Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), a physician who graduated from the University of Vienna, invented a therapy based on the concept of a universal fluid, similar to electricity, that flowed through all living things. By restoring the circulation of this fluid in the nerves of human bodies, he believed he could cure illness without resorting to medication. Few medical theories have enjoyed as great success as Mesmer's, first among French high society and then in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Russia, (...) Britain, and the US. Mesmerism was the circulatory phenomenon par excellence. Its success was founded not only on the hypothesis of the circulation of a fluid common to human physiology and the entire universe, but also on the scientific practices of the time—correspondence, translations, and periodicals—and some ardent and highly active supporters who ensured its spread. However, far from functioning along the lines of direct exportation–importation from one country to another, or a centre to the periphery, mesmerism's dissemination was the work of diffuse institutions and individual mobilities influenced by the modalities of communication. In seeking to reconstitute the wellsprings of these circulations, the first sources that come to mind are printed matter: the many pamphlets and especially the articles and reviews that appeared in periodicals, as well as the Romantic literature that flourished after 1810. Such documents are foundational for authoritative studies of mesmerism in Germany, which proceed from the thesis of successive “waves” of reception. Such sources, however, are somewhat misleading. Rather than taking them as our starting point, it would be better to reconstitute the channels of information by using many sources, both printed and handwritten. The complexity of the circulation of knowledge generated by mesmerism is implicitly testament to the difficulties arising from the institutionalization of this current. (shrink)

This book does not contain philosophical arguments, but is rich in material for philosophical reflection. In this small volume Professor Fuller traces the evolution of an idea deriving from the Viennese physician, Franz Anton Mesmer, through nineteenth-century American popular culture. What began with Mesmer as a thoroughly materialistic and antitheological theory of medical healing ended the century in America as a dualistic theory with the New Thought movement emphasizing the spiritual powers of the mind to control matter. How this came (...) about gives us yet another illustration of the capacity of a culture to absorb a new idea, transform it, and use it in the interest of a dominant ideology. (shrink)

Franz Anton Mesmer’s 1766 thesis on the influence of the planets on the human body, in which he first publicly presented his account of the harmonic forces at work in the microcosm, was substantially copied from the London physician Richard Mead’s early eighteenth-century tract on solar and lunar effects on the body. The relation between the two texts poses intriguing problems for the historiography of medical astrology: Mesmer’s use of Mead has been taken as a sign of the Vienna physician’s (...) enlightened modernity while Mead’s use of astro meteorology has been seen as evidence of the survival of antiquated astral medicine in the eighteenth century. Two aspects of this problem are discussed. First, French critics of mesmerism in the 1780s found precedents for animal magnetism in the work of Paracelsus, Fludd and other early modern writers; in so doing, they began to develop a sophisticated history for astrology and astrometeorology. Second, the close relations between astrometeorology and Mead’s project illustrate how the environmental medical programmes emerged. The making of a history for astrology accompanied the construction of various models of the relation between occult knowledge and its contexts in the enlightenment. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of Mesmer's theory.

Justinus Kerner's Reflections on Science. Justinus Kerner (1786–1862) was a physician as well as a poet. In his research, as well as his profession, he tried to reconcile empirical observation with dreams, mesmerism, and the unconscious. Like the romantic naturalists of his time, Kerner rejected the exclusive preoccupation with rational science as a restriction to epistemology, which he wanted to complement by considering the “nocturnal sides of nature” (“Nachtseiten der Natur”) as well. This article wants to show how Kerner (...) reflected on science, medicine, and nature, and how it became possible for a physician who became famous for the discovery of food poisoning by botulism to be ridiculed at the same time, or at least to be frowned upon, for writing about seeing ghosts and having visions. How could he combine empiric case studies and exact, detailed observation with his belief in the supernatural? And how could he, not only harmonize these apparently contradictory concepts in his writings, but also turn them into paradigms that are based on one another? To answer these questions, this article will refer to Kerner's works on “sausage poisonings” (1817–1842) in the early nineteenth century, as well as his case study of The Seeress of Prevorst (Die Seherin von Prevorst, 1829), in which he described the case of a female patient who was supposed to be a clairvoyant, and finally his literary writings, like The Homeless (“Die Heimatlosen”, 1816) and his autobiographic work Sketches from My Boyhood (Das Bilderbuch aus meiner Knabenzeit, 1849). His personal observations and experiences were the reason that Kerner did not simply deny positivist medicine, but expanded his concept of healing by adding dreams, mesmerism, and visions. For, in the end, the unconscious, as well as the “sausage poison”, evades determination by scientific empiricism alone. (shrink)

