Franz Anton Mesmer and his followers held patients literally entranced as they directed the flow of an invisible force they called animal magnetism through the bodies of their patients. (Wellcome Library, London)
In 1862, Mary Patterson entered the Portland, Maine, office of mental healer Phineas Quimby in tatters. Pale, weak, and emaciated, the forty-two-year-old Patterson, her wavy brown hair pulled back from her face, could barely carry herself up the stairs into the waiting room. She had been sick her entire life, missing much of school as a child and writing despairing poems from her bed about death and the meaninglessness of life as a young adult. Low in energy, emotionally unstable, and subject to spells of pain, Patterson tried regular care, homeopathy, hydropathy, and a Grahamite vegetarian diet, but nothing worked. Most of her life had been consumed by a constant search for someone who could provide her with lasting relief. She desperately hoped that someone might be Quimby.
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, or “Park” to his friends, had experimented with mesmerism and magnetic healing since 1838. Concluding that a patient’s trust and rapport with the healer led to cures, Quimby attempted to connect with his patients mentally and physically. He talked over their disease, massaged their hands and arms, tried to adopt and feel their symptoms himself, and encouraged them to think differently about life and health. His success with this method made him a national figure.
After only a week in Quimby’s care, Patterson’s health improved dramatically. The woman so enfeebled she could not step out of her carriage alone was, only days into her treatment, climbing the 182 steps to the dome on top of Portland’s city hall unassisted. No one was more astonished than Patterson herself, who before long was devoting her days to the practice and further study of Quimby’s method. Only a few years later, Patterson, soon to be known through another marriage as Mary Baker Eddy, would introduce her own new medical system. She called it Christian Science, and it quickly became the largest homegrown healing faith in American history, following in the long and potent path of mental cures and magnetic fluids that had begun more than a century earlier in Europe as mesmerism.1
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby taught his patients that good health came from positive thinking. (Wikimedia Commons)
Like phrenology, mesmerism began in late-eighteenth-century Vienna with the experimentation of an established regular physician. In the 1770s, Franz Anton Mesmer began to test an idea he’d first had in medical school about the body’s vital force. Just as gravity affected the behavior of the sun, moon, and planets, Mesmer proposed that the “nervous fluids” that coursed through the body made humans as susceptible as the tides to the universe’s invisible gravitational forces. He based his theory on those of the sixteenth-century alchemist Paracelsus, who had suggested that the human body could attract corresponding planetary effects. The idea of bodies influenced by unseen and unexplainable powers was nothing new in medicine, nor even unusual in an eighteenth-century world that seemed alive with powerful unseen forces. Isaac Newton’s gravity, Benjamin Franklin’s electricity, even the miraculous hot-air balloons of Jacques Charles and the Montgolfier brothers that lifted humans into the air were just a few of the powerful new forces turning heads and firing scientific thought in Europe.
The idea of nervous fluids had an even longer lineage. Roman physician Galen had speculated in the second century ce that bodily movement and sensation resulted from animal spirits that formed in the brain and flowed outward through hollow ducts in the nerves. This idea dominated thinking about the function of the nervous system for centuries even as the composition of those spirits and the mechanics of actual nerve function adapted to the latest scientific trends and discoveries. Gradually, the idea of animal spirits came to be replaced with “nerve fluid,” though the general concept of a substance moving through the nerves remained much the same. Like vitalism’s core concept of a life force that animated all living beings, it was widely believed that disruptions in the free flow of this nervous fluid caused disease.2
Unlike his predecessors, though, Mesmer suggested that a physician could learn to control the flow of these invisible forces from outside the body. It was a startling idea. Not only that, he believed he could also restore the internal harmony that signaled health. He theorized that illness might be cured with magnets. Since they, like celestial bodies, could influence other physical entities without actual contact, he wondered if magnets could also redirect the body’s nervous fluid. In 1774, Mesmer tested his theory on twenty-nine-year-old Franziska Oesterlin, a “hysteric” who experienced convulsions with vomiting and fainting. Mesmer treated and observed Oesterlin for two years. During an attack, Mesmer placed one magnet on her stomach and another on each of her legs. Almost immediately, Oesterlin reported feeling “painful currents of a subtle material” moving within her that eventually traveled downward to her extremities. Her spells soon subsided and did not return for hours. Mesmer repeated the treatment many times over the following weeks with the same success. He finally declared her entirely cured.3
Mesmer was unique among irregular healers for starting with a theory rather than a treatment. He assumed that some force did act on the body, and modified his therapy based on the results of his empirical tests. At first, Mesmer thought the magnets cured. But he soon found that he could provoke the same reaction in other patients that he had with Oesterlin using wooden objects and other nonmagnetic materials—even the simple stroke of his finger. Magnets could cure, but so, it seemed, could a lot of other things. Mesmer determined that the effects he witnessed must not be the ordinary magnetism known since ancient times but something else entirely: a separate imperceptible natural force that he called “animal magnetism.” Modern slang associates animal magnetism with sexual attraction, but Mesmer conceived of his force as the compelling power behind all kinds of interactions and attractions. Animal magnetism transmitted influence from and between all physical objects, from metal rods to water, food, and even the hat on a patient’s head. Once magnetized through touch or simply the wave of a hand, the object became indistinguishable from a real magnet, which Mesmer became convinced was merely a conductor of animal magnetism.4
Based on his new discovery and his experiences treating Oesterlin, Mesmer revised his theory to center on this “magnetic substance.” Sticking to vitalism, he claimed that human health depended on the unimpeded flow of animal magnetism, which he believed to be a real physical albeit invisible substance, through the body. Interruptions or imbalances in the stream caused organs to falter, deprived of sufficient amounts of this vital force to operate properly. Disease was the inevitable result.5 Removing the obstacle became the key to healing.6 His theory had a beautiful simplicity. Tracing disease back to a disturbance in the body’s supply of magnetism meant that all disease had one cause and thus one treatment, a universal method of healing like Thomson’s goal of restoring bodily heat. Mesmer’s theory reduced medical science to a straightforward set of procedures aimed at supercharging the nervous system with the life-giving energy that would keep people healthy, no drugs required.7 Armed with his new theory, Mesmer resolved to “dedicate my remaining life” to saving his fellow man from disease.8
Excited about his discovery and a bit prone to excess, Mesmer decided that if some animal magnetism was good, then more must be even better. He infused magnetism into every aspect of the patient experience. Patients napped between magnetized sheets, bathed in magnetized water, ate from magnetized plates and silverware, and strolled the grounds of his estate in magnetized clothing. Mesmer also played a magnetized glass armonica, a musical instrument that essentially mechanized the experience of rubbing the rim of a crystal glass with a wet finger. Mesmer was a virtuoso on the instrument, which was invented by Benjamin Franklin, who would, ironically, later lead an investigation that condemned Mesmer’s scientific claims. Franklin’s armonica consisted of a series of glass bowls in graduated sizes that turned on a foot-powered spindle. Players touched the rotating rims with moistened fingers to produce high and haunting pitches with a slight vibrato. Thousands of glass armonicas were built and sold. For Mesmer, music was not just ornament or background accompaniment: rather, the music communicated, propagated, and reinforced the flow of animal magnetism.9
Word of Mesmer’s healing success spread rapidly throughout Vienna, but scandal erupted when Mesmer claimed to have restored the sight of the talented pianist Maria Theresia Paradis. Eighteen-year-old Paradis had been blind since age three. Her parents had tried everything to cure her, summoning the best medical talent in the city, who applied leeches and plasters, prescribed purgatives and diuretics, and shocked her eyes with Leyden jars. Nothing worked. As a diversion from her malady, Paradis began music lessons and so impressed Austrian empress Maria Theresa with her musical skills as an eleven-year-old that she earned a government stipend for her musical education. Mesmer had known Paradis’s family for several years when he boldly proposed to her parents in 1777 that his animal magnetism might restore the young pianist’s vision. They agreed with his assurance that he was up for the challenge. After a series of treatments, Mesmer declared her sight restored. But vision turned out to be troubling and confusing to Paradis, and her piano skills dramatically declined. Some said she also might have fallen in love with Mesmer and maybe he with her, rumors that outraged and scandalized Viennese society. Her angry parents snatched Paradis away from Mesmer, worried about losing her pension and perhaps also the loss of her marketing cachet as the blind pianist. Once she was away from Mesmer, her blindness quickly returned. The incident sparked responses both vitriolic and gleeful from critics who jumped at the chance to ridicule Mesmer and his method. Discredited in the eyes of the medical profession, Mesmer abandoned Austria for Paris in 1778.10
One year later, Mesmer reflected on the Paradis incident in his Memoir on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism. “I was being taxed with eccentricity,” he wrote, “my tendency to quit the normal path of Medicine was being construed as a crime.”11 Despite his troubles in Vienna, Mesmer’s reputation and fame as an extraordinary healer preceded him to Paris. His worldly manners, intellect, sturdy good looks, and unabashed confidence gave Mesmer quick access to Parisian social circles even with his strong German accent and scandal-tinged character (though this being Paris, it may have intrigued more than it repelled). Soon, more patients than Mesmer could possibly treat individually besieged his office.12
Never one to miss a potential business opportunity, Mesmer introduced a magnetized instrument known as a baquet to meet the demand for his services. He had discovered a few years earlier that he could magnify his powers by standing with one foot submerged in a bucket of water. The baquet was simply a larger wooden bucket with a cover. Flexible iron rods that concentrated the flow of energy passed through the lid for patients to apply to specific body parts. Most important for Mesmer’s business, though, the baquet allowed as many as twenty patients to gather around and receive treatment at the same time. Mesmer kept four in his treatment rooms in Paris. One baquet was reserved for the poor who received treatment at no cost, while the other three had to be reserved far in advance and cost roughly the same price as a ticket to the Paris Opera.13 Patients gathered around the tub and joined hands to form a complete “magnetic” circuit. Once they were settled, the treatment—and show—could begin.
