Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis

by Waterfield, Robin

  Anyway, back in Paris at the end of 1782, Bergasse, Kornmann and Mesmer put their plans into operation: 100 of Mesmer's followers gave a subscription of 100 louis d'or each, and further money was raised from provincial societies where the charge was 50 louis d'or. They called the Parisian academy by the Masonic-sounding name of the Lodge of Harmony (later the Society of Universal Harmony). Mesmer was named Founder and Perpetual President of all the societies. Members were sworn to secrecy: they were not to divulge Mesmer's instruction (which took place not only in classes, but also by the reading of his written works), nor set up as practising animal magnetists on their own. This last clause was presumably inspired by Mesmer's resentment of d'Eslon, because there was no rational reason for it and it went directly against the original plan of Bergasse and Kornmann, for whom the whole point of the academy was that it would teach future teachers. Torn apart by this contradiction and by the dissension between Mesmer and Bergasse, the Paris society lasted no more than two years from its foundation in March 1783. As well as witnessing cures and learning the techniques and the theory of the action of animal magnetism on the nervous system, the students discussed the metaphysical, cosmological and political aspects of magnetism – the type of work that in 1784 would result in Bergasse's The Theory of the World and of Living Organisms According to the Principles of Mesmer. This book was written partly in code: over 100 of the key terms were given symbols rather than spelled out, so as to exclude non-initiates of the society. But then Bergasse was even more given to mystery than his master.

  The founding members of the Paris society included some illustrious names. Of especial interest to us in this book is that all three de Puységur brothers, whom we will meet more thoroughly in the next chapter, were original members, along with some of the great names of the French aristocracy – Duc de Lauzun, Duc de Coigny, Baron de Talleyrand, and the Marquis de Jaucourt, for example. Ironically, given Benjamin Franklin's hostility towards mesmerism (as we shall see in the next section), his grandson William Temple Franklin was an early member of the Paris society. The flamboyant Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) was also one of the original members. He had recently made a name for himself by taking a ship across the Atlantic to offer his help in the American War of Independence and inflicting a heavy defeat on the English at Barren Hill. Mesmer encouraged this disciple of his in his enthusiasm both for animal magnetism and for the new republic across the ocean, since he saw de Lafayette as a suitable apostle of the new therapy in America. De Lafayette did talk to George Washington privately about animal magnetism, but he does not appear to have spread the word more widely than giving one or two lectures. However, Thomas Jefferson, who was then the American representative in Versailles, was worried enough to send back home a number of anti-mesmerist pamphlets and copies of the negative reports of the two 1784 commissions.

  1784: Mesmerism in Crisis

  Mesmer was either giving up the idea of official recognition, or was biding his time, but d'Eslon, motivated perhaps by a desire to advertise his clinic, succeeded where Mesmer had failed. As a result of his requests, on 12 March 1784 Louis XVI appointed a committee from the Faculty of Medicine, who co-opted some members from the Academy of Sciences. Their brief was to investigate animal magnetism, and they chose to do so in d'Eslon's clinic, not Mesmer's. Mesmer protested, but it shouldn't have made any difference, since they were investigating animal magnetism, not personalities. In any case, the fact that it was d'Eslon who was investigated, not Mesmer, eventually worked to Mesmer's advantage. Subsequent to the commission's report, the threat to forbid the practice of animal magnetism was defused by the legal technicality that Mesmer's work had not been examined. In any case, Mesmer had always been convinced that he had more magnetic power than most people, and so could work the cures better.

  The committee was chaired by Benjamin Franklin, then an old man of seventy-eight, who was one of the envoys to France of the newly recognized country, the United States of America. Franklin's position was honorary rather than active, because of his age and infirmity, but some of the meetings took place in his house at Passy. The deputy chairman was Jean-Sylvain Bailly, an astronomer and statesman, who later became Mayor of Paris until his death on the guillotine. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was also prominent; he was an eminent chemist who had isolated and identified oxygen in the air, and had established the principle of atomic weights and the classification of chemicals. He was a tax-collector in Paris during the early years of the Revolution, until he was sent to the guillotine on the trumped-up charge of having added water to tobacco supplies. The names of other committee members – there were nine in all – have not survived the passage of time well, but it is worth mentioning Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who was himself spared from beheading by the instrument he had envisaged only by the death of Robespierre.

  Franklin and his colleagues on the committee were members of a Masonic lodge in Paris called the Neuf Soeurs (Nine Sisters). The membership of this lodge overlapped with that of a mystical lodge called Philalethes (Love of Truth), whose Grand Master, Savalette Delanges, had convened an international conference to consider the occult implications of mesmerism in the very month that the committee met. Reports were already coming in from the provinces that magnetized subjects were demonstrating clairvoyant abilities. The stage was set for a battle between empiricism and cumulative knowledge, on the one side, and on the other the claim that mesmerism opened one up as a sensitive to more comprehensive knowledge.

