Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  The City of Light

  As a result of his rejection by the Viennese medical community, Mesmer grew restless and decided to try his luck in the other European centre of culture and science, Paris. At the end of January 1778 he went to Paris, without his wife (whom he never saw again; she died of breast cancer in Vienna in September 1790), but with a letter of introduction to Count Florimund Merci-Argenteau, the Austrian ambassador. He may well have entertained hopes of being patronized by Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI's queen, who was Austrian herself, the daughter of the great Empress, who had certainly heard of Mesmer. At any rate, he renewed his acquaintance with Gluck, who was in Paris and a favourite of the queen.

  The Paris into which Mesmer came was a city of conflicting opinions and attitudes. On the one hand, the Enlightenment appeared to rule: Voltaire and Rousseau had just died, Diderot had completed the final volume of his massive Encyclopédie, science and mathematics were forging ahead in the hands of men such as Laplace, Lavoisier and Lagrange. On the other hand, there were secret societies of Rosicrucians and Swedenborgians propagating vague mystical notions, quacks selling home-brewed medicines in the streets, and the time was ripe for occultists such as Casanova and Cagliostro. It was Mesmer's tragedy that although he felt he belonged among the scientists, he would be condemned to the other class. But at a popular level his theories would easily have passed for science at the time, and even the fact that there was something ‘occult’ about them would not have been held against them.

  In Paris his reputation – both as a healer and as a controversial figure – went before him, and he found it easy to meet influential people through his Austrian contacts. He claimed, in fact, that it was not his intention to practise healing in Paris, but that people's curiosity and the desperate plight of his first patients won him over. To many he was the prophet of a new science; to some his cures seemed to show the direct effect of God in the world, and therefore to counteract the atheism of the Enlightenment; to most he simply seemed to offer hope of a cure for their ills. In a medical context, it is not difficult to see why he was so popular: what passed for medical science at the time was invariably little more than faith healing dressed up in rationalistic language, and was usually far more intrusive and painful than what Mesmer was offering. There are actually rather few ailments that are effectively treated by the kinds of potions available at the time, or by leeches, bloodletting and purges. Nevertheless, many physicians felt instinctively that what they were offering was altogether different from folk medicine, and drew a sharp dividing line by climbing on to a high horse of overblown and ultimately unjustifiable rationalism.

  Mesmer rented a large mansion in the Place Vendôme (or the Place Louis-le-grand, as it was known then). He made the acquaintance of Charles Leroy, President of the French Academy of Sciences. Mesmer wanted to gain official recognition for his theories, and since he considered himself a physicist as much as a physician, the Academy seemed the right place to start. With Leroy's help he held a couple of demonstrations in front of sceptical officials, but they were inconclusive; any effects Mesmer produced were said to be inexplicable, rather than attributable to animal magnetism. Mesmer gave up on the Academy and approached the newly formed Royal Society of Medicine, hoping that it would be more open to revolutionary ideas, but they were just as sceptical. He wrote several letters to the Royal Society, asking them to come and witness his results for themselves, but his letters remained unanswered or snubbed. It is typical of Mesmer that, although he wanted the imprimatur of these official organizations, once he had been rejected by them he cast scorn on them. He described the Royal Society as a licenser of quacks and sellers of poisons.

  Having failed to make any impression on the medical community, Mesmer decided to build up a practice and convince by success. He had moved to the village of Créteil, a few miles from Paris, where the layout of the house and the rural surroundings suited his work better. Here he continued to attract lay clients and official scorn. In so far as he was concerned to make money – to keep himself in the manner to which his acquired social status in Vienna had accustomed him – he could somewhat ignore the scorn and bask in the new feeling, which he had never experienced before, of being the healer to whom patients turned first, rather than as a last resort.

