Quackery

by Lydia Kang

  By the time Mesmer approaches you, magnetic rod extended, you can take this scene no longer and you quickly flee the room. As you walk back into the afternoon light, you reflect that although it was perhaps the most ridiculous scene you have ever witnessed, you have to admit you were completely entertained. And you’ll now have a shocking new topic of conversation at your next house party.

  What just happened? To explain, we have to step a bit further back in time and introduce you to Father Hell.

  Father Hell and the Birth of Animal Magnetism

  In the 1770s, Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer was a young doctor practicing medicine in Vienna, when a chance encounter with a Jesuit priest named Maximilian Hell changed his life forever. Maximilian Hell, or Father Hell, as we hope he preferred to be called, was conducting medical experiments with magnetized lodestone plates. Hell applied these plates to the naked bodies of sick patients in an effort to provide comfort for diseases like rheumatism.

  Mesmer was enthralled by the priest’s demonstrations. He adopted Hell’s magnetic theory, and then twisted it into his own delightfully bizarre philosophy that all disease—literally every single disease—was the result of an imbalance in the body of a universal magnetic fluid that was susceptible to gravitational force. Mesmer initially believed that these imbalances could be redressed with the application of magnets, but soon became convinced that the true power to realign magnetic fluids lay within himself.

  Calling this universal magnetic fluid “animal magnetism,” Mesmer believed that by laying his hands on patients and engaging his willpower, he could manipulate this fluid and heal the sick.

  The idea that human bodies contained a mysterious, universal fluid that could be influenced by external forces wasn’t new and was, in fact, a basic tenet of occult movements such as astrology and alchemy. In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus suggested our systems could be affected by planetary movements. Mesmer built upon this theory in his dissertation at the University of Vienna in 1766, writing:

  The sun, moon, and fixed stars mutually affect each other in their orbits; that they cause and direct in our earth a flux and reflux not only in the sea, but in the atmosphere, and affect in a similar manner all organized bodies through the medium of a subtle and mobile fluid, which pervades the universe, and associates all things together in mutual intercourse and harmony.

  Mesmer claimed that this “nervous fluid,” or “animal magnetism” as he called it, could be manipulated by a physician. In an era of incredible new scientific discoveries such as electricity and gravity, Mesmer’s magnetic fluid gospel found a willing audience.

  Of course, the satirists had a field day: here, donkeys hard at work as animal magnetizers.

  Mesmer’s Magic Touch

  After convincing Father Hell to make some similar magnetic plates for him to experiment with, Mesmer started treating patients in Vienna. He met with early success while treating Franziska Oesterlin, a young “hysteric” suffering from convulsions. During an attack, Mesmer applied the magnetic plates to her stomach and legs. Oesterlin reported feeling “painful currents of a subtle material” traveling through her body, which reduced the severity of a convulsion, ultimately stopping it altogether.

  He treated Oesterlin during many attacks over the next two years, eventually concluding that the magnetic plates were merely an accessory to Mesmer’s touch itself. He found he could produce similar results by simply passing his hands along Oesterlin’s body, or by moving his hands in the direction he wanted the magnetic fluid to travel, even from a great distance.

  After declaring Oesterlin cured, Mesmer set about writing to all the learned societies of Europe about his exciting new discovery. It was a delightfully simple and bizarre theory: Human health depends upon the uninterrupted flow of animal magnetism throughout the body. If that magnetic fluid is blocked, disease is the inevitable result. Health could be restored by removing the block and manipulating the animal magnetism via a magnetized, well, anything.

  Mesmer clarified this, sort of, while writing to a friend in Vienna:

  I have observed that the magnetic is almost the same thing as the electric fluid, and that it may be propagated in the same manner, by means of intermediate bodies. Steel is not the only substance adapted to this purpose. I have rendered paper, bread, wool, silk, stones, leather, glass, wood, men, and dogs—in short, everything I touched—magnetic to such a degree that these substances produced the same effects as the loadstone on diseased persons.