A flashy and theatrical entertainer, Mesmer entered the darkened room wearing gold slippers and flowing lilac robes. He circled the room, sometimes stopping to play the glass armonica to prepare the patients for the flow of magnetism. Large mirrors on the walls reflected any errant fluid back toward the assembled patients. Mesmer then passed slowly from patient to patient and gazed deeply into their eyes. His intense and enthralling stare immobilized and entranced clients, literally mesmerizing them and giving birth to a new term in connection with Mesmer himself. Passing his hands and magnetized wand over each patient, Mesmer provoked screams, sweating, fits of hysterical laughter, dramatic convulsions, and fainting. Mesmer, like hydropathy’s Priessnitz, called these extreme effects the “crisis,” and he considered them the goal of the treatment. Nerve fluid must be pushed to its maximum velocity and intensity to dissolve and expel the obstruction from the body while simultaneously reactivating the life force of the patient. The frenzied responses passed like a chain reaction around the baquet and sent everyone into fits, an effect that emphasized Mesmer’s control over the room and his subjects.14
To help him with his growing practice, Mesmer took on associate Charles-Nicolas Deslon, a medical professor at the University of Paris and the private physician to the Count d’Artois, brother to King Louis XVI. Deslon’s credentials brought prestige and visibility to Mesmer’s practice, but more important, it brought him into contact with the French aristocracy, who would prove to be some of his most ardent and faithful supporters in Europe.15 More than one hundred patients a day, women, men, and children, aristocratic to working class, passed through his doors and under his hypnotic gaze. By 1784, only six years after settling in Paris, Mesmer estimated that he had treated more than eight thousand people.16
Patient accounts of what it felt like to be mesmerized are scarce since most patients claim that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to credibly witness an altered state in one’s self. To do so, an individual would have to be astute and alert at the exact moment the intended phenomenon, insensibility through crisis, took effect. Most patients awoke from the experience remembering nothing.17 Even so, in the mid-nineteenth century, a Lady Rosse described her experience under the care of British clergyman and mesmerist William Scoresby. Anxious at first, “the moment I was settled on the sofa, with my hands in his—all apprehension vanished,” she claimed, as “a calmness, a delightful resignation to his will came over me. My eyes were irresistibly drawn to his and in vain did I combat the superior power of my Mesmerist. A pleasant thrill ran from my fingers throughout my body towards my feet—my heard pounded with joy.” Seconds later, “the faces and figures of those around me dissolved, one melting into another until the last vision of them seemed to vanish in Dr. Scoresby’s eyes. He was no longer Dr. Scoresby to me, but my all, part of myself; what he wished, I wished. In fact the attraction astonished me. The cares, the interest in this life ceased. I felt no longer a common mortal but infinitely superior and yet felt my Mesmeriser far superior to myself.”18 English writer Harriet Martineau recorded similar sensations in the 1840s at the hands of mesmerist Spencer Hall. Twenty minutes into her session, she “became sensible of an extraordinary appearance” that “seemed to diffuse itself through the atmosphere,—not like smoke, nor steam, nor haze,—but most like a clear twilight, closing in from the windows and down from the ceiling, and in which one object after another melted away.” The experience left her feeling hot, sick, and suffering from a “disordered stomach” for several hours after her session. But those sensations were gone by evening. Martineau soon found herself feeling a “lightness and relief” from the sickness that had kept her bedridden for several years.19
Some people found themselves so taken with Mesmer’s powers that they wanted to become practitioners of animal magnetism themselves. Mesmer was at first reluctant to share his system with anyone, convinced that he alone truly understood animal magnetism. He eventually agreed to share some parts of his system—but not without a monetary and psychological price to those who wished to learn. Mesmer’s more affluent disciples paid an enormous amount of money for the honor of membership in the Society of Universal Harmony, a semisecret organization founded in 1783 that mixed business, mesmeric education, and fraternalism. Like Thomson, Mesmer demanded absolute devotion from his disciples, but he felt no need to show any gratitude of his own in return. No one was allowed to add, modify, or subtract anything without his permission. Anyone who suggested alternative or contrary ideas was thrown out. Despite these strict conditions, chapters of the society soon existed in most major French cities. Men from some of France’s most illustrious and aristocratic families joined, including the French hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson William Temple Franklin also joined, though he would later tell his grandfather that he was merely curious.20 The society made Mesmer rich. It also transformed what had begun as one’s man closely guarded secret into the common knowledge and shared enthusiasm of an influential group of men.
But despite his success and incredible wealth, Mesmer remained dissatisfied. He was desperate for official recognition of his discovery from a scientific institution that would validate its importance to current understandings about life.21 “I dare to flatter myself that the discoveries I have made will push back the boundaries of our knowledge of physics as did the invention of microscopes and telescopes for the age preceding our own,” boasted Mesmer in his memoir.22 Members of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin did not agree with Mesmer, however, and they rejected his theory as nonscientific and “unworthy of the smallest attention” after witnessing his cures.23 The Royal Society of Medicine ignored his requests to present his ideas to its members, as did the Faculté de Médecine at the University of Paris.24 Even outside these institutions, regular doctors remained largely unimpressed with Mesmer and his magical force. Although some regulars acknowledged that he likely did succeed in curing some patients, they argued that these patients suffered from psychological rather than real, physical ailments so any attention would likely produce positive results. Not to mention the fact that his drugless system and single healing method made the medical profession largely superfluous, never an easy path to medical legitimacy. One English doctor scoffed that mesmerism bore as much relation to medicine “as astrology does to astronomy.”25
Mesmer’s biggest challenge came in 1784 when King Louis XVI set up a royal commission to investigate his claims. Far less enamored of Mesmer than his wife Marie Antoinette and eager to determine the veracity of a theory inflaming both widespread acclaim and condemnation in Paris, the king appointed five members of the Academy of Sciences and four prominent physicians from the Faculté de Médecine to the case. Chaired by the witty and worldly Benjamin Franklin, the only foreign member of the team, the commission comprised most of France’s leading scientists of the time, including the chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who was to achieve greater fame for an invention that would later cost his fellow commissioners Lavoisier and Bailly their heads. The subject of their investigation would not be Mesmer himself, who refused to cooperate, perhaps feeling the investigation biased from the start, but Mesmer’s disciple Charles Deslon, who gave them full access to his practice.26
The commissioners first spent one day a week in Deslon’s clinic receiving treatment. They each sat around the baquet while Deslon tried to magnetize them. Nothing much happened over three months of weekly visits. “Not one of the commissioners felt any sensation, or at least none which ought to be ascribed to the action of the magnetism,” read the report.27 Observing Deslon’s work with other patients, the commission recognized that a number of patients showed what appeared to be the crises Mesmer described. The effects impressed even the jaded commissioners: “nothing can be more astonishing than the sight of these convulsions.”28 But the commission’s charge was not to determine whether Mesmer’s treatment had any beneficial effects but whether animal magnetism—a new force of nature—actually existed.