Many writers have attempted to develop criteria to demarcate between competent science and pseudo?science. Such attempts can be aimed at sizeable, organized endeavours, such as mesmerism and astrology, or at the level of individual practice. The latter is seen by some, such as Lugg, as more likely to be feasible and useful. This paper argues that parapsychology, due to its complexity and diversity, illustrates some of the problems of attempting to develop demarcation criteria for extensive endeavours. It is also (...) suggested that parapsychology may offer a productive ground for testing whether demarcation criteria can be successfully applied to practices in respect of predicting which will succeed and which will not. The conclusion is that, for demarcation efforts to be useful, they should pass some of their own criteria, such as falsifiability. (shrink)

Why scientists reach an agreement on new experimental methods when there are conflicts of interest about the evidence they yield? I argue that debiasing methods play a crucial role in this consensus, providing a warrant about the impartiality of the outcome regarding the preferences of different parties involved in the experiment. From a contractarian perspective, I contend that an epistemic pre-requisite for scientists to agree on an experimental method is that this latter is neutral regarding their competing interests. I present (...) two medical experiments (on smallpox inoculation and Mesmerism) in which debiasing procedures such as blinding and data tabulation provided warrants of impartiality that made people agree on the experimental design even if they disagreed on the outcome. (shrink)

An excerpt from CHAPTER I. THE FORCES OF NATURE. You have asked me to give you an account of the opinions really held by some of those authors whose views you have seen caricatured in Punch and censured in religious periodicals. The subjects on which you specially questioned me were the speculations of Mr. Darwin, and the real or pretended discoveries of mesmerists, spiritualists, homoeopathists, and phrenologists. But a little reflection will, I think, convince you, that if I pretended to (...) give you, in a few conversations, the result of the lifelong labours of a succession of earnest and clever men, I could in reality only succeed in puzzling you, and in proving my own unfitness to act as the interpreter of any serious thinker whatever. It will be, I think, more to the purpose if I endeavour to put into your hands an end of the golden thread which, as it seems to me, binds all science together, giving us a clue through its intricate mazes, bridging over its awful chasms, and enabling us to walk fearlessly, even where we can see no light. If you like it, I will afterwards try to tell you what I believe to be the true meaning of some of the real or supposed revelations of modern investigation : but my main object will be to show you how you may, throughout your studies, make facts speak for themselves, and get help from books instead of being confused by them. In the first chapter of the Bible we read that the earth was originally without form and void. Next it is said that the "Spirit of God" moved upon the face of the waters. And throughout the Old Testament it is easy to see that the writers attributed the settling down of things in general, the ordering of the heavens, the coming up of dry land from under the sea, the clearing away of mists and vapours, and the production of life upon the earth, to the action of this Spirit (or Word) of God upon the chaos of matter. And not only so, but they evidently believed this living Word or Spirit to be continually present throughout creation, at every rising of sun or moon or star, in all cosmical changes, at every birth of man or beast, at every recovery of man or beast from sickness, in all growth, in all life, in all enjoyment; and to be at each moment the indispensable preserver of every living thing from decay.... (shrink)

The 19th century saw the development of an eclectic medical marketplace in both the United Kingdom and the United States, with mesmerists, herbalists and hydrotherapists amongst the plethora of medical ‘sectarians’ offering mainstream (or ‘allopathic’) medicine stiff competition. Foremost amongst these competitors were homoeopaths, a group of practitioners who followed Samuel Hahnemann (1982[1810]) in prescribing highly dilute doses of single-drug substances at infrequent intervals according to the ‘law of similars’ (like cures like). The theoretical sophistication of homoeopathy, compared to other (...) medical sectarian systems, alongside its institutional growth after the mid-19th-century cholera epidemics, led to homoeopathy presenting a challenge to allopathy that the latter could not ignore. Whilst the subsequent decline of homoeopathy at the beginning of the 20th century was the result of multiple factors, including developments within medical education, the Progressive movement, and wider socio-economic changes, this article focuses on allopathy’s response to homoeopathy’s conceptual challenge. Using the theoretical framework of Berger and Luckmann (1991[1966]) and taking a Tory historiographical approach (Fuller, 2002) to recover more fully 19th-century homoeopathic knowledge, this article demonstrates how increasingly sophisticated ‘nihilative’ strategies were ultimately successful in neutralising homoeopathy and that homoeopaths were defeated by allopaths (rather than disproven) at the conceptual level. In this process, the therapeutic use of ‘nosodes’ (live disease products) and the language of bacteriology were pivotal. For their part, homoeopaths failed to mount a counter-attack against allopaths with an explanatory framework available to them. (shrink)