  Taking a break from magnetizing leather and dogs, Mesmer landed a high-profile patient in Maria Theresia von Paradis, a young piano prodigy who had been blind since infancy. He attempted to adjust the young girl’s animal magnetism and, apparently, even made some progress in curing her blindness before he was abruptly dismissed by the pianist’s caregivers. Reports vary on the reason—some theorize that doctor and patient grew a little too close, which would hardly be a surprise considering all that intense touching going on—regardless, Mesmer was sent packing from Vienna.

  The nonstop action of facilitating the passage of magnetic fluid.

  American Innovation: From Magnetism to Faith Healing

  In 1862, Mary Patterson was weak, emaciated, and depressed from spending much of her forty-two years sick and bedridden. Desperate for a cure, she limped her aching body up the stairs to the office of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in Portland, Maine.

  A few years earlier, Quimby had caught a lecture on animal magnetism from a visiting Frenchman named Charles Poyen. He was hooked. Like a 1990s teenager who caught his first Phish show and then gave up everything to follow the band around the country, Quimby resigned from his business and became a mesmerism groupie. He followed Poyen, learning everything he could.

  Quimby’s method of magnetic healing relied upon building rapport between physician and patient, encouraging them to improve their mental health through positive thinking. He would stare into his patients’ eyes and listen carefully as they discussed their health complaints while he massaged their hands and arms. Somehow, Quimby was not viewed as creepy. Quite the opposite; after simply being listened to by their physician, a lot of Quimby’s patients were subsequently “cured.”

  Quimby appears to have been a genuine believer in the mesmeric healing arts he practiced. Although Mesmer’s morals were swallowed up in his mad dash for money and celebrity, Quimby had faith in the procedure and tried to help as many sick people as he could.

  Including the poor young woman who stepped into his office that day in 1862.

  To everyone’s shock, including her own, after just a week with Quimby staring intensely into her eyes and massaging her hands, Patterson reported a sudden and dramatic improvement in her health. Soon Quimby had more than a patient on his hands: He had a diehard devotee.

  The newly energized Patterson learned everything she could from Quimby before developing her own medical system influenced by animal magnetism. She later got married and adopted the name history would remember her by: Mary Baker Eddy. Oh, and that little medical system she invented? It was the beginning of Christian Science, the largest healing faith ever produced in America, still going strong in 2017 with a global membership of about four hundred thousand people.

  Mary modified the magnetic healing theories of Quimby and Mesmer to add a religious element: All disease is an illusion that can be cured by communion with God. And so animal magnetism continues—albeit in a modified form—into the twenty-first century.

  Mary Baker Eddy (née Patterson).

  The Societies of Harmony

  Despite the scandal back home in Austria, Mesmer found a more enlightened audience in France. His attractiveness, combined with his sophistication and almost preternatural self-confidence, found a natural sympathy with the French people. In 1778, he set up shop among the fashionable circles of Paris and launched his incredibly popular magnetic healing practice, which was two parts theater to one part healing. (Well, more like nine parts theater to one part healing.)

&n
bsp; The drama and sexual undertones were perfect for the repressed audience. Mesmer’s shows were an enormous hit and the physician was soon a wealthy man. Like so many quacks before and after him, as Mesmer’s bank account grew, his moral commitments to advancing medicine shrank. And then they shrank some more.

  Mesmer never lacked audacity, however, and he soon wrote the queen, Marie Antoinette herself, asking for a château and a significant annual income from the royal coffers for, well, basically just being Mesmer:

  In the eyes of your majesty, four or five hundred thousand francs, applied to a good purpose, are of no account. The welfare and happiness of your people are everything. My discovery ought to be received and rewarded with a munificence worthy of the monarch to whom I shall attach myself.