  Soon he had too many patients to treat individually. Reluctant to turn them away, he needed to develop some more rapid means of treating them. He found two such means: the baquet, described in the Preface, by which he could treat as many as thirty patients at a time, and the ‘magnetic chain’, in which patients held hands so that the magnetic fluid and its healing properties could pass from one to the other. Mesmer's house was thronged by up to 200 patients at a time, and most of them were paying handsomely for the cure. His dreams were coming true. He was minting money and gaining support at all levels of society. After a couple of months the need to be in the centre of things led him back to Paris, where he took a large house in the rue Coq Héron. Soon, despite the large sums he charged, he had too many patients and even this mansion could not house enough baquets to cope. But since he believed that anything could be magnetized, he magnetized a huge tree near the St Martin Gate and attached ropes to the branches. Up to 100 people could sit around this tree, touching the ropes to the afflicted parts of their bodies, and the tree's remarkable properties were said to be confirmed by the fact that it was the first to bear leaves in the spring and the last to lose them in the autumn. Such was the popularity of his techniques that the mere rumour that a particular tree had been mesmerized would have people running over to hug it.

  Mesmer was a man of contrasts. There is no doubt that he wanted money and respect, but at the same time he was moved by a genuine impulse to heal. He was shocked by the treatment of the poor, who were either herded into huge wards in public hospitals or not treated at all since they couldn't pay. He treated them for free (as his teacher at medical school, Gerard van Swieten, had in Vienna), and to compensate charged his rich clients enormous sums. Driven not just by common humanity, but by a desperate need for recognition, he treated princesses and paupers, duchesses and dustmen, counts and cobblers. In reality, though, there were more duchesses than dustmen, because the ailments Mesmer was particularly good at treating were the kind which working people do not have the time for – nervous ailments such as the vapours. It is also undoubtedly true that many women came to Mesmer when they were not really suffering from any illness; it became a fashion, an amusement, something to talk about over tea and cards at Countess So-and-so's salon.

  Some idea of the scene around a baquet can be gained from the report of the 1784 Royal Commission, whose work we will soon look at in more detail:

  The tableau presented by the patients is one of extreme diversity … Some are calm, composed, and feel nothing; others cough, spit, have slight pains, feel a glow locally or all over the body, accompanied by perspiration; others are shaken and tormented by convulsions. These convulsions are remarkable in their frequency, their duration, and their intensity. As soon as one attack begins others make their appearance. The Commission has seen them last for more than three hours; they are accompanied by expectorations of a viscous matter, torn from the chest by the violence of the attack. Sometimes there are traces of blood in the expectoration. The convulsions are characterized by involuntary spasmodic movements of the limbs and of the whole body, by contractions of the throat, by spasms of the hypochondriac and epigastric regions; the eyes are wandering and distracted; there are piercing cries, tears, hiccoughs, and extravagant laughter. The convulsions are preceded and followed by a state of languor and reverie, by exhaustion and drowsiness. Any sudden noise causes the patients to start, and even a change in the music played on the piano has an effect – a lively tune agitates them afresh and renews the convulsions.

  This excerpt focuses on the convulsions, but it is clear from the first two sentences that although convulsions were frequent, they were by no means universal. In fact d'Eslon, in his reply to the c
ommissioners, claimed that of the 500 or so patients he had treated, only about twenty had experienced convulsions. Nevertheless, the commissioners were right to stress them, because Mesmer clearly expected his patients to have fits, and took that to be a sign of the crisis that cleared the way for healing. What on earth was going on? Why did so many people have convulsions? They cannot all have been epileptics, or subject to other organically based fits. There were probably three main reasons why the crisis manifested in this form. First, the Christian rites of exorcism, which had been practised for many centuries, and, as we have seen, reached a phenomenal height of popularity with Gassner, invariably provoked such fits in their subjects, and so Mesmer's patients will have expected their crises to take such a form. Within recent history there had been a craze for spontaneous healing at a saint's grave in Paris, until the king banned it as a public nuisance: the cures had often been preceded by fits. Second, it was fashionable at the time and throughout the nineteenth century for society women to suffer from the ‘vapours’, which involved hysterical fainting and nervous fits. Third, Mesmer's practices and the general enthusiasm for science (he cleverly modelled his baquet on the Leyden jar, which was popular at the time among the very aristocrats who formed Mesmer's clientele) aroused such high expectations that the eventual release of those expectations, when it came, might well have produced a nervous reaction.