Franklin’s gout and other illnesses made travel difficult, so Deslon agreed to perform experiments at Franklin’s home in Passy outside Paris. In one experiment, a blindfolded woman was told that Deslon was in the room magnetizing her. Almost immediately, she began shuddering and crying out in pain, lapsing into crisis within minutes. The only trouble was that Deslon was nowhere near her—he was not even in the same room. Another experiment had Deslon supposedly magnetizing a woman from behind a door. Even when he was not present, the patient showed visible changes. When the reverse experiment was conducted on the same woman with Deslon trying to magnetize her but without her knowledge, nothing happened.29
On another day, Deslon magnetized an apricot tree in Franklin’s backyard with his special magnetized cane. He then blindfolded his subject, a twelve-year-old boy suffering from an unspecified illness. Once blindfolded, the boy stumbled clumsily around the yard toward the trees. “They made him embrace several trees for two minutes,” wrote Franklin’s fourteen-year-old grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, observing the proceedings. “At the first three trees . . . he said that he felt a numbness which redoubled at each tree.”30 Besides numbness, at the first tree, nearly thirty feet from the magnetized tree, the boy began to sweat, cough up phlegm, and complain of severe head pain. At the second tree, still further from the magnetized tree, his head pain increased. He appeared dazed and bewildered. Moving on, the boy claimed that the magnetic force felt even stronger. He complained of a tingling sensation like a light electric shock that increased with each tree, even as he walked farther and farther away from the magnetized tree. The experiment ended suddenly when the boy fainted.31
These experiments suggested to the commissioners that those people who felt the effects of the treatment had high expectations and vivid imaginations. “If the symptoms are more considerable and the crisis more violent at the public exhibition, it is because various causes are combined with the imagination, to operate, to multiply and to enlarge its effects,” wrote the commissioners. They concluded, “This agent, this fluid has no existence.”32
Released in August of 1784, the Rapport des Commissaires became an immediate sensation. More than twenty thousand copies sold, and summaries of the commission’s findings appeared in publications ranging from Gentleman’s Magazine to the London Medical Journal. The report itself was notable for being one of the first, if not the first, instance of blinding of subjects in a medical trial, a practice now essential to modern medicine. Mesmer, unsurprisingly, refused to accept the commission’s report. He argued that it was unfair and politically motivated since the commission’s scientists had the most to lose from the veracity of his claims. He was particularly infuriated that the commissioners had based their results on treatments administered by Deslon, though Mesmer himself had refused the commission’s invitation to participate. Many of Mesmer’s followers also protested the commissioners’ conclusions. They claimed vivid memories of the animal magnetism entering and leaving their bodies, if little else of the actual experience, and asserted their belief in the mystical power of the baquet. Mesmer soon left Paris and traveled through Europe before spending his final years near his birthplace in Germany, where he died in 1815.33
Mesmerism itself was far from dead, however—it was just getting started. The same year that the commission’s report appeared to discredit magnetism, Amand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puységur, made a spectacular discovery that breathed new life into the movement. The eldest of three brothers in a respected aristocratic family, Puységur began experimenting with magnetism on the peasants who worked his estate in Buzancy in northern France in 1784. They proved willing subjects for his new healing art. Among the first to come to him was a young shepherd named Victor Race who had spent several days in bed with what appeared to be pneumonia. Puységur magnetized Race, but rather than experiencing the crisis that Puységur expected, he instead found that the young man fell into a strange peaceful sleep. This wasn’t like any sleep Puységur had seen before. Although he appeared to be sleeping, Race soon began to talk about his problems. Puységur worried that these unhappy thoughts might aggravate Race’s illness, so he tried to change the subject to happier topics. He suggested that Race might imagine himself dancing at a party and taking part in a shooting contest. Puységur’s suggestions set Race into motion. He stood up and began walking. He pantomimed dancing. He shot a gun. Race not only appeared to be awake and aware of his surroundings, he also seemed more intelligent and well spoken than normal. After an hour experimenting with this new kind of magnetic crisis, Puységur calmed Race down and brought him back to consciousness. Race recalled nothing that had happened.34
Intrigued, Puységur magnetized Race again some days later to similar effect. Puységur soon found that many of his workers fell into these unusual, sleeplike states of consciousness. Lacking a baquet of his own, Puységur mesmerized a group of peasants tied around a magnetized tree and observed the results. Like Race, these entranced patients appeared brighter and more receptive to their surroundings and to other people. They recalled long-forgotten memories in minute detail and answered questions with an intelligence unexpected in those with a peasant’s education and background. Even better, when Puységur asked them about their illnesses, many could offer a complete case history and diagnosis that usually held up under further investigation. These patients claimed they could see their own insides like human X-rays. Some even prescribed remedies and could predict the day the illness would finally pass. A select few achieved what Puységur called “extraordinary lucidity” and could perform feats of telepathy and clairvoyance. Once, Puységur claimed he used magnetism to bring a supposedly dead dog back to life. Puységur named these unusual effects “mesmeric somnambulism” or “magnetic sleep.”35
Quite inadvertently, Puységur discovered the human unconscious, a strange new world just below the threshold of ordinary consciousness. Mesmer, perhaps feeling spurned by the attention lavished on Puységur, claimed that he had actually discovered somnambulism many years before, but it seems unlikely. Although Mesmer’s name is the one remembered, Puységur’s discovery dramatically shifted the debate over mesmerism and the substance of animal magnetism. The remarkable effects produced by mesmerism now seemed to have not a physical cause, as Mesmer had claimed, but a psychological origin, the mechanisms of which would consume many scientists, philosophers, and doctors in the nineteenth century.36
The relationship between patient and healer, always important but secondary to the actual fluid itself under Mesmer, became the primary component of Puységur’s brand of magnetism. Mesmer himself had paid little attention to psychological factors. He did not concern himself with questions about the patient’s attitude or belief going into treatment, or the effect the magnetizer might have on the patient.37 Puységur rejected Mesmer’s claim that the redistribution of the physical fluid of animal magnetism induced the healing crisis. He instead explained his therapeutic success as a mental effect produced by the mesmerist’s will over the vital power. The crucial variable in the mesmerizing process, according to Puységur, was the magnetist’s ability to gain some control over the patient that then allowed the patient to slip into the somnambulistic state.38 “I believe in the existence within myself of a power. From this belief derives my will to exert it,” explained Puységur in a 1785 address to the Strasbourg Masonic society. “The entire doctrine of Animal Magnetism is contained in the two words: Believe and want. I believe that I have the power to set into action the vital principle of my fellow-men; I want to make use of it; this is all my science and all my means.”39 Patients had internal capabilities that he as the magnetizer could activate and manipulate through the magnetizing process. And that control changed the role and responsibilities of the patient. Where before, Mesmer had treated a seated and mostly passive patient, Puységur’s method demanded the active involvement of the patient in the healing process. Mesmerized patients needed to move, talk, and, most important, discern illness in themselves and others, becoming both performer and diagnostic tool.