  The queen’s advisers eventually replied, offering a 20,000-franc pension if Mesmer could prove his discovery successfully in front of physicians appointed by the king. Mesmer demurred and, suddenly proclaiming his disdain for money, fled Paris (and with it, the possibility of further investigation) for the Belgian town of Spa. Some enthusiastic converts followed, where one of them, named Bergasse, opened a subscription service in his name. Each subscriber, at the rate of one hundred louis d’or each, would receive their leader’s secrets. Mesmer, forgetting his earlier disdain for money, happily agreed, receiving a fortune of 140,000 francs from subscribers who wanted to spread the Mesmerian gospel.

  Money in hand, Mesmer triumphantly returned to Paris, while his subscribers opened what they called Societies of Harmony throughout France, where they purported to cure disease through magnetism. It was no accident that many of the subscribers were wealthy libertines, eager to set up magnetized healing rituals for the debauched pleasure of watching young women descend into delirious states.

  Mesmer’s return to Paris, however, did not escape the notice of the comparatively austere French Academy of Sciences, who decided to look into this sweeping medicinal trend in 1784. They even roped visiting American dignitary Benjamin Franklin into their investigation. Their bummer of a conclusion: Magnetic fluid did not exist. Mesmer was decried as a fraud, using the powers of suggestion and imagination to create powerful placebo effects in his patients.

  Mesmer left France for good and drifted into obscurity, wandering around Europe before dying in Austria in 1815. His legacy, however, lives on. Today, Merriam-Webster defines mesmerize as to “hypnotize” or “spellbind.”

  But magnetism wasn’t done. Mesmer actually laid the groundwork for a surprisingly effective form of relaxation and pain relief. How? To explain, we must journey to Bengal, India, where a doctor was dealing with a rather large problem.

  Hypnosis: Magnetism’s Modern Upgrade

  James Esdaile was a British colonial doctor serving in Bengal who was anxious to provide pain relief for his patients while he attempted to drain their large scrotal tumors. A result of an outbreak of filariasis, a parasitic disease from roundworm infections, the problem was of such a massive scale (one man’s scrotal tumor was so large that he had to move it via a rope and pulley system) that the medical community was struggling to provide a solution.

  Although this was thousands of miles away from Paris, word had trickled down to the remote outposts of the colonial empire of a certain Franz Mesmer who was producing trance states in patients that allowed for pain-free medical procedures.

  Esdaile read up on Mesmer, then decided to give animal magnetism a go himself. The doctor improvised a unique mesmeric method that included elements of local Indian practice, such as yogic breathing and stroking. After the patient slipped into a trance state, out came the scalpel, and—hopefully—out came the scrotal tumor. The funny thing was, it worked.

  Although Esdaile would have considered himself a Mesmerist (the term hypnosis was just then coming into use in England), he effectively pioneered the use of hypnosis for surgical anesthesia, which would flourish briefly prior to the discovery of chloroform and was used effectively all the way through the American Civil War. In an era when on a good day a surgeon would manage to not kill 50 percent of his patients, Esdaile lost only sixteen patients out of the thousands he operated on during his six years in India.

  The use of hypnotism in Western medicine really took off, however, when Scottish surgeon James Braid managed to elevate hypnotic techniques into mainstream medical practice. Like many physicians of his day, Braid was introduced to hypnotic techniques via a public demonstration of animal magnetism, which he first witnessed in 1841. Braid was amazed at what he saw and returned the following week to watch the same demonstration again. Convinced that he had observed a unique phenomenon, but dissatisfied with its explanations of manipulated “emanations” or “magnetic fluids,” Braid sought his own answers.

  During both demonstrations of animal magnetism, Braid noticed that the patient’s eyes had remained closed. He concluded that the patient had somehow been lulled into sleep due to neuromuscular exhaustion, probably induced via intense staring. He decided to experiment on his dinner guest the next evening, whom he invited to stare without blinking at the top of a wine bottle for as long as possible. The dinner guest promptly fell asleep (and never went back for another dinner at Braid’s house).