  There is no doubt that the commission did an effective hatchet job on mesmerism, but there were also gaping holes in their procedures. They proved that the magnetic fluid does not exist, but oddly ignored the question of how Mesmer and d'Eslon had cured so many people. They did not want to disturb the sensibilities of d'Eslon's eminent clients – ‘The distinguished patients could not be questioned too closely without the risk of annoying them’ – so they experimented on themselves rather than them, but they were healthy people, so the fact that they felt no effect is, on Mesmer's own terms, no proof or disproof: their fluid was already in equilibrium. They tried to magnetize others themselves, but since they were sceptics, the healing power of suggestion was not present, and so it is no wonder that they failed. They suspected that cures might be due to spontaneous remission, and thought that convulsions could be damaging and addictive. As the 1784 comedy The Baquet of Health ironically puts it, when one character asks another if she is getting better: ‘Much better, madame. I used never to have more than one crisis a week. Now I have two a day.’

  It is hard not to reproach the commission for short-sightedness. There were hundreds of testimonials of cures available to them. It would surely have been worthwhile for them to investigate them. As the Marquis de Puységur later complained, they thought that the facts did not prove anything. All right, they dismissed animal magnetism as nonsense; but something was causing the cures, and as scientists they should have looked into what it was: they might have appreciated the power of suggestion. The immediate problem was that they took themselves to be scientists investigating the existence of a supposed new substance, rather than physicians looking into an effective way of curing patients. The broader problem has been well expressed as follows: ‘Science is the outgrowth of human curiosity, but the trained scientist often appears to be the least curious of mortals because he has imposed upon himself such rigorous conditions for satisfying his need.’

  But for all the gaps in their approach to the cures, their debunking of animal magnetism was telling. They tried to repeat Mesmer's cures under controlled conditions and found that it was only when patients could see which parts of their bodies the magnetic fluid was being directed towards that they felt the required prickling sensations and were cured. When patients knew they were being treated by an operator, they would reach the crisis in a few minutes; when they did not know, no crisis was reached, even when the magnetizer was in the same room. Conversely, blindfolded patients who believed in animal magnetism reached crisis when th
ey believed that d'Eslon was in the room even when he was not. Or again, they had one of five trees mesmerized, and then sent a patient to find which tree would effect the cure: the patient went into crisis at the wrong tree. They falsely told a patient in an adjoining room that he was being mesmerized, with the result that he went into crisis, even though nothing was in fact going on. They tried to detect the magnetic fluid with measuring devices, and failed. They concluded that ‘imagination without magnetism produces convulsions, and that magnetism without imagination produces nothing’, that ‘the existence of the fluid is absolutely destitute of proof, and that the fluid, having no existence, can consequently have no use’.

  The committee's emphasis on imagination is odd, in an ironic fashion. They were appealing to something psychic and hardly more liable to scientific procedures than animal magnetic fluid. Perhaps this is why they did not leave imagination to carry the whole burden of their argument. While stressing it as the main factor involved in Mesmer's cures, they also noted that sometimes the magnetist would actually touch his patient, and they thought that this touching could itself be therapeutic in some cases. Finally, along with imagination and touching, they pointed out the power of imitation: the fact that one patient feels better, and goes into convulsions, is likely to provoke the same reactions in the next and so on.

  As we have seen, Mesmer's system was not a pseudo-science within the framework of the science of the time. There were other grandiose and unverifiable systems around, some of which received the official blessing of the Academy. In fact, two members of the 1784 commission were enthusiastic fluidists: Franklin explained the action of electricity by appeal to a fluid, and Lavoisier did the same for heat. Yet mesmerism was condemned by the 1784 commission. Why? What kind of threat did it pose to the medical establishment? The clash between mesmerism and the 1784 committee was an archetypal clash between two paradigms. It was to be echoed many times in the following decades, not just in further French commissions (which we will look at in the next chapter), but in Romantic literature. For many Romantics the attraction of magnetism was precisely that, as a holistic theory which saw the whole universe as interconnected by the fluid that pervaded it, it ran counter to the kind of scientific theory which splintered the world and forgot the big, meaningful picture. With good reason, the commission explicitly placed Mesmer in the scorned tradition of Paracelsus, van Helmont and Kircher, who all believed in magnetic cures. This tradition was despised because it was really no more than a pseudo-scientific dressing-up of magic; in this tradition magnetism was the occult force of the universe, on which a magician could draw to effect changes in the world. Finally, it is hard to resist the notion that Mesmer was being punished for his notorious cantankerousness.

  As well as the official report, they submitted a private report to the king, expressing doubts about the morality of mesmeric procedures. Pointing out that the magnetizers are always men, and the patients invariably women, who are more susceptible to touching, imagination and imitation, they didn't like the fact that the magnetizer could touch ‘the most sensitive parts of the body’, nor the way the healer got so close to his patient: ‘Their proximity becomes the closest possible, their faces nearly touch, their breaths mingle, they share all their physical reactions, and the mutual attraction of the sexes acts with full force. It would not be surprising if their feelings became inflamed.’ They deliberately described the convulsions they had witnessed in d'Eslon's clinic in a way calculated to remind the reader of an orgasm. But no action was taken on the basis of this secret report, and it remains the case that no aggrieved husband or lover ever tried to sue Mesmer or d'Eslon for fooling around with his woman.

  The Faculty and Academy commission was not the only investigation to which mesmerism had to submit in 1784. The eminent botanist Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and some others from the Royal Society of Medicine formed an independent committee, also authorized by the king, which tagged along after the main commission. The Royal Society's report agreed substantially with the main committee's findings, but de Jussieu submitted a minority report, saying that they had not investigated the causes of the cures thoroughly enough. He felt that there were still some cases that hadn't been explained away by the commissioners, and for which animal magnetism or some such cause was required.

  As a result of these two reports (or three, counting the secret one), the Faculty banned any doctor from professing or using animal magnetism, and the convictions of very few even of those doctors who had been using it gave them the courage to face official banishment. Mesmer claimed that he received many letters of encouragement, but he seems to have been further embittered by the whole business. D'Eslon's response was simply to agree that the imagination plays an enormous part in the cures of animal magnetism. He also published another series of wonderful cures to counteract the negative effect of the two commissions’ reports. But it was too late for him, and he died in August 1786.

  This last book by d'Eslon, called Observations sur les deux rapports (Remarks on the Two Reports), was just one of a torrent of pamphlets and discussions that circulated in 1784. In newspapers too there was no more common topic than mesmerism. Just to show how popular a topic mesmerism was, consider that the printed copy of the Franklin report sold 20,000 copies within a week or two of being published. No doubt Mesmer saw the printing of so many copies as a deliberate attempt by the establishment to turn popular opinion against him. To add to his woes, Fraulein von Paradis happened to be playing in Paris that April, and she was pronounced as blind as ever. Mesmer foolishly attended the concert; everyone knew the story; all eyes in the theatre turned to him. Another event which told against him was the death of the scholar Antoine Court de Gébelin, famous for his book Le Monde Primitif, in which he touted the notion that ancient cultures knew of a ‘primitive science’ which has since been lost to us. He had been a patient of Mesmer's previously for dropsy, and had written an enthusiastic pamphlet when he thought he was cured, but now, late in 1784, he died of kidney disease. A spoof epitaph circulated, which read:

  Here lies poor Gébelin,

  Fluent in Greek, Hebrew and Latin;

  All should admire his heroism;

  He was a martyr to magnetism.

  If accidental events were tipping the balance against mesmerism, in the war of words honours were more evenly balanced. There were serious discussions, testimonials from cured patients, scurrilous attacks on animal magnetism and comic plays and verses which held it up for public ridicule. The two main playwrights to enter the fray were the satirists Pierre-Yves Barré and Jean-Baptiste Radet. In their comedies Modern Doctors and The Baquet of Health they liberally accused Mesmer of charlatanism, veniality and immorality. Some of Mesmer's loyal but misguided followers attempted to disrupt these plays by showering pro-magnetic leaflets on the audience. Incidents like this kept the topic in the public mind, as also when a mesmerizing priest, Father Hervier, interrupted one of his sermons to magnetize a woman in his congregation who was having a fit. The first accounts were also arriving in Paris of the miraculous phenomena the Marquis de Puységur was getting his mesmerized subjects to display on his estate in Buzancy. Jean-Jacques Paulet wrote a pamphlet implying, by innuendo, that all kinds of sexual titillation went on at mesmeric sessions: for instance, he suggested that the bodily magnetic poles that Mesmer worked with on women were in the region of the heart (or breasts) and the vagina. The frontispiece of another such pamphlet shows a magnetist touching a woman's breasts and asking: ‘Do you feel that?’

  Disputes within the Society of Universal Harmony did not help matters. The feather in the society's cap, Claude-Louis Berthollet, an eminent chemist and a member of the Academy, left, publicly declaring the society and its teachings to be humbug:

  After having attended more than half of M. Mesmer's course; after having been admitted to the halls of treatment and of crises, where I have employed myself in making observations and experiments, I declare that I have found no ground for believing in the exist
ence of the agent called by M. Mesmer animal magnetism; that I consider the doctrine taught to us in the course irreconcilable with some of the best established facts in the system of the universe and in the animal economy; that I have seen nothing in the convulsions, the spasms, which could not be attributed entirely to the imagination, to the mechanical effect of friction on regions well supplied with nerves, and to that law, long since recognized, which causes an animal to tend to imitate, even involuntarily, the movements of another animal which it sees … I declare finally that I regard the theory of animal magnetism and the practice based upon it as perfectly chimerical.

  On the other side, the main volume of testimonials of cures came out under the title Supplément aux deux rapports de MM. les Commissaires. Over 100 cases are reported, some by doctors, some by the patients themselves. Although many of the cases are incomplete, with treatment still ongoing, so that the patient could report only improvement not cure, the range of ailments successfully treated is remarkable; where the disorders are identifiable they include burns, skin diseases, tumours, sciatica and fevers. It is also good evidence of loyalty to Mesmer's cause that all these patients, who invariably occupied lofty positions within society, would expose their details to public scrutiny, especially since the cures often included heavy sweating, vomiting or diarrhoea.