Intrigued by Puységur’s discovery, some regular doctors experimented with using somnambulistic trance in their own practice. Alexandre Bertrand, Ambroise Liebault, and Hippolyte Bernheim were among the scientists who further examined Puységur’s theory and claimed to have proved the existence of an unconscious mental state.40 Alleviating the pain of surgery seemed like the most promising application of somnambulism. The need was great as anesthetics did not exist until the introduction of ether in 1846; most surgical patients endured the terrible pain of surgery with little more than a strong drink and a broom handle held between clenched teeth. Parisian mesmerist Pierre Jean Chapelain participated in one of the first mesmeric surgeries in April 1829. He entranced a sixty-four-year-old woman known as Madame Plantin while surgeon Jules Cloquet successfully removed her cancerous breast. Cloquet recounted his accomplishment before the Section on Surgery of the French Royal Academy of Medicine a few days later. Several members of the Academy questioned Cloquet’s story, even though a later account of the surgery by a Scottish authority on somnambulism, John C. Colquhoun, reported that the woman “continued to converse quietly with the operator [magnetizer], and did not exhibit the slightest sign of sensibility” during the procedure. When she awoke, she “did not appear to have any idea, any feeling of what had passed in the interval.” The success of the surgery spurred further investigations of mesmerism in medical treatment.41 In 1837, somnambulistic surgery came to England at the suggestion of John Elliotson, a well-respected regular doctor at London’s University College Hospital. Mesmerism, he insisted, had a huge future in modern medicine. It was not Elliotson’s first maverick act—he had also been the first doctor in England to use a stethoscope. Drawn to the new and exciting, Elliotson argued that medical progress required experimentation and risk. He amazed observers with his surgical demonstrations on deeply mesmerized patients. After witnessing one of his mesmeric displays, writer Charles Dickens became an Elliotson disciple and used his magnetic skills on his family and friends. He also wrote mesmerism into his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Unfortunately, Elliotson’s colleagues were less unimpressed with mesmerism than Dickens. In 1838, the University College Hospital passed a resolution banning the use of mesmerism within its doors, a move that essentially booted Elliotson out of his job. He left and eventually started a journal devoted to the study and promotion of mesmerism and phrenology. He also established the London Mesmeric Infirmary, a hospital devoted to mesmerism, in 1850.42
These medical experiments also gave mesmerism a new name. In 1841, Scottish physician James Braid began dangling bright objects before the eyes of his subjects to induce trance. Braid had first witnessed the phenomenon in a demonstration by Parisian showman and magnetist Charles Lafontaine. At first he wondered if the patients faked their trances, but he soon came to believe that the effects Lafontaine caused were genuine. The real question then concerned the nature of the effects and the agent that produced them. Braid’s observations and experiments led him to reject animal magnetism outright, concluding instead that somnambulism had a purely psychological and subjective source, most likely rooted in suggestion. Though most mesmerists disagreed with his theory, many began using the name he coined for the practice in 1842 as a way to dissociate his findings from mesmerism and the antics of traveling showmen: hypnosis. His method of inducing trance also inspired the popular image of the hypnotist waving an object before his patient.43
Mesmeric mania finally hit American shores in the 1830s, only a few years after phrenology had first suggested the wondrous possibilities of the mind. Although some educated Americans knew of it already from its introduction in the 1770s, mesmerism only gained widespread popularity in the United States with the arrival of Frenchman Charles Poyen de Saint Saveur. A twenty-year-old medical student and self-styled “Professor of Animal Magnetism,” Poyen came to Boston in 1836 to spread his magnetic faith. But much to his surprise and dismay, he found himself talking about a subject that few Americans knew anything about. It wasn’t the first time a Frenchman had tried to introduce mesmerism to America. In 1784, General Marquis de Lafayette, an enthusiastic member of Mesmer’s Society of Universal Harmony, wrote to his friend and mentor George Washington promising to reveal to him “Mesmer’s secret, which, you can count on it, is a great philosophical discovery.” Though sincere in his enthusiasm, Lafayette had overstepped his bounds. Not only did he not have Mesmer’s permission to make such an offer, even worse, when King Louis XVI heard of his letter, he scornfully asked Lafayette, “What will Washington think when he learns that you have become Mesmer’s chief journeyman apothecary?” Washington chose not to get involved, perhaps heeding the advice of Thomas Jefferson, who, appalled by the irrational popularity of mesmerism in France, handed out copies of the negative conclusions reached by Franklin’s royal commission that very year.44
Poyen had discovered mesmerism during his medical studies in Paris. Suffering from a nervous ailment that defied standard medical treatment, Poyen eventually sought the services of a mesmerist and was impressed with the effects. He then traveled to Martinique and Guadeloupe in the West Indies and met French planters using magnetism to heal their slaves in cases Poyen found “altogether remarkable.” Poyen stayed and studied magnetism and somnambulism for a year before deciding to move to New England for its cooler climate and healthful maritime air. His mesmeric study had also imbued him with a messianic message for the American people: the hidden secret to human happiness and well-being.45
Poyen embarked on a lecture tour of New England soon after he landed. He did little to transform the theory he had first learned in Europe. Poyen believed that Puységur’s discovery of the somnambulistic state was the most important scientific discovery of animal magnetism, and perhaps the most important in all of science. Larding his lectures with medical magic tricks, Poyen demonstrated the magnetic state of consciousness to awestruck audiences. He hired a clairvoyant who could supposedly read the thoughts of audience members as well as the contents of sealed envelopes while under a mesmeric trance. Colonel William Stone, editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser, admitted to his “times of laughing at animal magnetism,” but after seeing Poyen, Stone changed his mind. Mesmerism had to be seen to be believed. “Nothing hitherto published upon that subject, is so wonderful by far, as the facts of which we were witness,” declared Stone. After witnessing a blind girl under trance read a sealed letter at a demonstration in Providence, Rhode Island, Stone hailed mesmerism as “not only marvellous [sic] in our eyes, but absolutely astounding.”46
During his lectures, Poyen picked volunteers from the audience to undergo trances. They sat onstage while Poyen waved his arms over and around them to heighten the activity of their internal animal magnetism. Poyen usually succeeded in hypnotizing about half of his volunteers. Loud hand clapping and jars of ammonia passed under their noses failed to evoke even the slightest response or nose twitch. To the audience, these volunteers appeared to have withdrawn completely from the physical world. Crowds thronged to see family and friends transformed before their eyes.47 “The gossip of the city is of Animal Magnetism,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson to his brother William on January 13, 1837. “Three weeks ago I went to see the magnetic sleep & saw the wonder.”48 The trance subjects themselves, like Poyen’s own medium Cynthia Gleason, became featured players in the performances. Poyen’s exhibitions proved to be great theater, mimicking the drama that had so captivated and entertained Parisians in Mesmer’s time. It also had the unfortunate side effect of disenfranchising mesmerism from the serious consideration of the American scientific community, which highly disapproved of pairing frivolity with science.49
While people certainly came for the entertainment, many others sought Poyen’s medical care. Like Mesmer, he attempted to direct the flow of animal magnetism to the diseased part of the body with his hands. These patients generally remembered nothing of their mesmeric trance but still declared themselves cured when they awoke. Poyen boasted the successful treatment of everything from rheumatism and back pain to liver disease and nervousness. Newspaper articles and letters to the editor from patients following his appearances tended to support his healing assertions.50
Word of Poyen’s healing methods spread rapidly throughout New England and the rest of the country. Poyen was an able and evocative speaker bursting with egotism, and his message played on growing public confidence in the promise of science to bring about a better world. He prophesied that mesmerism, when fully accepted by “intelligent and fast progressing” people, would make America “the most perfect nation on earth.”51 For an American public with a boundless sense of destiny, Poyen’s message found eager ears.52
But while many Americans enthusiastically embraced mesmerism without question, others were not so sure. The idea of a force with the power to influence human behavior led some to worry about what horrors could result if it were left uncontrolled or put in the hands of the untrained or immoral. Many ministers thought that mesmerism might undermine religious faith with its similarities to the healings performed in the New Testament. They worried that some followers might conclude that the miracles described in the Bible were simply mesmerism and that Christ raised the dead through animal magnetism rather than anything divine. Some mesmerists did, in fact, make that claim, perhaps hoping to capitalize on religious skepticism or to link magnetism to a long and ancient history.53 These religious concerns tended to fade as mesmerism claimed more and more converts. Many evangelicals came to embrace mesmerism’s potential to demonstrate the hidden powers of the mind. Mesmerists put patients through an intense physical and mental experience that “restored the body to harmony,” but also happened to look an awful lot like a religious conversion experience. The visible changes seen in patients under trance seemed to testify to the utter transformation possible when people came under spiritual guidance. Both revivalists and mesmerists argued that confusion and self-doubt would continue until people gave themselves over to a higher power, which for mesmerists was animal magnetism and for the religious, God. In America, the two became increasingly entwined.54
The sexual overtones of the mesmerizing process, however, worried far more Americans, and these worries were not as easily dispatched as religious concerns. It was, after all, an act where a passive patient, often female, willingly yielded all mental resistance to comply with the physical gestures of a powerful and usually male mesmerist. Individual treatment often relied on close proximity between doctor and patient. Sitting face-to-face, the doctor usually enclosed the patient’s knees between his own. He then began touching and stroking the patient’s body, often paying particular attention to the abdomen. Many could not help but suspect improper passions at work, an accusation that dogged mesmerism from the very beginning, particularly as most reports of mesmeric malfeasance involved female patients. In fact, members of the original French commission had secretly submitted a second report to Louis XVI warning of the indecencies to which Mesmer’s science and method were inherently prone. The king had a personal stake in this as his wife, Marie Antoinette, had been among Mesmer’s greatest fans.55 Eighteenth-century comics, writers, and musicians seized on mesmerism’s erotic implications, satirizing the treatment in cartoons and bawdy verses that congratulated Mesmer for conquering so many women. Mesmer repeatedly denied that he took liberties with his female patients, but the gossip continued unabated.56
