In 1779 Mesmer published a short book in French entitled Report on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism in which he described the 27 principles of animal magnetism. Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. In 1768, when court intrigue prevented the performance of La finta semplice (K. 51), for which the twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had composed 500 pages of music, Mesmer is said to have arranged a performance in his garden of Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne (K. 50), a one-act opera,[8] though Mozart's biographer Nissen found no proof that this performance actually took place. The couple married on January 10, 1768, and moved into a mansion in Vienna, bought for the couple by Marias father. Mesmer would see them alone, often for a long time. The inquiry was a landmark event: the first government investigation of scientific fraud and the earliest instance of formal, psychological testing using what would now be called a placebo sham and a method of blind assessment. Darwin Pleaded for Cheaper Origin of Species, Getting Through Hard Times The Triumph of Stoic Philosophy, Johannes Kepler, God, and the Solar System, Charles Babbage and the Vengeance of Organ-Grinders, Howard Robertson the Man who Proved Einstein Wrong, Susskind, Alice, and Wave-Particle Gullibility. "Self-Evidence." Mesmer was working attempting to heal a woman by having her drink an iron-based liquid before he moved magnets over her body. The commissioners began by assuming that mesmeric effects were due not to a nervous fluid, but instead to the faculty of imagination. He would magnetize patients clothes and beds so they could receive the healing fluid every hour of the day. [4] Mesmer, Prcis (1781), 135; Puysgur, Mmoires (1786), 74-75. Mesmer believed he had discovered a fluid, something akin to electricity, which he called animal magnetism. While that may sound like some sort of sexy super power, Mesmers meaning was a bit more literal. He died three decades before science formally explained his hypnotic successes in Vienna and Paris. Worinnen Man Seine Grunds zze, Seine Theorie, Und Die Mittel Findet Selbst Zu Magnetisiren. In a letter to Franklin several years after the mesmerism investigation, a fellow commissioner, the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, recalled their collaboration in the "highly ridiculous affair of animal magnetism. Hundreds of people flocked to be cured by the man in the lilac taffeta robe who waved his hands and an iron rod over his patients' bodies, sending them into fits as they fell to the ground. "[5] But, within the materialist framework of contemporary natural science, it was the commissioners, and not Mesmer, who made the truly radical and, to many, the ridiculous proposal.
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