  After repeating the experiment to similar success with his wife and manservant, Braid enjoyed having the house to himself for a few minutes, put his feet up on the dinner table without anyone yelling at him, and reached an important conclusion: The mesmerized state, which he would dub “nervous sleep,” could be understood as a physiological and psychological phenomenon.

  Braid spent the next eighteen years of his life researching hypnosis and employing it in a wide variety of medical applications, including the treatment of spinal curvature, deafness, and epilepsy. He claimed his treatments worked, and they were gradually accepted by the medical community owing to Braid’s investigations and near-constant stream of publications in academic journals. The physician laid the groundwork for the occasional accepted medical use of hypnosis, which includes treatment for pain, hot flashes, fatigue, and many psychological ailments.

  Braid was even responsible for popularizing the name that history would remember the practice by: hypnosis. It’s thanks to Braid that today you seek out treatment from a hypnotherapist and not an “animal magnetizer.”

  Isn’t that something to be thankful for?

  A life-size puppet (from a French magnetism manual, 1846).

  26

  Light

  Of Blue Glass, Kellogg’s Light Baths, the Spectro-Chrome Institute, the Surgical Ray, and the Bureau of Cosmotherapy

  Brigadier General Augustus J. Pleasanton was a respectable citizen of mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia who happened to spend an inordinate amount of time puzzling over the sky. “For a long time I have thought that the blue color of the sky, so permanent and all-pervading … must have some abiding relation and intimate connection with the living organisms on this planet.”

  Pleasanton decided to experiment with this idea and got to work constructing a greenhouse with alternating blue panels on his estate in 1860, filling it with grapevines. His plants grew at an astonishing rate, although this was probably due to the fact that he built them a greenhouse and had nothing to do with the blue glass panels. Pleasanton was encouraged, however, and his grapes were the envy of his neighbors.

  Then, in 1869, Pleasanton was staring at a pig one day and thought to himself, What if I shone blue light on a pig? So the intrepid inventor let some of his piglets develop in a piggery with clear glass and some in a piggery with blue glass. And, lo and behold, the blue light pigs grew quicker and were healthier.

  This was all the confirmation Pleasanton needed. He was ready to loudly proclaim the gospel of blue light to anybody willing to listen. He soon landed on a charming, if entirely kooky, vision of the future of the human race where, thanks to harnessing the power of blue light, we become giants in perfect health, bringing along our domesticated animals for the ride:

  What strength of vitality co
uld be infused into the feeble young, the mature invalid, and the decrepit octogenarian! How rapidly might the various races of our domestic animals be multiplied, and how much might their individual portions be enlarged!

  His enthusiasm was contagious. As Pleasanton spread his views around the country in self-published pamphlets, reports began to trickle, then pour in, of illnesses cured and injuries alleviated by soaking up the rays beneath blue glass windowpanes.

  Pleasanton even received a letter announcing that a premature baby, born paralyzed, had been placed beneath blue glass for long periods and was now able to move. Another attested to an infant whose large tumor had disappeared after exposing it for an hour each day to blue light. And so on.

  Pleasanton’s awesome green (blue) house.

  Pleasanton wrote a book about his blue light discoveries, chock full of such testimonials from patients, and, in an extraordinary effort to fill some blank pages, his own bizarre theories on electricity and electromagnetism. The coolest thing about Pleasanton’s book, however, and the reason it’s a collector’s item today, is that he had it printed on blue paper with blue ink “to relieve the eyes of the reader from the great glare, occasioned by the reflection of gas light at night from the white paper usually employed in the printing of books.” It was a thoughtful gesture to his readers, but an unfortunate choice for latter-day scholars who now must struggle to read the fading light blue ink.

  Published in 1876, The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Colour of the Sky launched the blue light fad into the mainstream for two glowing years. The second edition of Pleasanton’s book, which claimed that blue glass was a universal panacea and could cure everything from gout to paralysis, came out the next year, and glass manufacturers around the country lined up in droves to personally thank the author.