In the late 18th century two medical fashions—Mesmerism in France and the Perkins ‘tractor’ in the USA and England—appealed to the principle that a single universal force acts on all of us and is responsible for health and illness. This principle served both fashions well, as it made it all the easier for those who came within their force fields to experience the sort of sensations that other subscribers to the fashion also seemed to feel. The first research on (...) what is now known as the placebo effect was in connection with these two movements. The propensity to feel what we suppose or imagine that others like us feel remains even now one of the channels of the placebo effect. (shrink)

During the last third of the 19th century, the ‘new’ French psychology developed within ‘the hypnotic context’ opened up by Charcot. In spite of their claims to the scientific nature of their hypnotic experiments, Charcot and his followers were unable to avoid the miracles that had accompanied mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. The hysterics hypnotized in the Salpêtrière Hospital were expected to have supernormal faculties and these experiments opened the door to psychical research. In 1885 the first French psychology (...) society was founded. The research carried out by this society may seem surprising: its members – Charles Richet in particular – were interested in strange phenomena, like magnetic lucidity, ‘mental suggestion’, thought-reading, etc. Very quickly, psychologists applied themselves to finding rational explanations for these supposedly miraculous gifts. Generally, they ascribed them to unconscious or subconscious perceptual mechanisms. Finally, after a few years, studies of psychical phenomena were excluded from the field of psychology. However, during the 4th International Congress of Psychology, which took place in Paris in 1900, the foundation of an institute devoted to the study of psychical phenomena was announced, but Pierre Janet and Georges Dumas founded within it the Société Française de Psychologie, from which psychical research was excluded. As for Charles Richet, disappointed by the psychologists, he devoted himself to the development of a new ‘science’ which he called ‘Métapsychique’. Several hypotheses have been put forward to account for this early research undertaken by the French psychologists, pertaining as much to parapsychology as to scientific psychology. (shrink)

This book explores the ways in which poetic inspiration came to be associated with madness in early nineteenth-century Britain. By examining the works of poets such as Barrett, Browning, Clare, Tennyson, Townshend, and the Spasmodics in relation to the burgeoning asylum system and shifting medical discourses of the period, it investigates the ways in which Britain’s post-Romantic poets understood their own poetic vocations within a cultural context that insistently linked poetic talent with illness and insanity. Joseph Crawford examines the popularity (...) of mesmerism among the writers of the era, as an alternative system of medicine that provided a more sympathetic account of the nature of poetic genius, and investigates the persistent tension, found throughout the literary and medical writings of the period, between the Romantic ideal of the poet as a transcendent visionary genius and the ‘medico-psychological’ conception of poets as mere case studies in abnormal neurological development. (shrink)

This paper illustrates Hegel’s criticism of the reduction of reality to thought in the idealism which he believed to be peculiar to the Indian spirit. The paper starts by analyzing the metaphors of dream and mesmerism. Hegel deducted these metaphors from anthropology and he largely used them to describe the ways in which Indian idealism is structured. We outline Hegel’s interpretation of some central concepts of Indian philosophy and religion, especially those of Brahman and Yoga. Then we reach the (...) rebound which is proper of every idealism of this kind: the resolution of material reality into an absolutized, and therefore absolutely empty, thought turns ipso facto into a subjection of thought to reality in its harshest and most natural shape, represented in India by castes. Finally, we trace Hegel’s criticism of Romantic irony, and in particular of Friedrich Schlegel. We show that irony ends up subjecting the spiritual dimension to superstition and to bare reality, like Indian idealism. However, irony starts from an absolutization of a form of thought which is very far from the Indian one. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the 19th century dynamometry was a common method to measure human body strength. Instruments were described by J.-B. Regnier, G.B.A. Duchenne de Boulogne, V. Burq et Mathieu, and unauthorized copies of different size were also being used. Although it is not clear which instrument exactly Sigmund Freud used when trying to measure the effects of cocaine on grip strength in 1884, it seems that he used copies like those maintained in the Museum on the History of (...) Medicine in Ingolstadt. Attempts of quantification seem to belong to the scientific tendencies in mid and late 19th century medicine. It can be demonstrated, that the roots of dynamometry go back to the first decades of the century and belong to the conceptions derived from Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism. (shrink)

