Franz Mesmer and the Power of Belief

https://youtu.be/xQf-r83jRhI

Like Julius Caesar before him and Charles Boycott after him, Franz Mesmer is among those select human beings whose names became part of the English language. Even if you have never heard of Mesmer, you probably know the words mesmerize and mesmerism, but “hypnotic appeal” (one of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of mesmerism) was not Mesmer’s original claim to fame.

Instead, Mesmer achieved his fame with a different claim, one that promised cures to those people who subjected themselves to his sensational form of “treatment.”

In the end, Mesmer’s theory and treatment were all sizzle, something Mesmer knew how to sell. Still, the story of his sensational appeal and the investigation that debunked him is itself a kind of cure—though more practical than miracle—that all of us can use today.

Suspicious Beginnings

Long before the fictional “Music Man” Harold Hill and the very real hucksters of nineteenth-century America, Franz Anton Mesmer was one artful dodger, as oily as any snake-oil salesman of a subsequent era. He looked legit—as any quacksalver must—but, well, he wasn’t all there.

He did write a dissertation and earn a degree—or maybe I should say he submitted a dissertation and received a degree—in Vienna in the 1760s. As historian Jessica Riskin explains, “the dissertation was . . . largely plagiarized from the English physician Richard Mead's De imperio solis ac lunae in corpora humana et morbis inde oriundis (1704).”

That little detail should clue you into the personality of Dr. Mesmer, but there’s more. A year after he secured a spot on the faculty at the University of Vienna, he got married. The lucky bride, Maria Anna von Posch, could have been Mesmer’s soulmate, I suppose. She definitely was wealthy anyway. “Her fortune,” Riskin explains, “supported her husband's burgeoning career, though her justifiably suspicious family placed increasing constraints on his access to it, while her luxurious estate in the Landstrasse offered a venue for the sumptuous musical soirées he liked to host“ (Riskin).

Is the makeup of the good doctor starting to come into focus? Just wait.

An Attractive Theory

Somewhere along the way in his medical career, Mesmer began treating patients with—what else?—magnets. He had gotten the idea, apparently, from Maximilian Hell, an astronomer and—ironically, given his surname—a priest. Now, if I were a physician, I would like to think I would be open to medical insights to help me improve my practice, but I don’t know that I would be soaking them up from astronomers and priests or even someone who was looking up in both respects. Perhaps Mesmer knew a good thing when he saw one. At any rate, Hell shared a magnet that he had wielded with such skillfulness that he had freed a noblewoman from an abdominal ailment—that was the story anyway.

“Mesmer,” Riskin explains, “soon elaborated this practice, adding a theory from his doctoral thesis, which hypothesized a fluid from the stars that flowed into a northern pole in the human head and out of a southern one at the feet.”

OK, it’s far-fetched—involving, as it did, sources that were literally light-years away—but Mesmer’s theory of so-called “animal magnetism” was not as out there as it might seem, at least by eighteenth-century standards. As physician Adam Rodman notes in his podcast Bedside Rounds, other “invisible forces” were getting serious attention at this time. You probably have heard of some of them: gravity, for example, and electricity. “Ah,” you say, “but those are real.” Well, who’s to say? It takes rigorous scientific experimentation to distinguish an actual natural phenomenon from a purely fanciful idea.

Mesmer’s fanciful idea, fortunately for him, was also an appealing one, since it promised relief from a variety of excruciating and debilitating disorders. "Having ascertained that a magnetic fluid coursed through nature,” historian Stacy Schiff explains, “he concluded that all illness resulted either from its imbalance or from its faulty distribution.” Along with this theory came an idea for a treatment. Schiff writes, “By manipulating a patient's fluids with his hands or with a special iron wand, he could restore that equilibrium, thereby alleviating any complaint, from rheumatism, gout, or asthma to blindness, epilepsy, or paralysis.”

As an educator and a writer, I realize now that I have spent three decades squandering my efforts on work that merely enriches and elevates the life of the mind. Clearly, I should have been working on a miracle cure. Wait, since reading William Blake’s long poetry gives me a headache, maybe reading it backward . . .

A Medical Sensation

After initial success, some controversy repulsed the magnetic Mesmer, sending him packing. He landed in Paris, started fresh, and found new success.

In Paris, Mesmer’s treatments came with some drama—lots of it, actually. Sure, he could have had would-be patients come to his office, subject themselves to a touch of his hands or wand, and then walk away cured, but what fun would that be?

Instead, he treated patients in a setting that, for some of us, conjures up images of a nineteenth-century seance (a similarly fishy phenomenon, also worthy of a column here in Mind Travel).  Here's how Riskin describes it:

Soon mesmeric salons had sprung up throughout the city.  Inside, their atmosphere was murky and suggestive, with drawn curtains, thick carpet, and astrological wall-decorations.

