeing eye. Why the lid of the baquet is decorated with Masonic symbols: a Masons, from which most of its members were recruited, which explains The Lyon Mesmerist society, La Concorde, was closely allied to the Before leaving I will obtain permission to let you into Mesmer’s secret, which, you can count on it, is a great philosophical discovery.” “I know as much about it as any sorcerer ever did. Benjamin Franklin remarked that the public’s attention was divided equally between the baquet and the new hot air balloon, and wrote of the craze: “Struck with the clearness and accuracy of reasonings, the magnificence of his pretensions, and the extraordinary and unquestionable cures he performed, some of the greatest physicians and most enlightened philosophers of France became his converts.“”In 1784, George Lafayette, the French soldier and statesman, wrote to George Washington of his enthusiasm for Mesmer. The fashionable and the curious flocked to Mesmer’s clinic to see and experience the miraculous transformation it promised (the novelist Stefan Zweig described this “collective frenzy” as “Mesmeromania”). Some baquets could seat twenty people, and Mesmer had four of these in his Paris treatment rooms at the Hôtel Bullion on rue Coq-Héron.
In fact, the hysterical reactions Mesmer provoked seemed to be contagious, so the dramatic effects were exacerbated in a crowded room.
#Franz mesmer full#
Mesmer believed that animal magnetism “could be stored up and concentrated, like electric fluid” and that with the aid of the magnetic reservoir in his therapeutic prop he could distribute the full force of his own peculiar “vital fire” to a burgeoning clientele. The baquet was essentially a gigantic bucket, a huge Leyden jar supposedly charged by the animal magnetism emanating from Mesmer’s own person. A few years earlier, he had discovered that the powers of his own animal magnetism were magnified if he stood with one foot in a pail of water with an iron rod dipped into it. Mesmer was soon besieged by more patients than he could hope to treat individually, as many as two hundred a day, so on arriving in Paris he invented the baquet to accommodate them en masse. In comparison to these torture treatments, Mesmerism-or “animal magnetism”-seemed to offer a less violent, and no less miraculous, form of therapy. One poor boy was repeatedly thrown into a vat containing a large electric eel until he was cured of an irregular use of his limbs. (One medical electrician claimed not only to have shot a charge through 150 guardsmen, but to have made a kilometer-long line of monks simultaneously jump into the air.) Some animals were electrocuted in public displays of electricity’s magical and invisible power others were drowned and immediately revived with galvanic current. Benjamin Franklin, then American ambassador to France, was fond of demonstrating the power that could be harnessed in a Leyden jar, the prototype of the modern battery, by using one to send a bolt of electricity through a chain of people. Pharmacists and apothecaries frequently prescribed shock treatment, especially in attempts to cure paralysis, and often exposed the sick to a more general “electrical aura” as a healing agent. The baquet, as Mesmer named his vessel, parodied the contemporary craze for medical electricity. When a patient’s seizures became so exaggerated as to be dangerous or disruptive, Mesmer’s valet, Antoine, would carry him or her to the sanctuary of a mattress-lined “crisis room” where the screams would be muffled. These effects were considered cathartic and curative. By slowly passing his hands over patients’ bodies, or with a simple flick of his magnetized wand, Mesmer would provoke screams, fits of contagious hysterical laughter, vomiting, and dramatic convulsions. He would prowl around the expectant, highly charged circle, sending clients into trances with his enthralling brown-eyed stare. Franz Anton Mesmer, the legendary Viennese healer, hypnotist, and showman, would enter this baroque salon of his own invention wearing flamboyant gold slippers and a lilac silk robe.
0 kommentar(er)