These concerns crossed the Atlantic with Poyen. The publication of the anonymous but American-written Confessions of a Magnetizer, in which the author boasted of taking advantage of his more attractive patients after placing them in a trance, certainly did nothing to quell suspicions and fears.57 Soon, a whole genre of scare literature featuring evil mesmerists who seduced innocents appeared on the publishing scene. Timothy Shay’s Agnes; or, The Possessed, A Revelation of Mesmerism (1848) told the story of a young woman who leaves her fiancé after falling under the spell of mesmerist Monsieur Florien during a tooth extraction. Her exceptional magnetic conductivity leads Florien to abduct Agnes for further experiments. She’s eventually rescued by her fiancé, who tracks her from Boston to New York City. Fortunately, he finds that the young Agnes has not been compromised. Florien’s wife assures the fiancé that Agnes has remained pure under her watchful eye. In case the message was not clear enough, Shay warns of the dangers of mesmerism and its “disorderly, and therefore, evil origin” in both the preface and afterward of his tale. In a more enduring book, The Bostonians, Henry James compares mesmerists to vampires feeding on the animal magnetism of their unknowing patients.58
Mesmerism both fascinated and repelled Nathaniel Hawthorne, who used its power dynamics as a theme and cautionary tale. In The House of the Seven Gables, the hardworking carpenter Matthew Maule entrances the snooty beauty Alice Pyncheon and uses his powers in selfish revenge after she spurns his affections. The acts he subjects her to eventually result in her death. Mesmerism appears again in The Blithedale Romance in which the passive and receptive Priscilla is exploited as a stage performer. But despite these dark portrayals of mesmerism, Hawthorne also found similarities between himself as an artist and the mesmerist: both create characters, the author in his stories and the mesmerist of his patients under trance and often of himself as well; explore intimate lives; and hold others spellbound. The negative view prevailed in his own life, though, as Hawthorne was unwilling to entertain his wife Sophia’s interest in mesmerism. He told her to “take no part” in “magnetic miracles” to prevent the possible violation of her soul by the mesmerist.59
The patient-mesmerist relationship did not have to be this way, though, counseled Joseph Francois Deleuze. The French mesmerist devoted an entire section of his mesmerism manual Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, first translated into English in 1837, to choosing the right magnetizer. He counseled women to seek the services of other women since patients commonly developed a deep affection for the magnetizer. Female modesty was also at stake since magnetism tended to produce “spasmodic movements” in women that were “not proper for a man to . . . witness.”60
Concern for women could turn quickly to scorn, however, if a woman voluntarily participated in mesmerist shows as a volunteer or, worse, as a clairvoyant. Immoral, greedy, and attention seeking were just some of the insults hurled by critics at these women. But mesmerism offered poor women an opportunity for economic and social advancement far from the dangers of the factory floor in a culture that afforded them few choices. Poyen’s own clairvoyant, Cynthia Gleason, had worked in a textile mill in Rhode Island when she sought his care for chronic stomach pain. Her skills while under mesmeric trance “of discerning the symptoms of disease, and prescribing appropriate remedies for them” impressed Poyen, who hired her on as his traveling assistant. By the time she died in 1847, Gleason had amassed a small fortune for her work as a clairvoyant somnambulistic healer, first for Poyen and then on her own. With hundreds if not thousands of people attending some demonstrations, it wasn’t hard to understand why some factory girls preferred this more lucrative and potentially star-making job. Mesmerists also preferred female assistants because of the widespread belief that women more easily succumbed to trance than men.61
Women participated in mesmerism as far more than passive subjects, though. They also used its healing power for their own gain and benefit. Women loved mesmerism’s potential to reduce the pain of childbirth. Just as the mesmeric trance could be used as an anesthetic in surgery, it found a welcome home in the home health-care regimen of some midwives. Once there, it never really left, as hypnobirthing is still in use today with more than one thousand practitioners in the United States, online courses, and classes offered at some major hospitals.62
Other women became mesmerists themselves. As in other irregular fields, female mesmerists treated women almost exclusively. Most appear to have received little public notice, as the uproar over potential liberties taken by male mesmerizers over supposedly helpless female patients dominated popular conversation. A female mesmerist named Elizabeth angrily denounced accusations of immorality from regular doctors in the pages of the mesmerist journal the Zoist. “But why, and on what account and proof, are mesmerists to be thus stigmatized?” she asked. “Are then mesmerists, as a class, ‘notoriously’ worse than other people? There must be some distinguishing character belonging to them.” She asserted that mesmerists “proudly boast among their number, refined and educated females, possessing highly intellectual attainments.”63
The United States soon crawled with itinerant mesmerists. In Boston alone, more than two hundred magnetizers sold their services by 1843. Dozens of books with do-it-yourself instructions appeared on store shelves to train and tempt would-be home mesmerizers with the promise of health and self-improvement. Methods of inducing trance varied from practitioner to practitioner. Nearly all passed their hands over the body, but where some made actual contact, others simply moved their hands over and around the body. Some imitated Mesmer and used a metal wand to conduct the flow of animal magnetism. Still others dragged phrenology into the mix and tried to direct their magnetic powers toward particular parts of the brain associated with one or more phrenological traits.64 All mesmerists could agree on one thing, though: one person had the power to gain control over another.65
As mesmerism’s disciples became more numerous and enthusiastic in the United States, the movement fell ever further away from respectability in the eyes of regular medicine. In 1844, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal expressed the frustrated bewilderment felt by many in the medical establishment. “In after times, the history of the mesmeric infatuation in New England will be read with surprise, and produce a train of feeling much like that developed by reading an account of the witchcraft mania in the ancient town of Salem.”66 A writer in the New-Hampshire Gazette wondered, “Can it be possible, that among enlightened men, in this age of light, the pretended wonderful art or science of ‘animal magnetism’ can gain a moment’s credence!”67 The apparent ease of inducing mesmeric trance did inevitably draw enterprising showmen who drew large crowds with what amounted to carnival sideshow hypnotism. For these practitioners, mesmerism was nothing more than entertainment and profit. And as with other irregular healing movements, these showmen degraded all of mesmerism in the eyes of regular doctors eager to find fault with their competitors.68
Other regulars questioned mesmerism’s healing claims. They charged magnetizers with overstatement and deception for making extravagant claims about unseen and unknown forces to dupe the witless. They accused patients of faking trances to gain access to free medical care or of actually being hired actors. The patient’s “grimaces, manipulations, and jargon of words is all a farce to deceive the ignorant . . . hoaxed out of much small change, at the expense of their wit.”69
To combat these accusations and make the case for the seriousness of their science, American mesmerists offered detailed neurophysiological observations and made hypotheses based on contemporary medical knowledge. Mesmerist John Bovee Dods suggested that the body breathed in animal magnetism from the air and transformed it into vital fluid for human use. Several mesmerists proposed that animal magnetism took the form of electrical impulses when it entered the nervous system. Others suggested that the brain exuded animal magnetism. All were convinced that science would eventually account for this new and wholly unexplored autonomous psychological realm. Aware of the power of suggestion and expectation in determining behavior, mesmerists became the first Americans to directly study the psychodynamics of interpersonal relationships. Most mesmerists accepted that suggestion and prior expectation affected the patient’s susceptibility to trance, but they, like Puységur before them, did not believe that this could account for all of their data. Subjects in the highest mesmeric state reported feeling a distinct, and in some cases, tangible force emanating from their nervous systems. Afterward, most could not remember the details of the trance experience, but many clearly recalled feeling something inside them moving around. For mesmerists, the physical existence of animal magnetism seemed undeniable based on their data. Many believed it also gave their theory greater significance because it proposed both a new psychological realm as well as a new natural force in the universe. Mesmerists promoting even the most psychological versions of their method never abandoned the idea of an invisible fluid. This commitment to animal magnetism distinguished mesmerism from opposing theories and other mental cures. As a result, American mesmerists were not as interested in pursuing the notion of suggestion as some European scientists, such as neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his student Sigmund Freud, would be later in the nineteenth century. Charcot found aspects of mesmeric trance useful in treating certain psychiatric patients, while Freud used hypnosis in his career to recover repressed memories. But until then, mesmerist articles and charts in the 1840s and 1850s represented some of the most significant attempts of the period to explore the nature of consciousness and the mind-body connection.70
Almost as abruptly as he arrived, Poyen left the United States and returned to France in 1839. But by then, the movement he spawned had developed a life of its own. Both P. T. Barnum’s American Museum and Ruben Peale’s New York Museum of Natural History and Science drew crowds at twice-daily demonstrations of mesmerism and clairvoyant somnambulism that combined, like the museums themselves, sensational and over-the-top entertainment with education. Competition grew so fierce between the two museums that each actively poached popular magnetizers from the other with the timeworn lure of higher pay and greater prestige.71 Outside of cities, small-town and rural Americans relied on traveling mesmerists to provide them with medical instruction and entertainment. These itinerants tried to make a career out of demonstrating their mesmeric skills to fellow Americans.