  Of these, the first factor is probably the main one. Expectation and mass suggestion are powerful forces. Emile Coué tells the story of how a madman injected a passer-by in the street with a liquid which caused her leg to swell. The newspapers gave the story a few lines – and within a few days dozens of other cases had been reported, too many to be true. All Mesmer needed was a few good cures, and word spread around high-society Paris in a trice: ‘There's a remarkable healer in town. He's really good.’ This was an age of marvels; if Montgolfier could conquer the air with his balloons, why should Mesmer not discover a panacea?

  As described in the Preface, Mesmer also made use of occult trappings, subdued lighting and so on in his healing rooms. Presumably he had found by experience that these work, but he never acknowledged the importance of psychological factors in the cures, and he remained an obdurate materialist all his life. It wasn't just his detractors who obscured the importance of the psychological aspects of his healing by focusing on the question whether there was any such thing as the cosmic fluid Mesmer talked about. These were precisely the rules of the game as Mesmer saw them too.

  From Paris to Spa and Back Again

  Not long after his arrival in Paris, Mesmer gained his most notable convert in Charles d'Eslon. This resuscitated his hopes of official recognition, because d'Eslon was physician to the Count d'Artois, one of Louis XVI's brothers, and a member of the prestigious Faculty of Medicine, the governing body of medicine in France. Even with d'Eslon by his side, however, his hopes were to be signally dashed. In 1779 he arranged to read some or all of his famous Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal (On the Discovery of Animal Magnetism) to some representatives of the Faculty, but this got him nowhere. They were impressed by his results, but needed more research before agreeing that the causes to which Mesmer attributed his successes were the right ones. There was little point, they argued, in his displaying patients before them and treating them, when they knew nothing of the previous history of these patients and so could not assess the extent of the cures. They wanted to put in place a control experiment to see if a blindfolded person would react to a line-up of people, only one of whom would be Mesmer with his magnetic powers. Mesmer and d'Eslon might have replied that in their view everyone had magnetic powers (though some more than others), but instead they rejected the experiment out of hand. Mesmer's discovery was too important to be subjected to petty tests.

  At the end of the Mémoire Mesmer reduced his theory of animal magnetism to twenty-seven propositions, the most important of which are the following:

  1. There exists a mutual influence between the heavenly bodies, the earth, and animal bodies.

  2. A universally distributed fluid, which is so continuous as to be entirely without vacuum, and is of an incomparably rarefied nature, and is by its nature capable of receiving, propagating and communicating all the impressions of movement, is the medium of this influence.

  8. The animal body sustains the alternate effects [ebb and flow] of this agent, which insinuates itself into the substance of the nerves and affects them without any intermediary.

  9. It is particularly clear in the case of the human body that the agent has properties similar to those of a magnet; by the same token one can distinguish within it different, even opposite poles, which can be brought into communication, changed, destroyed and strengthened…

  10. The animal body has a property which makes it susceptible to the influence of the heavenly bodies and to the reciprocal action of the bodies surrounding it; the similarity of this property to the magnet induced me to term it ‘animal magnetism’.

  23. The facts themselves will show that, provided the practical rules which I shall draw up are followed, this principle can cure nervous disorders directly, and other disorders indirectly.

