Breakthrough: Fraulein Oesterlin
Since we have no record to the contrary, we may presume that at this time Mesmer's medical practice consisted of the usual methods – leeches and bloodletting, blistering, purgatives, sedatives and so on. He was getting on for forty years old, a tall, stout man, with broad shoulders, somewhat coarse features, an imposing presence and the kind of bedside manner that went down well with his wealthy clients, provided he could curb his enormous ego and short temper. But in the early 1770s it came to his attention that the Astronomer Royal to the imperial Austrian court, Father Maximilian Hell, was experimenting with the healing properties of magnets. This was greatly facilitated by the fact that in 1750 John Canton had discovered how to make artificial magnets by rubbing iron or steel. Magnets were suddenly more widely available, and didn't have to be dug out of the ground, but could be shaped and sized to one's purpose.
Healing through magnets has a long history, dating back at least to ancient Greece, and it had been promoted, closer to Mesmer's times, by various luminaries. Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541) had hypothesized that we possess a magnetic power by which we can attract healthy or diseased effluvia from a body; the magnetic ‘virtue’ is stronger in the healthy than the weak. Johannes Baptiste van Helmont had discussed magnetic healing in De Magnetica Vulnerum Curatione (1621), as had the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), Robert Fludd (in Philosophica Moysaica, 1637), and William Maxwell in De medicina magnetica (c. 1650). Maxwell went so far as to claim that all illness is the result of a defect in the vital magnetic fluid of the body, and that these defects can be rectified by restoring the appropriate quantity of magnetism. Hell was far from the first to practise healing with magnets.
Mesmer had a hysterical patient called Francisca Oesterlin, a friend and companion of his wife. She suffered, in Mesmer's own words, from ‘constant vomiting, inflammation of the bowels, stoppage of urine, excruciating toothache, earache, melancholy, depression, delirium, fits of frenzy, catalepsy, fainting fits, blindness, breathlessness, and lameness’. It's hardly surprising that melancholy and depression are on the list! Some of Leopold Mozart's letters add that she was frequently at death's door, and nothing but skin and bones. Mesmer had tried all the usual remedies, but to no avail. Finally he turned to Hell, and ordered some magnets from him. In July 1774, he made Oesterlin swallow a drink infused with iron and then attached three magnets to her, one on her stomach, the other two on her legs. Oesterlin went into crisis: she felt waves of energy pulsing through her body and threw a fit. After several sessions, though, she was cured, and the cure seems to have been permanent. At any rate, we have a 1781 letter of Leopold Mozart from Mesmer's house saying that Oesterlin was plump and well, and the mother of two fine babies – she had married Mesmer's stepson.
It looks as though this cure struck Mesmer like a bolt of lightning. He was a convert, an enthusiast; the course of his life was changed for ever. Away with conventional medicine: he had discovered a universal panacea, a way of helping nature to bring about the state of ideal health. But if this was the first of Mesmer's magnetic cures, it was also the first of many professional quarrels. Hell wrote an article, to which Mesmer took great offence, pointing out his part in Oesterlin's cure. Mesmer replied that Hell's magnets had little to do with it, since magnets themselves are not the agents of cure, but simply channel the universal magnetic fluid into and through the patient's body. The magnetic fluid is what animates a body and is responsible for health and disease; if it is in equilibrium, we are healthy, and disease is disorder of the fluid. The presence of the magnetic fluid in us gives us ‘animal magnetism’ (which simply means ‘vital magnetism’), more if we are healthy, less if we are ill. If health is the correct balance of the magnetic fluid in us, it is the healer's job to channel the universal fluid into the patient's body to effect a cure. And he claimed that this is what he had always believed, since his days as a medical student at university. In other words, somewhere along the line in Mesmer's mind the ‘gravitational fluid’ of his dissertation had become ‘magnetic fluid’.
Hell suggested testing Mesmer's theories by magnetizing just one of a number of bottles of water and asking a patient to pick out the correct bottle time and time again. The patient should instinctively know which is the correct bottle, because of her bodily need for extra magnetic fluid. Needless to say – and as he would later too – Mesmer refused to carry out any such experiments. In his view the fact of the cure was all the evidence anyone should need to recognize the supreme importance of himself and his discovery to humankind. Throughout his life he would dress his theories up in scientific language and say things like ‘Observations have shown that…’, when he had carried out no laboratory tests at all.