These public displays injected mesmerism into the lives of the American lower and middle classes. Mesmerism, not unlike its fellow irregular healing systems, provided one answer to a growing popular demand for new and more satisfying worldviews outside of religion. Exploring the unconscious mind and the mind-brain connection through trance states allowed Americans to learn about themselves and their true nature outside the walls of the churchyard.72 Followers believed, or certainly hoped, that mesmerism was not a hoax, but a healing tool with real scientific and therapeutic benefit.
One of these Americans was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who expanded mesmerist philosophy into a total philosophy of life. A clockmaker by trade, Quimby sat spellbound in the audience as Poyen demonstrated the astonishing powers of animal magnetism on a stop in Belfast, Maine, in 1838. After the lecture, Quimby nearly assaulted Poyen with questions about this mysterious mental fluid. Poyen told Quimby that he, too, could develop his own mental powers if he devoted himself to its study. It was all Quimby needed to hear. He set aside his clocks and followed Poyen from town to town until he mastered the practice of mesmerism. His dedication prompted Poyen to compliment his “exceptional magnetic powers and great power of concentration.”73 Before long, Quimby had a magnetic practice of his own back in Belfast.
Quimby soon joined forces with Lucius Burkmar, a young man particularly adept at mind reading and clairvoyance while under a mesmeric trance. Once magnetized, Quimby directed Burkmar to use his clairvoyant powers to diagnose illnesses in patients and prescribe medicinal remedies. At other times, Quimby dispensed with Burkmar and instead transmitted the magnetic energy from his own brain into his patient’s body. The two took to the road in 1843, providing demonstrations and enacting miraculous cures. Newspapers took note, and soon the former clockmaker from Maine was being touted as the world’s leading mesmerist.74
As time passed, though, Quimby began to doubt that animal magnetism alone could explain his healing successes. The startling accuracy of the diagnoses that Burkmar produced so amazed patients that they tended to put their full trust in the curative power of Quimby and Burkmar. But Quimby wondered if the remedies worked more on what the patient believed about her disorder than on what actually ailed her. Was Burkmar simply using his telepathic skills to read the patient’s mind rather than to diagnose the actual physical illness? Was he perceiving what the patient already supposed about the illness and simply providing confirmation of that thought? Most of the remedies Quimby prescribed were innocuous enough substances to prove equally effective (or ineffective) on any number of diseases, so it was hard to know what actually did the healing.75 Quimby’s speculations about Burkmar led him to a radical conclusion: rather than suppose that what a person believed contributed to healing, Quimby determined that the patients’ beliefs were actually the cause of all their symptoms. This idea bears much in common with what are now known as somatoform (or psychosomatic) disorders, where physical symptoms result from psychological causes. Quimby, however, felt that this was the origin of most, if not all, disease.76
Starting from the assumption that the human mind comprised all beliefs, Quimby rationalized that if a person is “deceived into a belief that he has, or is liable to have a disease, the belief is catching and the effects follow from it.”77 Quimby wasn’t the first mesmerist to suggest a psychological origin for disease, but unlike his predecessors who pointed to a magnetic fluid imbalance as the primary problem, Quimby specifically identified faulty ideas as the main cause of disease. “All sickness is in the mind of belief,” proclaimed Quimby. “To cure the disease is to correct the error, destroy the cause, and the effect will cease.”78 His theories moved mesmerism one step closer to clinical psychology.
Before Quimby, neither regular doctors nor mesmerists were really prepared to deal with problems that did not have an obvious physical cause. Doctors were uncomfortable with diseases that lacked a discrete, material, and easily explained origin. Without an understanding of their basis or the presumption that they even existed, the pain and discomfort of mental health issues and symptoms of psychological origin rarely received the social recognition that would grant these illnesses legitimacy. Mental and emotional disorders tended to be classified as ephemeral or hypochondriacal, so most Americans could find little consideration or relief for mental health issues. Quimby, on the other hand, based on his new theory of disease, expanded the scope of the mesmeric cure to provide the support patients needed to constructively manage life’s difficulties. He still believed strongly in animal magnetism, which he thought flowed to the nervous system and conscious mind from some deeper, unconscious part of the mind that he believed existed as an actual physical place, but he now assigned human beliefs to a new interventionist role as control valves or power switches regulating the flow of magnetism from the conscious to the unconscious mind. Wrong beliefs could block this flow and disrupt the body’s internal harmony by placing it solely at the mercy of outside conditions. Deprived of these essential energies, patients eventually lapsed into disease. The healer’s job was to engage with clients on a one-on-one basis to overcome their negative and self-defeating attitudes, a proto–talk therapy. This discussion allowed the healer to identify the wrong beliefs that were causing the outward symptoms and to then heal the patient with new, more positive thoughts. Armed with his new mentalistic theory of disease, Quimby no longer needed Burkmar or any clairvoyant, and the two parted ways in 1847.79
Quimby instructed patients to “come with me [mentally] to where the trouble is, and you will find . . . it is kept hot and disturbed by your mind being misrepresented.”80 His treatment consisted of a combination of straightforward mesmerist technique and a self-induced altered state of consciousness. In this state, Quimby claimed he could see a kind of vapor cloud enveloping his patient’s body, similar to an aura, that contained all of her “ideas, right and wrong. This vapor or fluid contains the identity of the person.”81 He could see events long forgotten and, presaging Freud, suppressed opinions and feelings contained in this mental fog. While in this superior mental state, Quimby engaged with the cloud to transmit his mesmerically acquired healing forces telepathically from his own person to the patient. He used this force to instill faith in the patient that she was healthy and that any negative thoughts were wrong.82
Quimby described his treatment process when he visited a Mr. Robinson who had been confined to his bed for four years. He explained how he’d take up Robinson’s feelings “one by one, like a lawyer examining witnesses, analyzing them and showing him that he put false constructions on all his feelings.” Robinson was skeptical of Quimby at first but allowed him to proceed, his arguments being “so plain that it was impossible not to understand.” By the end of the session, Robinson “felt like a man who had been confined in a prison for life” who had just been given “a pardon” and “set at liberty.” The next day, he felt better than he had in years and “had no desire to take to [his] bed” again.83 Quimby’s skill and method proved so powerful that he even treated people through the mail. In this “absent treatment,” Quimby professed to be present for the patient in spirit through the written word.84
Quimby’s mind cure had an appealing simplicity about it, even as the explanations he offered for his healing powers often defied reason and skirted the edges of the fantastic. Describing his mesmeric state, Quimby claimed to travel into the “land of darkness with the light of liberty, [to] search out the dungeons where the lives of the sick are bound, enter them and set the prisoners free.”85 He couldn’t explain his powers; he knew only that they worked. When offered one thousand dollars for his secret, he was forced to confess, “I don’t understand it myself.”86 His willingness to admit that he did not know everything was a far cry from other irregular healers, who tended to lash out at those who asked too many questions or required clarification. Right beliefs led to health and happiness. Human misery resulted from listening only to the outward world and losing touch with the body’s inner mind and spiritual self. The key element, Quimby counseled, was to identify internal rather than external reference points of self-esteem and worth, a message so modern and familiar as to not seem out of place in any women’s magazine or self-help book today. “Disease is something made by belief or forced upon us by our parents or public opinion,” wrote Quimby. “Now if you can face the error and argue it down you can cure the sick.”87 Listen to your inner voice. Don’t let other people distract you from the life you were meant to live. Quimby was the Oprah of the nineteenth century.