  If a system lacks coherence, drawing up its main points as a list can disguise its lack of coherence only to a limited extent. D'Eslon thought that they had failed with the Faculty because Mesmer was too vague and obscure; he focused too much on cosmology and not enough on the concrete matter of the cures. Perhaps too he had failed to impress the Faculty because of his thick German accent. So in 1780 d'Eslon published his Observations sur le magnétisme animal, a lucid account of a number of cures. But this only made him too a target for abuse. He was ordered to withdraw his allegiance from this new fad, but he refused and was stripped of certain privileges as a member of the medical Faculty, which at the same time unequivocally rejected Mesmer's ideas, and bullied other members who had shown signs of interest in animal magnetism to give it up.

  Mesmer was fed up, and he decided to leave Paris. Marie Antoinette herself was persuaded to try to get him to stay by offering him, in the name of the king, a substantial income per year, provided a commissioned report was favourable. Even when the king relaxed this condition to a clause that Mesmer should accept some men of the government's choice as students, Mesmer was affronted. He saw such students as spies rather than a disinterested committee. He wrote an astonishingly arrogant and paranoid open letter to the queen, in which he demanded not just the annuity she had offered but a country estate where he could continue his work. He could have got away with such a letter only because these were the declining years of the monarchy in France. It is easy to see why he was gaining a reputation as a crank.

  Naturally enough, Marie Antoinette did not deign to answer, and in May 1781 Mesmer left Paris for Spa in Belgium, accompanied by a few of his wealthier patients. In Spa he perhaps hoped to pick up further patients from the various clinics, as well as restore his own health which had been battered by the stresses of Paris. He was bitterly angry and disappointed, but perhaps he also had the hidden agenda of wanting to arouse public opinion to wield against the authorities. ‘If they miss me,’ he might have thought, ‘their protests will reach official ears.’ His constant rejection by the medical authorities (which he attributed to envy, presumption and incredulity) had only hardened his determination to achieve recognition as a great pioneer and the saviour of humankind. He wanted d'Eslon to join him in Spa, but d'Eslon refused, stayed in Paris and set up his own clinic. One can sympathize with d'Eslon's position: he did not want to abandon his patients, and could not understand how Mesmer could do so. But Mesmer took offence: he thought that d'Eslon was stealing his patients, and regarded him as a traitor.

  In Spa, as well as taking the waters to calm his disgruntled nerves, he wrote his Short History of Animal Magnetism. With d'Eslon in bad odour, his two main cronies were the lawyer Nicolas Bergasse and the banker Guillaume Kornmann, who were dividing their time between Paris and Spa. They came up with
a proposal which was designed to attract Mesmer back to Paris, and to assuage his worries about losing clients and hence income to d'Eslon. They wanted to found a special academy for the propagation of animal magnetism, where Mesmer would instruct others. At the end of 1781 Mesmer returned to Paris to discuss the rules and regulations of this academy with Bergasse and Kornmann, who had prepared the way well: Mesmer found that there were more than enough people prepared to pay the exorbitant subscription to found the academy, and he gave Bergasse and Kornmann the go-ahead. He returned to Spa in July 1782, with Bergasse as his unwilling secretary; their relationship was never sound, and would soon lead to the project's collapse.

  While in Spa he heard that d'Eslon had again been reprimanded by the Faculty, and had suffered the indignity of having further privileges removed. While he was pleased by his disciple's loyalty to the cause, he still felt betrayed. He raged that d'Eslon had no right to set up on his own, that he was incompetent, that he didn't know enough about animal magnetism and so on. Though there were some attempts at reconciliation, the two of them never again saw eye to eye, one of the bones of contention being that d'Eslon felt that only qualified medical men should be allowed to study animal magnetism, whereas now, with his academy, Mesmer was opening it up to anyone who could afford the fee. Finally, in January 1784 d'Eslon published a brief account of his quarrels with Mesmer and formally announced that he was setting up as an animal magnetist in his own right. By now he had been expelled from the Faculty, but his aristocratic connections guaranteed him a wealthy practice – or, as Mesmer saw it, deprived Mesmer of a number of wealthy clients. Mesmer threatened to sue him, but in the end backed down from this silly posturing.