Exorcism or Magnetism?
Further magnetic cures followed (and perhaps some failures too, though we don't hear of those). Mesmer found he could ‘magnetize’ other substances – paper, glass, water, etc. – so that all these things could act just as effectively as magnets themselves as conductors of magnetic fluid and as instruments of healing. This only confirmed his argument with Hell: the magnets themselves are not important. He gradually came to believe that he himself was a particular channel for the magnetic fluid – that his animal magnetism could produce the same effect on people as real magnets or magnetized substances – and he began to use hand passes to redistribute the fluid in the patient in a healthy way, and to guide it if necessary to the ailing part of the body. He also realized that the patient was more likely to get better if there was good rapport between him and her, and even that physical contact was not always necessary, just speaking with authority. On occasion, then, he found that he could heal through a wall, but it never occurred to him that this was due to the power of suggestion: throughout his life he remained a convinced materialist, so that if he could heal through a wall, that was because the fluid was powerful and fine enough to pass through solid objects.
‘There is only one illness,’ Mesmer would grandly declare, ‘and only one cure.’ Illness is caused by blockage of magnetic fluid (witness hardening of the arteries, stiffening of the joints, aches and pains), and to cure is to free the blockage. The patient will often experience a crisis point when the fluid reaches equilibrium (it had been standard medical theory since the time of Hippocrates in ancient Greece that the transition from illness to health is marked by some kind of crisis). This crisis is due to the fact that the magnetic fluid in the patient's body has solidified, so to speak, and a sudden push is needed to restart the healthful process. This push is provided by the magnetizer. The crisis takes the form of a fit: physical convulsions, weeping, hiccups or uncontrollable laughter, a tight feeling in the throat and chest, a feeling of cold and then of heat, sweating – that kind of thing. In some patients the crisis passes quickly; in others it lasts up to three hours.
Mesmer is sometimes criticized because, despite the blunt maxim that there is only one illness and only one cure, throughout his life he continued to prescribe certain medicines, both for himself and for others. But in fact these medicines are largely purgatives, which is consistent with his theory of blockage and unblockage. He once told Charles d'Eslon, his foremost disciple in Paris, that medicines were effective only in so far as they were conductors of the magnetic fluid. Perhaps he felt that over time he had identified the drugs which were such conductors and employed only these: there would be nothing inconsistent in this.
Emboldened by his successes, and wanting to gain official recognition for his methods and theories (a goal that he and his disciples would pursue, more or less futilely, for years), he sent a paper outlining his work round to various European medical academies. The only one to respond, however, was the Berlin Academy of Sciences, on 24 March 1775. They were extremely doubtful that Mesmer could magnetize non-metallic substances and found it unlikely that his methods had any true therapeutic value.
A test case for Mesmer's materialism occurred later that year. Mesmer was v
isiting Bavaria, where his fame had gained him membership of the Academy of Sciences (the only official honour he was ever to achieve). He was spreading the magnetic gospel, and Elector Maximilian Joseph III asked him to investigate the work of Johann Joseph Gassner, a Catholic priest who was carrying out a great many exorcisms, though by the laying-on of hands rather than by the rites accepted by the Church. Gassner had started healing in the 1760s, in Klösterle, a small village in eastern Switzerland where he was the priest. By the middle of the 1770s he had achieved astonishing fame throughout the German-speaking areas of Europe, and people were flocking to him in their thousands. Here is an account of one of his healings:
The first patients were two nuns who had been forced to leave their community on account of convulsive fits. Gassner told the first one to kneel before him, asked her briefly about her name, her illness, and whether she agreed that anything he would order should happen. She agreed. Gassner then pronounced solemnly in Latin: ‘If there be anything preternatural about this disease, I order in the name of Jesus that it manifest itself immediately.’ The patient started at once to have convulsions. According to Gassner, this was proof that the convulsions were caused by an evil spirit and not by a natural illness, and he now proceeded to demonstrate that he had power over the demon, whom he ordered in Latin to produce convulsions in various parts of the patient's body; he called forth in turn the exterior manifestations of grief, silliness, scrupulosity, anger and so on, and even the appearance of death. All his orders were punctually executed. It now seemed logical that, once a demon had been tamed to that point, it should be relatively easy to expel him, which Gassner did.