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This book reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet, and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that Romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew (...) upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of Romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy, and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of Romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them. (shrink)

This anthology of primary materials will help redraw our understanding of the complexity and range of Victorian psychological thought and its relations to the wider cultural framework of the era. Drawing together an unprecedented range of materials from scientific, medical, and cultural sources, it charts changing notions of selfhood and bodily identity in the emerging sciences of psychology and psychiatry. Areas covered include: physiognomy, phrenology, and mesmerism; theories of dreams, memory, and the unconscious; female and masculine sexuality; insanity and (...) nervous disorders; and theories of degeneration. The book illuminates both the diversity and vitality of psychology in the pre-Freudian era and will help correct many of our misconceptions about theories of sexuality and the unconscious at this time. Embodies Selves will be of interest to both specialist and non-specialist audiences in the areas of cultural, literary, historical, and gender studies. (shrink)

The journal Mind is now a wholly philosophical journal. At the time of its founding, in 1876, however, its mission was rather different in character. Its aim was to discover whether scientific psychology was a truly viable enterprise and, if so, what its boundaries with philosophy, with other scientific disciplines, and with the earlier generation of discredited attempts at `scientific' studies of the mind (e.g. phrenology, mesmerism) might be. Although at first Mind published mostly philosophical pieces and literature reviews, (...) by the mid-1880s it was publishing primary experimental research, mostly by American psychologists who as yet had few outlets of their own. For a time it was the leading journal of experimental psychology in the English-speaking world. As the international competition among scientific and scholarly journals intensified in the 1890s, however, Mind started to lose its share of experimental contributions, and with the editorial takeover of the journal of George Stout in 1892, the journal soon became one dedicated purely to philosophy. (shrink)

In order to show its role in the conscience and realize the link between Naturphilosophie and the sources of the Dark romanticism, the intent of this text is to trace the influence of the animal magnetism and of mesmerism across G.H. Schubert and his Aspects of the Night Side of Natural Science on the Ages of the world by Schelling with special attention to the passages dedicated to the dream.

In Renaissance and early modern times, the concept of imagination was essential for the philosophical explanation of magic processes, especially in the anthropology of Paracelsus. He assumed that imaginatio was a natural vital power including cosmic, mental, psychical, and physical dimensions. The Paracelsians criticized traditional humor pathology ignoring their theory of ‚natural magic’. On the other hand, they were criticized by their adversaries as charlatans practicing ‚black magic’. About 1800, in between enlightenment and romanticism, the healing concept of ‚animal magnetism’ (...) evoked an analogous debate, whether ‚magnetic’ phenomena originated from a real power or were just due to fantasy or imagination . At the end of the 19th century, the French internist Hippolyte Bernheim created — against the background of medical hypnosis as a consequence of Mesmerism — his theory of suggestion and autosuggestion: a new paradigm of psychological respectively psychosomatic medicine, which became the basis for the concept of ‚placebo’ in modern biomedicine. From now on, all the effects of ‚alternative medicine’ could easily be explained by the ‚placebo-effect’, more or less founded — at least unconsciously — on fraud. (shrink)

Psychological traumatisation, as we understand it today, was—in terms of the history of ideas—anticipated by various approaches which have had a lasting impact on modern psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychosomatic medicine. On the one hand, there is the traditional concept of possession and exorcism with its impressive psychodynamics. On the other hand, there is the theory of the imagination, of an illusion in the sense of a pathogenic infection. Especially the pathological teachings of Paracelsus (sixteenth century) and Johann Baptist van Helmont (...) (seventeenth century)—the latter having advanced the former’s alchemist approach—demonstrate the extent to which demonological, parasitological, and psychological ideas were amalgamated in their ontological notion of a disease. Only the introduction of hypnotism in the middle of the nineteenth century made possible a psychological or psychodynamic understanding of psychological trauma in the modern sense. Hypnotism was striving to strictly dissociate from the magical and natural philosophical speculations of mesmerism and its theory was quite compatible with the model representations of scientific medicine. Sigmund Freud was able to tie in his ideas of hysteria and neurosis with this concept and especially to define repression of (infantile) sexuality as the cause of a culturally ineluctable psychological trauma. Finally, a brief survey of medical history is given to explore artificial trauma as a healing factor. (shrink)

