Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: The Rise and Fall of the First Energy-Healing Empire

1. The Salon Where Paris Went to Be Healed

In the late 1770s, at the height of his medical career, a doctor in Paris stood in a dim, mirror-hung room and waved his hands over the bodies of his patients, sending them into fits as they fell to the ground. Hundreds of people flocked to him. Rich and poor queued together, pressed iron rods to their aching parts, and rose claiming themselves cured. [1]

The man in the lilac robe was Franz Anton Mesmer, and he promised something the physicians of Paris could not: that the cause of their suffering was visible to no one, that it flowed through them like a tide, and that one man knew how to turn the tide back. His patients did not merely believe him. They felt him — convulsions, chills, trances, tears, recoveries — and they paid fortunes for the feeling. [1][2]

What happened next would become one of the most instructive stories in the history of medicine: the rise of the first empire built on healing energy, and the first systematic test that an empire of that kind ever faced. It is a story with a surprising ending. The empire fell. And yet something in it refused to die — it grew up, changed its name, and became part of medicine itself.

2. One Fluid, Blocked: The Theory of Animal Magnetism

Mesmer was born in 1734 into a large and modest family in Swabia, in the German-speaking south of central Europe. He first studied theology, then turned to medicine in 1759. For his doctoral dissertation he wrote about the planets' invisible influence on the human body — an approach that sat comfortably with the newest scientific fashion of the day, Newtonian gravity, an invisible force that acted across empty space. Mesmer called his version "animal gravity" at first, and later "animal magnetism." [1]

The theory grew simple and grand at once. A subtle fluid, "something akin to electricity," governed, penetrated and surrounded all bodies. [1] When the fluid flowed freely, a person was well; where it was blocked or gathered wrongly, they fell ill. Because the fluid was invisible, its blockages could not be measured — but they could be felt, and above all they could be treated, by a practitioner skilled enough to draw the obstruction away with magnets, with passes of the hand, with the touch of an iron wand.

In 1774 Mesmer began treating a young woman tormented by a long cycle of fevers, vomiting, unbearable toothaches and earaches, delirium and occasional paralysis. [1] He applied magnets to her body, the method of the Jesuit astronomer Maximilian Hell, whom he had consulted — and his patient recovered. It was the first great success of the new medicine, and Mesmer drew the conclusion he would never abandon: the cure proved the fluid. [1][4]

His successes in Vienna were soon clouded by scandal, most famously over a celebrated blind pianist whom he failed to cure, and by the early months of 1778 Mesmer had moved his practice to Paris, the scientific capital of the continent. [1][2][4] There, against the backdrop of an Enlightenment that had made the invisible forces of Newton respectable, his invisible fluid found its natural audience. If gravity could reach across the heavens without touching anything, who was to say a healer's hands could not reach across a room? [1]

3. The Baquet and the Lilac Robe

Mesmer's Paris was not a clinic. It was a theatre, and the theatre was the treatment.

Patients were led into a richly carpeted, muffled room and seated around the baquet — a shallow wooden tub filled with "magnetized" water, glass, metal and iron bars, large enough to treat thirty people at once. [1][4] They linked hands, or held cords, so that the fluid might circulate through the whole company. Soft music played on the glass harmonica, an instrument Mesmer loved and had helped bring into fashion, while the master himself presided in a magnificent lilac robe, an iron wand in hand, taking the most difficult cases aside into a private room for one-on-one treatment. [4]

The effects were anything but quiet. Patients trembled, wept, laughed, cried out or sank into trances — the celebrated "crises" that were supposed to mark the fluid breaking free of its blockage. Mesmer increasingly specialised in disorders of the nerves, believing the fluid held particular sway over them and that the crises restored their balance. [4] Some of his patients genuinely improved; many claimed themselves cured; and the fashionable, the curious and the desperate kept the salon full. [1]

Not everyone was persuaded. Among the sceptics was Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, head of the Royal Academy of Sciences. [1] And one of Mesmer's own most devoted followers, the Chevalier d'Eslon — a physician to the Comte d'Artois — had set up a flourishing practice of his own, a fact that would matter a great deal in 1784. [4]

4. The King's Commissioners

By 1784 the commotion had reached the court. The Royal Academy of Sciences proposed an official investigation of animal magnetism. [4]

