Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (16 page)

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 existence 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.

One of the most intelligent pro-mesmeric responses was
Doutes d'un Provincial
, a treatise written anonymously by Joseph-Michel-Antoine Servan (1737–1807). He argued that the commission had exaggerated the importance of convulsions, which were much rarer in the provinces than in Paris. In other words, the commission should have focused on cures, not crises. If they did not want to question d'Eslon's ‘distinguished patients', there were plenty from
lower classes available. And he pointed out that medical science was not immune to mistakes: for instance, in the past inoculation had been condemned before its value was established. Another pamphlet from the provinces, by Antoine Esmonin de Dampierre, cited Puységurian experiments on magnetic sleep. Whereas the main commission had stressed touch, imagination and imitation as the only factors necessary to explain Mesmer's results, de Dampierre argued that the production of a somnambulistic state at a distance refuted the idea that touch was necessary, and that imagination and imitation could hardly be involved in magnetizing animals and infants.

It would be safe to say that 1784 was a year Mesmer would rather forget. Nor did the publicity, both favourable and adverse, show much sign of dying down. Not only did the pamphleteering continue, but at the Carnival of 1785 an exhibit had a clownish doctor sitting backwards on an ass making magnetic passes in the direction of people walking behind, who parodied going into convulsions.

By now Mesmer was thoroughly disgruntled with Paris, and probably suffering from one of the bouts of depression that accompanied his setbacks. He felt that they didn't deserve him; they had failed to give official recognition to himself and his great discovery. The Paris society, already torn apart by dissension, did not survive for very long, and this too must have confirmed for Mesmer that it was all over with Paris. While Mesmer was on a visit to Lyons in August 1784 (where he completely failed to mesmerize Prince Henry of Prussia, who offered himself as a sceptical guinea pig), Bergasse took over and invited non-members to come along to some of the meetings. When Mesmer returned, he accused Bergasse of breaking the secrecy contract. To Bergasse's mind, however, the secrecy clause had only been temporary, its purpose being to prevent the doctrine being too widely disseminated until private subscribers had raised enough money to pay for Mesmer's teaching, which was agreed to
be the sum of 10,000 louis d'or or 240,000 livres (a domestic servant or an agricultural labourer might earn about 40 livres a year at the time). This sum had now been reached and surpassed – and so Bergasse thought the time for secrecy had passed too. ‘Bergasse and Kornmann saw that amount as the purchase price for the system, while Mesmer saw it as a reward to the discoverer who was still to maintain his proprietary rights.' They fell out, and despite conciliatory moves by other members, the society fell apart. Bergasse, Kornmann and Jean-Jacques d'Éprémesnil, the most influential members, formed a splinter group, which began to propagate a political form of mesmerism, preaching the reform of society along Rousseauan lines of harmony with nature; the Revolution was looming, after all. Before long they had admitted members who had nothing to do with animal magnetism, but were purely political, such as the future Girondist leaders Etienne Clavière and Antoine-Joseph Gorsas.

Bergasse and others, such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot, read politics into mesmerism first because its stand against the medical and scientific authorities was seen as a model for resistance to and oppression by dictatorial authorities in all walks of life (and indeed the academies were seen by Brissot and his friend the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat, whose scientific views had also been rejected by the establishment, as tools of the tyrannical government), and second because it provided them with ‘scientific' grounds for their political theorizing: harmony with the universal magnetic fluid would restore health not only to the human body, but to the body politic of France. Bergasse overtly politicized mesmerism by writing to the popular Parlement, calling for this body to sponsor a proper investigation of animal magnetism, in the face of the hostility and intransigence of the commissions' reports. It was in this climate, with Mesmer's students calling for publication of the material and the revelation of any secrets that Mesmer was withholding (not that he had any, but he pretended he had), that one of the breakaway members took it upon himself to publish an account of the teaching. This was Dr Caullet de Veaumorel, and his book was
Aphorisms of M. Mesmer … in 344 Paragraphs
. In the preface de Veaumorel disingenuously expressed his hope that Mesmer, committed as he was to the dissemination of his system, would not be offended by the publication.

The most important dispute will become clear only after the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that the kind of mesmerism being practised in the provinces was very different from Mesmer's own practices. His child had grown up and taken on a life of its own. The Lyons society, for instance, was headed by the redoubtable occultist Jean-Baptiste Willermoz. On his visit there, Mesmer found himself quite out of sympathy with Willermoz, who was a Rosicrucian, a Freemason, a Martinist and the head of a ritual magical lodge. Not all the provincial societies were entirely given over to occultism, but most of them were involved with the kind of psychological, non-materialistic magnetism espoused by the Marquis de Puységur. Mesmer could only have been aggrieved when the countries that spoke his own native German proved receptive to Puységurian mesmerism, rather than his own brand. Mesmerism was introduced into Germany by Johann Kaspar Lavater (whom Mesmer met in 1787). As early as 1787 and 1789 Professor Eberhard Gmelin published two large books on magnetism without once mentioning Mesmer's name.