In case anyone questioned the religious implications of his theory as they had of mesmerism, Quimby made sure to spell it out. His “Science of Health” reunited the wrong-thinking mind with the divine internal spirit of Christ. Quimby asserted that he established inner rapport with the Christ-like spirit contained inside every person when he healed. Quimby’s mesmerist psychology seemed to verify a common belief that humans possessed both a lower animal nature and higher spiritual nature. Phrenologists also made this distinction by locating the traits associated with animals in the lower part of the brain and the more religious and moral faculties in the lobes. By turning the mind inward toward its own psychic depths and God’s emanative powers, people could grasp the true purpose of their lives in the physical world; under Quimby, mesmerism now offered a way to conceptualize a theological viewpoint in psychological terms. The mind-cure approach to well-being decreed that everyone had power over their own psychological realm, even if modern life had seemingly stripped away every other aspect of control. Quimby’s cure presented both a Christian and scientific approach to life that many nineteenth-century Americans wanted and that he occasionally referred to as “Christian Science.”88
By 1865, nearly twelve thousand patients had come to Quimby’s Portland, Maine, office for treatment. Most came out of sheer desperation after regular doctors had given up hope of a cure. Patients came for relief of everything from consumption and smallpox to cancer, diphtheria, and nervous ailments. Quimby was skilled at putting people at ease. His interest and compassion astonished his patients, who were unused to doctors listening so intently and seriously, especially to emotional complaints.89
One of the patients to appear on Quimby’s doorstep was Mary Patterson, soon to be Mary Baker Eddy, in 1862. Quimby with his patient ear and healing mind worked wonders on Eddy. She was so inspired by his healing process that once well, she resolved to take up a career in Quimby-style mental healing. A few months later, Eddy gave her first public lecture on “P. P. Quimby’s Spiritual Science Healing Disease as Opposed to Deism or Rochester-Rapping Spiritualism,” the last a reference to the mysterious and ghostly knockings that inaugurated the spiritualist movement in Rochester, New York. With this talk, she anointed herself Quimby’s first spokesperson. Unfortunately for Eddy, her mentor died the next year, on January 16, 1866, temporarily robbing her of her inspiration and role model.90
Two weeks after Quimby’s death, though, Eddy discovered the path to her future. After a fall on an icy street left her largely confined to bed, Eddy found sudden relief from her painful injuries while reading passages from the Bible on Christ’s healing ministry. The “presence and power of God seemed to flood her whole being” and she stood up “healed.”91 She could not explain what happened, but she knew beyond a doubt that her recovery resulted from her reading of the Gospel. From this experience, she developed a theory based on the premise that disease resulted from one’s alienation from God. Like Quimby, she believed that illness existed in the mind; her reading of the Bible told her that it was not inherent in God’s creation. Since “God is good” and “God is all,” Eddy reasoned that evil, a category under which disease naturally fell, therefore could not possibly exist. “Evil is but an illusion,” Eddy counseled, a misbelief that needed to be changed. It was an idea that largely conformed to Quimby’s practice. She then took the extreme step of negating the existence of the physical body itself. Eddy argued that God lived in the spirit that existed in the mind, and since God was everything, what people thought of as their physical body was in reality only another misguided belief. In theory, she wrote, “a man could live just as well after his lungs had been removed as before, if he but thought he could.” She named her new approach to healing “Christian Science,” ignoring or perhaps not caring that Quimby had sometimes used that name for his system. She also disavowed any debt to her mentor and claimed only divine revelation, even though her theory appeared to be little more than Quimbyism embellished with biblical references.92
Eddy published her findings in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in 1875 and four years later, in 1879, founded the Church of Christ (Scientist). The church soon became one of the fastest-growing denominations in the country, counting more than 200,000 members by 1925. Local churches and instructional institutes opened around the country, and several thousand Christian Science healers, more than 80 percent of them women, began practicing.93 Eddy also opened a school, a first for any of the mesmerist and magnetist mind cures in the United States, in 1881. The Massachusetts Metaphysical College graduated hundreds of doctors of Christian Science, who helped spread her message and technique from coast to coast. She’d begun teaching students more than a decade before, in 1868, promising lessons in a method “with a success far beyond any of the present modes.”94
Christian Science boasted an impressive record of cures. Healing “testimonies” appeared as a monthly feature in the Christian Science Journal, which launched in 1883. In its pages, people claimed to have been cured of cancer, blindness, and gunshot wounds to the chest. When a stage curtain descended on the head of an operatic prima donna, it delivered a “staggering blow” to her “delicate little nose.” But after a visit with a practitioner of Christian Science, her swollen nose and badly bruised eyes had healed completely.95 Not all believers went to visit a Christian Science doctor. Some attempted to cure themselves by reading Science and Health. One Seattle woman reported that thirty years of constipation cleared up after she read Eddy’s book. Another woman in Salt Lake City declared the broken arm she suffered in a bicycle accident healed after ten minutes of reading. Eddy expected patients to try to heal themselves first. This is partly why she put so much work into editing and refining Science and Health throughout her life, undertaking eight major revisions and issuing more than four hundred printings.96
Few irregular theories struck regular doctors as more ridiculous than Christian Science, particularly Eddy’s denial of the very existence of physical bodies. After Eddy reported saving the life of a pregnant woman and her twelve-pound infant, Chicago physician Edmund Andrews sarcastically remarked that, for having no body, “this bouncing offspring” had produced “a very satisfactory result” for the mother.97 Another case found a Christian Science healer called to attend to a sick cow. Once recovered, the cow chased the doctor around the barnyard until a hired man scared him off with a pitchfork. The story prompted one regular doctor to wonder if the line of “non-existence of matter has to be drawn at enraged animals.”98 American journalist Ambrose Bierce got in on the fun, too, writing in his Devil’s Dictionary that Christian Science was superior to regular medicine because it “will cure imaginary diseases, and they cannot.”99 Eddy’s claim that the death of her husband in 1882 was caused by a mental poison delivered by an enemy mesmerist earned the scorn of the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, which claimed that, in fact, he had suffered from arsenic poisoning. “Mrs. Eddy’s theory reminds one of the old stories of witchcraft, in which the tormenter made an image of the person he wished to afflict, and by sticking pins into it and otherwise misusing it, caused the live victim to feel pain as if he had been directly attacked,” stated the Gazette. “This is the nineteenth century, but the traditions of the seventeenth still survive.”100 An autopsy conducted by Dr. Rufus Noyes concluded that Eddy’s husband had died from heart disease, but Eddy refused to believe him, even after Noyes went to the extraordinary length of bringing her his heart on a tray and showing her the diseased parts.101
Harvard physician Richard Cabot was more generous, writing that “most” of the cures claimed by Christian Science were probably true if gauged by the power of suggestion and placebo. Tabulating cures proclaimed in Christian Science journals, Cabot proposed that at least three-quarters were of psychological rather than physical ailments.102 Many regulars agreed that Christian Science probably worked for hysterics, worriers, and sufferers from “imaginary maladies,” but for serious cases like smallpox and heart disease, they called Christian Science a danger to public health. Some Christian Scientists were accused of murder, but most were acquitted on the grounds that patients were free to express their religious beliefs. To avoid further legal trouble, though, Eddy advised her followers to decline patients seeking help for infectious or contagious diseases as well as seriously ill children.103