Amidst the current profusion of research on consciousness, discussions of the historic origins of the topic are frequently overlooked. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the West, the nature of consciousness was barely understood, nor differentiated from its esoteric and religious contexts. By the end of the century, however, novel ideas about the structure of consciousness were proposed by Janet, James, and the Society for Psychical Research. This article proposes that these discoveries were intrinsically linked to popular nineteenth-century (...) explorations of unorthodox religious experiences and trance states. Operating outside mainstream religious, medical, and academic settings, alternative spiritual and medical sub-cultures such as Mesmerism, Mind Cure, Spiritualism, Transcendentalism and Orientalism provoked scientific discourse about consciousness that advanced the field. Examining these developments sheds light on the current renaissance in consciousness research and its relation to popular interest in states of consciousness, meditation and powers of mind. (shrink)

This book offers a radically new interpretation of the entire philosophy of J. G. Fichte by showing the impact of nineteenth-century psychological techniques and technologies on the formation of his theory of the imagination—the very centerpiece of his philosophical system. By situating Fichte’s philosophy within the context of nineteenth-century German science and culture, the book establishes a new genealogy, one that shows the extent to which German idealism’s transcendental account of the social remains dependent upon the scientific origins of psychoanalysis (...) in the material techniques of Mesmerism. The book makes it clear that the rational, transcendental account of spirit, imagination, and the social has its source in the psychological phenomena of affective rapport. Specifically, the imagination undergoes a double displacement in which it is ultimately subject to external influence, the influence of a material technique, or, in short, a technology. (shrink)

By offering an original reading of J. G. Fichte's central philosophic work, The Science of Knowledge , through the prism of his much over looked "Journal of Animal Magnetism" this dissertation situates Fichte's later metaphysics of the image within the concerns of contemporary media theory. It does so by taking seriously the political consequences of the historical transformation of the faculty of imagination in age of materialism. Such a reading is made possible by approaching German Idealism through the critical apparatus (...) of 20th century Continental Philosophy . ;In the 19th century, Post-Kantian idealism's designation of the imagination as a faculty was called into question. For instance, with the appearance of Mesmerism and the rise of magnetic psychology, the very validity of the transcendental subject was rendered suspect. The subject's imagination was shown to be transparent to external influence. In his own search for a physical instantiation of idealism Fichte realized that the imagination and its power of imaging was no longer limited to the transcendental subject, but was shown to be a function of material technique. Such a transformation would have far reaching political consequences. Specifically, if Fichte articulated spirit---which defined social wholeness---in terms of the imagination, then the appropriation of the imagination by technological materialism demanded a fundamental rethinking of the communicative ground of the social. (shrink)

This paper revisits the different notions of influence, persuasion and influencebound subjects. It illustrates and critiques the dominant prevailing concept of influence and its effects, which, though diversely denominated and presented through various theories, always comes down to reaffirming the relationship of dominance and the possibility of the nullification of the subject within the relationship with the other. With this aim, it studies the classical theories of interpersonal influence and brings to attention some of the bodies of information which have (...) been systematically neglected or set aside, particularly concerning suggestion, possession, mesmerism and somnambulism. (shrink)

This paper is a historical study of stage hypnotism from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The hypnotists' stage performances over this period reveal cultural tensions related to modernization. Public responses to these shows also indicate the shifting dynamics of reform. When mesmerists first toured the U.S. in the early nineteenth century, the hypnotic trance confirmed popular belief in the ultimate perfectibility of the individual and society. By the late nineteenth century, however, hypnotic shows seemed more a model (...) for human enslavement than liberation. Medical experts also began to express concern at the possible health damage hypnotism might inflict. Despite stage hypnotists' efforts to defend their art, hypnotism became increasingly marginalized as the growth of the middle class and of mass culture dictated an increasingly sanitized popular culture. (shrink)