The fact that Gassner got the nun to display anger, grief and so on, is remarkably reminiscent of the displays elicited by stage hypnotists. More importantly, Gassner's patients behaved just like Mesmer's patients, and were cured just as effectively – and yet Gassner spoke only about God and evil spirits, with no reference to any material fluid, magnetic or otherwise. Mesmer's conclusion about Gassner, not surprisingly, was that Gassner, without knowing it, was making use of animal magnetism, an entirely natural process. In the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, certain Greek thinkers began to explain the awesome meteorological phenomena which had previously been the exclusive domain of the gods by reference to natural processes: it was not Zeus but the clouds that caused thunder when they clashed. This exactly parallels the clash between Mesmer and Gassner. Gassner was a ‘primitive’ healer born in an increasingly rationalist age; Mesmer represented the new spirit. He felt himself to be a scientist because he was attributing healing to natural rather than divine causes. Gassner fell from grace, not as a result of Mesmer's report to the Elector of Bavaria, but because the Church had long been looking askance at his practices. His fall was as abrupt as his fame. The Church and the Bavarian government proscribed his writings and banned his practice, and he died a few years later in obscurity.
Back in Vienna Mesmer won few converts among his fellow doctors. They tended to regard him as unscientific, and they were worried about reports of trance states in his patients, which sounded to them like sorcery; it was not many years since the last witch to be burnt in Europe had gone to the stake. They were also worried about the moral propriety of Mesmer's methods. The hand passes Mesmer employed often involved physical contact with the patient's body – think of it as massaging the body's supposed magnetic poles and nodes with the hands or sometimes with magnetically charged instruments. Mesmer would sit with the patient's knees between his own or with feet touching, so as to set up a magnetic polarity between healer and patient, since he believed that opposite sides of the body contained opposite magnetic poles. His patients were invariably women. The healer would run his fingers all over or around the patient's body, looking for the poles of the small magnets that together composed the great magnet of the body as a whole. Areas to be avoided were the crown of the head and the soles of the feet, because they were respectively the receptors for astral magnetism and terrestrial magnetism. The small magnets of the body kept changing position somewhat, except those in the nose and the fingers. (Mesmer prohibited the taking of snuff, in case it upset the nose's magnetic balance.) In practice, the area of the body most massaged was the upper abdomen, which was seen as the body's equator. This was bound to seem licentious to the sensibilities of the time. Nowadays we are used to doctors prodding and probing us, but that was not the way things were done in the days before the invention of stethoscopes and percussion. Rarely would a doctor press his ear to his patient's chest. He identified the illness as best he could from past experience and from questioning the patient, and then made prescriptions accordingly.
But official disapproval from the medical academies and his fellow doctors in Vienna didn't dent Mesmer's confidence, and he continued to attract a number of patients. He set up a magnetic clinic in his own house, in which he installed baths where patients could immerse themselves or their hands and feet in magnetized water. Powerful patients began to hear of his reputation as a miraculous healer. Baron Horeczky de Horka invited him to spend some weeks at his castle in Hungary, near Rohau, where he not only helped the baron with his throat spasms, but cured a number of local folk too. An eyewitness report of his working on the baron shows the eccentricity of his methods:
Mesmer sat on the right side of the bed, on a stool, wearing a grey gown trimmed with gold braid. On one foot he had a white silk stocking; the other, which was bare, was immersed in a tub about two feet in diameter, filled with water … Near the tub sat Kolowratek [Mesmer's assistant for this operation], fully dressed, facing the bed and holding in his left hand a metal rod the tip of which rested on the bottom of the tub. With his right hand he rubbed the rod up and down.
