Le Magn?tisme Animal, 18th Century
Drawing room scene with many people sitting and standing around a large table; a man on a crutch has an iron band wrapped around his ankle; others in the group are holding bands similarly; to the left, a man has hypnotized a woman. By 1780 Mesmer had more patients than he could treat individually and he established a collective treatment known as the baquet'. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) was a German physician with an interest in astronomy, who theorized that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects that he called magn?tisme animal (animal magnetism) and other spiritual forces often grouped together as mesmerism. Mesmerism is considered to be a form of vitalism and shares features with other vitalist theories that also emphasize the movement of life energy through distinct channels in the body. There those who thought he was a charlatan and those who thought he had made a great discovery. Mesmer treated patients both individually and in groups. He would often conclude his treatments by playing some music on a glass armonica. 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. In 1779, Mesmer wrote an 88-page book entitled: M?moire sur la d?couverte du magn?tisme animal, to which he appended his famous 27 Propositions that outlined his theory. In 1784 King Louis XVI appointed commissioners to investigate animal magnetism. The commission concluded that there was no evidence for such a fluid. Whatever benefit the treatment produced was attributed to imagination'. Mesmer lived to be 80 years old