Mesmer wanted the investigation — but on his own terms, with his own secrets protected. The Academy refused his conditions and made its offer instead to d'Eslon, who accepted. [4] King Louis XVI then appointed two royal commissions: one drawn from the Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine, the other from the Royal Society of Medicine. The first and most famous was chaired by Benjamin Franklin — then serving as the American minister to France and, conveniently, a patient of d'Eslon's — and counted among its members the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and the physicist Le Roy, joined by four physicians of the Paris Faculty. [2][3][4]

The commissioners did not come to argue. They came to watch, and they brought a new tool with them: they tested the fluid's effects without telling the patients which treatment was real. If animal magnetism was a physical fluid, an honest patient ought to be able to tell a magnetized cup of water from an ordinary one. The commissioners arranged exactly that test. [1][3]

5. The Experiments That Could Not Be Fooled

The results were as elegant as they were devastating.

A patient was brought to a garden and shown a row of trees, only one of which had actually been magnetized by d'Eslon. Blind to which was which, the patient ran about the garden and fell into convulsions while embracing one of the ordinary trees. [3] Elsewhere, at Lavoisier's house, patients drank plain water calmly while believing it was magnetized — and on other occasions, plain water produced convulsions while genuinely magnetized water produced nothing at all. [3] One young woman, blindfolded and told she was being magnetized, fell into a full mesmeric crisis while d'Eslon sat in the next room, attending to Franklin. [4] Time and again, patients who could not tell the magnetized object from the ordinary one responded exactly as the treatment demanded — because the treatment, in those moments, was their own expectation.

The commissioners' conclusion was summed up in a single, devastating sentence: imagination without magnetism produces convulsions; magnetism without imagination produces nothing. [3] Bailly, who wrote the report, stressed the role of imagination and imitation — two of humanity's "most astonishing faculties," in his phrase — and recommended that their influence on the body be studied further. [1] No fluid had been found. No force had passed from the healer to the healed. The report was printed in more than twenty thousand copies and read aloud before the Academy. [1]

It is worth pausing on what the commissioners did not say. They did not claim that nothing had happened. Patients really had trembled, wept, calmed and sometimes recovered; the crises were witnessed events. What the commissioners denied was the cause — not the experience. The effects, they concluded, came from the power of the patient's own imagination, working through contact and imitation. [1][3][4] Two hundred and forty years later, that single idea — that expectation, ritual and human contact can move the body — is one of the best-documented findings in modern medicine. The first energy empire had been tested blind, and the test had found not nothing, but something stranger: the mind itself. [1][4]

6. A Verdict the Healer Could Not Accept

Mesmer was outraged. He offered to prove his method by mesmerizing a horse before the Academy — an offer, understandably, no one accepted. [1] His practice dwindled; the tide that had carried him turned and ebbed. He left Paris, lost what fortune he had kept in the upheavals of the Revolution, and returned to his homeland, where he died in 1815, largely forgotten by the city that had once idolized him. [1][4]

His disciple d'Eslon, who had submitted to the commissioners' tests in good faith, was never shaken. He died at the baquet, in a mesmeric crisis, two years after the report — and such was the scandal now attached to the practice that he was buried in unconsecrated ground. [4]

One of Mesmer's more sympathetic biographers wrote that "throughout his life it was Mesmer's tragedy to overlook the essential cause of his success." [4] He was so certain the cure lay in his invisible fluid that he could not see the far more remarkable thing his own salon had demonstrated: that expectation, attention and human contact — the very faculties the commissioners marvelled at — could produce real changes in a real body. Mesmer spent his life trying to prove the fluid, and never noticed that he had stumbled on something medicine had not yet named.

7. The Empire's Heirs: From Magnetic Sleep to Hypnotism

The verdict of 1784 ended the empire, but not the phenomenon. Mesmer's followers carried the practice out of Paris and into the provinces, and there it was transformed.