In short, they just looked like the kinds of places where medical miracles could occur.  After all, if you want something out of the ordinary to occur, you naturally expect it to happen in a place out of the ordinary.

Once they entered these "mesmeric salons," patients would undergo treatment in different ways.  Since treatment was based on the notion of a magnetic fluid, patients sometimes would touch one another's thumbs, although they might also be connected via ropes, while situated around basins of water.  The treatment supposedly came from metal rods that were projecting out of the water.  In another form of treatment, Mesmer would treat patients directly with his wand or even his hands.  "By means of these titillating practices," Riskin explains, "he provoked the notorious mesmeric crises."

These crises were dramatic, probably creating some of the sensation surrounding animal magnetism.  "Soon enough the air filled with sighs, ecstatic shrieks, and hysterical laughter," Schiff writes.  "Patients fell into trances, or succumbed to violent convulsions, at which point they were removed to silk-padded rooms."

“Nothing is more astonishing than the spectacle of these convulsions;” one contemporary account reads, “until one has seen them one can have no idea of them . . .”

Paradoxically, such spectacles, as sketchy and even comical as they appear to us, may have lent some credibility to Mesmer's methods because of a parallel with another, real invisible phenomenon, as Riskin observes:

The cures, which involved violent "crises" with fits of writhing and fainting, reminded contemporaries of the recently invented electrical capacitor, the Leyden jar, which sent a fiery commotion through the bold (or careless) experimenter who discharged it by touching it.

Mesmer seemed to have it all: a theory that at least seemed plausible, some appealing drama, a sizable crowd of people drawn to his treatment, a band of disciples (including a respectable physician named Charles Deslon), and even some success stories. That’s right, his methods actually appeared to work.

Eventually, however, King Louis XVI appointed a Royal Commission to take a closer look at Mesmer’s practice. As it so happened, one of the world’s leading scientists happened to be in town, an American by the name of Benjamin Franklin. In a little-known chapter of his illustrious career, Franklin, as head of the commission, set out to add “medical reviewer” to his already lengthy resume.

The Secret to Mesmer’s Success

Mesmer’s treatments actually held some interest for Franklin, but not for the reasons that Mesmer might have preferred. Along with the Pennsylvania fireplace and the lightning rod, Franklin had invented a musical instrument called the glass armonica, which consisted of glass bowls that could be played with wet fingers. Because of the eerie, otherworldly sound it makes, the armonica was ideal for setting the mood for a mesmeric treatment.

Whatever Franklin thought about the musical atmosphere of Mesmer’s salons, he wasn’t convinced that the treatments worked for the reasons Mesmer claimed. He himself underwent treatment by Deslon, and some clever methods were used with other patients. For example, Deslon tried to treat some patients from behind a screen, so that they did not know they were being treated, and one patient underwent “treatment” by a commissioner, not Deslon. In short, success seemed to be correlated not with actual treatment, but rather with the belief that one was being treated.

The commission’s report put it this way:

After these and several more experiments, the commissioners concluded that the effects of animal magnetism were due to imagination and the subject’s own expectations.

Today, we know this phenomenon as the “placebo effect,” which Britannica defines as “psychological or psychophysiological improvement attributed to therapy with an inert substance or a simulated (sham) procedure.”

Mesmer’s treatment was a sham, all right, but believing in it seems to have had an effect in some cases.

The report was widely disseminated, and Mesmer was discredited. He lived for many more years, outliving Franklin in fact, but no longer enjoyed the sensational success he had during those halcyon days in Paris.

Although he saw through Mesmer’s pseudoscience, Franklin was not entirely negative in his assessment of the treatment. With characteristic sagacity, he wrote:

There are in every great city a number of persons who are never in health, because they are fond of medications and always taking them, and hurt their constitutions. If these people can be persuaded to forbear their drugs in expectations of being cured by only the physician's finger or an iron pointing at them, they may possibly find good effects tho' they mistake the cause.

The Limits of Belief

Franklin, always the pragmatist, found practical value even in a fraudulent treatment. Still, I like to think that he would encourage people to train a critical eye on scientific claims and, indeed, other claims about reality. Many of us, along with Fox Mulder of The X-Files, “WANT TO BELIEVE,” but carrying that desire too far can come back to haunt us. Even if the mind occasionally—and only occasionally, mind you—can bend health effects to its own will, all things beyond one’s own body—earth, wind, fire, and more—are impervious to such effects of belief, or, as the Royal Commission’s report put it, “imagination.”

Our minds are the most powerful when we use them to consider evidence and evaluate claims (and claimers) critically. We cannot wish away reality (or conjure it up with our imaginations), but we can discern reality and use our reason to make sound decisions based on it.

If all of this critical thinking seems like too much work, let me know because I’m working on a new product I’m calling Poetry Panacea. For $499–paid in three easy installments—you can learn to end any ailment simply by chanting “Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore . . .”