"The basis of Mesmer's fame has been described as the creative function of an erroneous idea. In his doctoral thesis in medicine at the University of Vienna, Dissertatio physico-medica deplanetarum influxu (1766), Mesmer revived the ancient doctrine of the influence exerted by the gravitational forces of the sun, moon, and planets on human well-being. He believed that health was the result of harmony between the bodily organs and planetary gravitation (a force he called 'animal gravitation'); disease was then a disharmony, and the purpose of treatment was to restore harmony or equilibrium. In 1775, inspired by the experiments of the Jesuit astronomer Maximilian Hell, Mesmer began to use magnets in his treatment of patients, producing in them first a trance or somnambulic state in which they were neither asleep nor awake, and then convulsions or a crisis that led to a cure. Accordingly, he now attempted to explain his treatment as due to 'animal magnetism' in contrast to 'mineral magnetism.' He later found that he did not need the magnet to obtain these results but could produce them merely by touch.
"Mesmer's practice and the claims he made aroused so much controversy and criticism in the medical community of Vienna that he decided in 1778 to move to Paris. Arriving on the eve of the French Revolution, he quickly captured the imagination of the Parisian public to the exclusion of nearly everything else; in fact, it has been shown that in France in the decade before the beginning of the French Revolution more literature was generated on mesmerism than on any other single topic. In 1779 Mesmer published his Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, his manifesto on the subject of animal magnetism, containing twenty-seven propositions that supposedly accounted for the cures he effected, as well as case histories of some of the patients he had treated successfully in Vienna. Another version of the work in duodecimo format, with different pagination, possibly a piracy, was also published in 1779. A second edition appeared in 1781, and a German translation also in 1781. An English translation was not published until 1948.
"Mesmer's activities and the excitement they produced aroused the concern of the Parisian medical community, which in 1784 prevailed upon the king of France to appoint a royal commission to investigate Mesmer's work. The commission, which included such scientific notables as Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, found no evidence of the physical magnetic force claimed by Mesmer; rather, its members attributed all the phenomena they witnessed to the effects of the imagination. Ironically, Mesmer refused to credit the agency of the mind in any of his cures and insisted upon a physical explanation throughout the remainder of his life.
"Mesmer left France about 1789, spending the rest of his life in obscurity; however, his many followers or 'magnetists' continued their practice for several decades. In 1841 the English surgeon James Braid began an investigation of mesmeric phenomena after attending a popular demonstration of mesmerism and reported his observations in a book entitled Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism (1843). It was Braid who coined the terms 'hypnosis,' 'hypnotism,' and 'hypnotize,' from the Greek hypnos, meaning sleep. His work established the fact that subjects in hypnosis were very susceptible to suggestion and that this was the basis of its therapeutic potential. In 1866 a French physician, A. A. Liébeault, stressed the fact that suggestibility was the most important feature of the hypnotic state, an idea also advocated by Liébeault's disciple Hyppolyte Bernheim. Sigmund Freud, a student of Bernheim, treated his patients with hypnosis and suggestion and then used hypnosis to recover forgotten memories, eventually developing from hypnosis the techniques of free association and psychoanalysis." (Haskell F. Norman in 100 Books Famous in Medicine).. 8vo (167 x 105 mm), contemporary French calf with richly gilt spine and red morocco title label, half-title and title with some marginal damp staining otherise fine and clean throughout, pp. [2] [i-iii] iv-vi [1] 2-85 [3:blank]