Eddy herself also provoked the heated cries of her critics in the religious and medical circles she sought to displace with her own medical-religious system. Clergymen portrayed her as a boa constrictor who had “coiled herself around the Christian system, breaking all the doctrinal bones of Christianity,” while she covered them in slime so they would “go down easy.” Others saw her as a spider attempting to “beguile simple souls into her web” and “devour them.”104 In human form, she was an “enchantress,” cruelly enticing the innocent with “the sweet cup of her sorcery,” before revealing to the ensnared masses that she was “not a beautiful maiden, but an old hag” leading “the sons of men downward to darkness and woe.”105 Clearly, Eddy’s gender and not just her theory played a large part in the attacks. Developed and led by a woman, rather than just allowing women to take part, Christian Science posed a unique threat to both regular medicine and traditional religion. Prevailing views held that women who promulgated unorthodox views or who did not fulfill their female duties were insane, unpleasant “mental harridans.” Some declared Christian Science to be little more than the delusions of a hysterical woman. Ralph Wallace Reed asserted that practitioners of “psychological medicine” would “have no difficulty in diagnosing her case” of major hysteria. Widespread stereotypes of women’s intellectual inferiority made others declare Eddy simply incapable of reason and scientific inquiry and thus pronounce her system impossible to take seriously, dismissing it as a movement of women, even as it grew into an international phenomenon.106
Despite Eddy’s critics, Christian Science only continued to grow and spread among women and men. The large number of men who helped to expand the church and spoke out in its favor belied the image of Christian Science as an organization of hysterical women. Letters in the Christian Science Journal found followers coming to Christian Science primarily for healing but also for a more satisfying understanding of God. Both men and women confessed themselves unable to reconcile themselves to the idea of a God who caused or even allowed so much suffering in traditional religion. Eddy’s insistence that God did not cause evil in any form and her advice to have a hopeful state of mind comforted those theologically and medically disillusioned.107 As more people converted, Christian Science Reading Rooms for the study and purchase of books opened around the country and continue to operate to this day. The Christian Science Monitor continues to publish national and international news with a daily religious feature. Church members can be found in more than 130 countries.108
Christian Science was not the only mental healing group to emerge after Quimby’s death. Two other Quimby patients, Warren Felt Evans and Julius Dresser, along with Dresser’s wife, Anetta, interpreted the growing public interest in mental health as a calling, and they set up mental healing practices in Boston. Unlike Eddy, they fully acknowledged their debt to Quimby. With no prior training other than what they had observed from Quimby, Evans and the Dressers continued to clarify and refine their intellectual understanding of mental healing, picking up pieces of nearly every metaphysical idea they happened across, be it Christian, spiritualist, Transcendentalist, Buddhist, Swedenborgian, mystic, or otherwise. Their enthusiasm proved contagious and helped to spread their increasingly popular brands of healing around the country. These and other like-minded thinkers contributed to what became known as the New Thought movement, a loosely organized group that shared a conviction—if little else—that the mind can solve all human problems. “Minds are forces,” they argued, and could be harnessed with proper instruction.109
Publishing a stream of articles and books, New Thought authors attempted to systematically apply the principles of mesmerism and other metaphysical ideas to everyday life. They advised readers to adopt mental habits that duplicated the thinking associated with the mesmeric state of consciousness, in effect taking the “right beliefs” that Quimby sought to place in people’s minds and turning them into complete descriptions of how people ought to think and act.110 In practice, this resulted in a flood of surefire mind-cure solutions to problems in marriage, work, or home life. Books with titles like Thought Is Power, How to Get What You Want, and Making Money transformed belief in the power of the mind to cure illness into a whole life philosophy largely centered around positive thinking.111 “Within yourself lies the cause of whatever enters your life,” advised Ralph Waldo Trine’s 1897 In Tune With the Infinite, which sold more than two million copies. “To come into the full realization of your awakened interior powers, is to be able to condition your life in exact accord with what you would have it.”112 Frank Channing Haddock offered practical, hygienic advice for “acquiring magnetism” and what he called “success-magnetism” in his Master of Self for Wealth, Power, and Success, recommending “scrupulous cleanliness of the body, without and within,” “sweet, sound and early sleep,” and a balance of “work and recreation.”113 These books, many of them best sellers, dramatically increased the number of people who came into contact with American mesmerist ideas of the mind’s extraordinary powers to shape one’s external circumstances. It also obscured mesmerism’s history and original applications.
While mental healing systems that grew out of mesmerism proliferated, by 1900 mesmerism itself had quietly disappeared as a subject of popular interest. American mesmerists, while successful, had never established mesmerism as a professional medical science. No official schools of mesmerism were established. No professional organizations formed. Many magnetic healers abandoned their mental healing practices after a few years in favor of more metaphysically inclined psychological theories, a trend that only increased after Quimby’s death. Some mesmerists became spiritualists, concentrating their mental powers on speaking to the dead in the spiritual realm that they believed the mesmeric state activated. The actual practice of mesmerism languished in the 1870s and mostly expired in the 1880s with the emergence of psychology as a professional scholarly field. These new psychologists sought to demonstrate the superiority of their psychology to its philosophical predecessors by writing articles denouncing mesmerism and mind cures as speculative, irrational, and unscientific.114
Although mesmerism itself never achieved scientific acceptance, it spawned many legitimate scientific fields and stimulated new strains of inquiry. Mesmerism, like phrenology, was one of the first in a long line of American popular psychologies that promised to impart the secret to personal renewal. Mesmerism differed from phrenology, though, in that it had nothing specifically to do with the brain as an organ but rather envisioned the mind and thought itself as a physical force. Where phrenology put a detailed map and vocabulary for self-development into the hands of Americans, mesmerism provided them access to their innermost mental domains. While other scientists, physicians, and healers alluded to the potential of the mind to cure, Mesmer was the first to elevate the mind to primacy in the healing process, inspiring waves of cures and healing movements based on mental powers.
In many ways, though, Puységur’s name is the one we should know. His discovery of the unconscious mind through somnambulism led to the first truly psychological treatment, and his method and emphasis on the psychological, rather than Mesmer’s focus on an imperceptible physical fluid, became the standard form of mesmerism (despite the name) practiced in the nineteenth century. He observed and recorded all of the core elements of modern hypnosis: the idea of a therapeutic connection between the magnetizer and subject, an altered state of consciousness with noticeable lucidity in some patients, and the near total amnesia of the trance experience that followed. Experimentation with somnambulism led to the development of dynamic clinical psychology as scientists, including Sigmund Freud, used data provided by entranced patients to formulate the rudiments of psychoanalysis. By the late nineteenth century, the act of bringing someone into a trance state, now known as hypnosis, had finally won the scientific and medical backing that Mesmer had so desperately craved in his own life.115 Mesmerism’s ideas and healing successes stimulated public interest in the inner workings of the mind and laid the groundwork for psychology, psychiatry, and the modern use of therapeutic hypnosis as a healing tool.
But if mesmerist practice mostly disappeared in its original form, the pop-cultural image of a flamboyant doctor turned mystical scientist and the idea of altered states certainly did not. Virtual travel through altered states like that induced by mesmeric trance has become a staple of books and movies. Think of the Matrix movies, where heroes act in a virtual space while their physical bodies sit immobilized. A similar idea underlies the plots of the movies Avatar and Inception. Books like The Secret and those of Eckhart Tolle promoting the power of thought to change lives continue to sell briskly.
As with phrenology, mesmerism spoke to a deep-seated desire to unlock the potential of the mind for human use. To know and understand ourselves and others, to be better people, to cure what ails us—these are goals humans are still striving to achieve. The idea that the answers might lie within continues to mesmerize.