The eyewitness, Ernst Seyfert, the tutor of the baron's children, adds that he couldn't help laughing at the sight of Mesmer alternately grasping the baron's hand with one hand and his big toe with the other, presumably to polarize the magnetic fluid in his body. But for the baron, as occasionally for others among Mesmer's patients, the treatment was worse than the ailment: the unpleasant aspects of the convulsions put him off and he eventually asked Mesmer to leave.
Breakdown: The Affair of the Blind Pianist
There was in Vienna a child prodigy who was the talk of the town. Despite her blindness, Maria Theresa von Paradis was an excellent pianist and had become one of Empress Maria Theresa's protégées. She was not born blind, but lost her sight on 9 December 1763, aged three. She was talented enough on the piano not only to give concerts from an early age, and to compose a few pieces herself, but later to have Mozart write his Concerto in B Flat Major for her. Cynically or realistically, we might think that part of the reason for her fame was precisely her blindness, but her parents and those who cared for her had spent enormous amounts of time and money trying to get her cured. For ten years and more, she had been subjected to the full range of standard medical treatments, including some 3,000 electric shocks, but everything had proved useless.
Late in 1776 her parents approached Mesmer. Did he mind being the last resort, when everything else had failed? Probably not: if successful he would shine, and otherwise nothing had been lost. Early in 1777 Mesmer moved the teenager into the private clinic he had built as a wing of his house. By 9 February she claimed to be able to see outlines, and the spasms in her eyes became less. Her parents were delighted, and her father even vouched for her cure publicly, in writing. Gradually Mesmer acclimatized her to light, until she could see better and better; gradually she got used to people's ugliness, and to perspective.
Understandably, while she was at the in-between stage of learning to use her eyes, her piano-playing suffered; her touch had been secure in her blind world, but certain skills had to be relearnt with the recovery of her sight, and she had continuing problems with the assessment of distance. This worried her parents: they were receiving a good income from the Empress thanks to their daughter's skills, and if she lost those skills, the Empress might well cancel th
eir allowance. They arranged for other doctors to examine the girl, and while these other doctors, who were already antagonistic to Mesmer, could not deny that a blind girl now could see, they poured scorn on Mesmer's methods. There may also have been hints of immorality. A beautiful young girl had been living in Mesmer's house for some time, and treated in ways that were more often maliciously misinterpreted than misused. In the phenomenon the Freudians call ‘transference’, perhaps the girl had become overly attached to Mesmer. Perhaps Mesmer returned her affection; he would shortly leave his wife and change his life in a way that smacks of mid-life crisis, and attraction to a younger woman is often a sign of mid-life crisis in a forty-something male.
The parents stormed into Mesmer's house and demanded their daughter back. She refused to leave, and the mother forcibly tore her from her nurse's arms and flung her against the wall. When Mesmer went to help, the mother turned on him. The father entered with his sword drawn. By now Maria Theresa was in a terrible state, and was vomiting noisily in a corner; her parents became alarmed at this and were persuaded to leave her there. They even asked Mesmer to continue the treatment, and within a fortnight Mesmer had calmed her nerves and got her back to the point before her parents’ interference. They asked to have her home for a while, promising to return her soon to her doctor, and Mesmer fell for it. The girl soon suffered a relapse, but Mesmer was refused access to her. The doctors pronounced her blind and Mesmer a charlatan. All Vienna was talking about the affair. We may guess that Mesmer's conventional wife was deeply upset with him. He was accused of fraudulent practice and ordered to give up his practice or leave Vienna.
The trouble with this account of the Paradis affair, as with most of Mesmer's work, is that we hear only Mesmer's side. Since he was an irascible man who suffered opposition very poorly, it is hard to tell how much exaggeration has gone into it. Reading between the lines, it is quite plausible to suggest that the young Miss Paradis never really recovered her sight; she could probably already see things vaguely and dimly, and was sensitive to light and shadows, and that was all. There is little in Mesmer's account to make one think that he was not simply redescribing her limited sight in a more optimistic fashion, or that she was not deluding herself into thinking that she was getting better. Her blindness was more likely organic than functional, since it is hard to conceive how a three year old might receive the kind of shock which would induce hysterical blindness, and it did prove to be a lifelong affliction. But if it was organic blindness, Mesmer could hardly have managed to improve it.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 11