In May 1784 — the very season the commissioners were at work — one of Mesmer's most gifted disciples, the Marquis de Puységur, was treating peasants on his estate at Buzançay. Rather than provoking dramatic crises, Puységur found that his patients drifted into a strange, quiet state: asleep, yet able to speak, answer questions and describe their own illness, with no convulsions at all. It became known as "magnetic sleep," or artificial somnambulism, and Puységur was so struck by it that he magnetized the village elm tree and treated more than a hundred and thirty people around it in a single day. [4][5] Modern historians of hypnosis look back to that elm as one of the birthplaces of their field. [5]

The decisive step came half a century later, in Manchester. The story usually begins in 1841, when a doctor named James Braid watched a touring French magnetizer put subjects into a state he found genuinely puzzling. Braid suspected neither fraud nor fluid. By 1843 he had satisfied himself that the remarkable state belonged entirely to the subject's own nervous system — a "nervous sleep" produced by concentration and suggestion, needing no invisible force from the operator — and he published his argument in a book that renamed the field. [6] The name he gave it, from the Greek for sleep, was hypnotism. [6]

From there the lineage runs straight into modern medicine. In the decades that followed, the practice was developed in Paris and Nancy by Jean-Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim, and carried back to Austria by a young neurologist named Sigmund Freud — who, whatever he later made of it, began his career in the school of the somnambulists. [4] What had been dismissed as an occult fluid did not disappear. It was absorbed — tested, renamed, explained — and became the science of hypnotic suggestion, a therapy still used in clinics today. [4][6]

8. The Lesson of the First Energy-Healing Empire

What remains of Mesmer, two centuries on? More than the word "mesmerize," though that word is his quiet immortality. [1] Two things, actually, and they are worth keeping apart.

The first is a method. When the king's commissioners arranged their blind tests in 1784, they invented something medicine would spend the next two hundred years perfecting: the controlled trial, in which the patient does not know which treatment is real. Every honest test of a healing claim since — including the trials that established the placebo effect as a real physiological phenomenon — stands in their shadow. [1][3]

The second is a lesson about experience. Mesmer's patients were not faking. The warmth, the trembling, the calm, the reported relief — these were real events in real bodies, produced by real human faculties: expectation, attention, ritual, the presence of someone who cared. Science did not explain those experiences away in 1784; it began, for the first time, to take them seriously enough to measure them. What the commissioners denied was not the experience but its supposed engine. [3][4]

That distinction has never stopped mattering. Every age since Mesmer has dressed the hope of an invisible healing force in the newest scientific vocabulary — the story of how that vocabulary keeps changing is told in our essay From Aether to Orgone: The 2,000-Year History of an Idea We Still Can't Name. And when someone today tells you that a stone, a sound or a pair of hands carries "energy," it is worth remembering what the word has meant in each of its long careers — a map we drew in The Word "Energy" Means Three Different Things.

None of this asks you to doubt what you feel. Calm is calm, whether it arrives by chemistry, by ritual, or by the presence of a person who attends to you — and the research on expectation suggests it often arrives by all three at once. What the first energy-healing empire teaches is simpler and stranger: the feeling is real, the meaning is yours, and the invisible engine is the one part of the story that has never survived a blind test. The medicine of the mind, meanwhile — born in a candle-lit salon, tested in Franklin's garden — is real, too, and it has been part of the clinic ever since. Mesmer could not see it, but he helped build it. [1][4]

References

1. Martin, C. "Mesmerized: The controversy around animal magnetism." Science History Institute (Distillations magazine), December 6, 2011. https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/mesmerized/
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — "Franz Anton Mesmer." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Anton-Mesmer
3. Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi, de l'examen du magnétisme animal (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1784). Scan of the Wellcome Library copy (Internet Archive id: b30384187). <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/File:Rapport_des_Commissaires_..._nomm%C3%A9s_par_le_Roi_pour_faire_l%27examen_du_magn%C3%A9tisme_animal_(IA_b30384187).pdf>
4. Jenkin, A. "Happy 200th Deathday Franz Anton Mesmer." University of Sheffield, History Matters, March 5, 2015. https://historymatters.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/blog-archive/2015/happy-200th-deathday-franz-anton-mesmer
5. Université du Mans, Dicopolhis — « Arbre de Buzancy ». https://dicopolhis.univ-lemans.fr/fr/dictionnaire/a/arbre-de-buzancy.html
6. Braid, J. Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism or Mesmerism (London: John Churchill, 1843). Digitised by Wellcome Collection. <https://wellcomecollection.org/works/uxg9rq3v>