Good morning.

Today, a darkened room in Paris before the Revolution… and a doctor who turned a debunked cure into one of the most useful words in English.

Let’s begin.

The Doctor Who Mesmerised Paris

Le Mot Juste—“Mesmerise”

Inside, soft music plays on a glass harmonica, an eerie instrument of spinning glass bowls. Patients sit in a circle around a large wooden tub, holding iron rods that stick out from its lid, and joined to one another by cords.

Then the doctor appears, dressed, by most accounts, in a lilac silk coat and holding an iron wand. He passes it slowly over their bodies. One by one, the patients begin to shake, cry out, laugh or faint. They call it “the crisis,” and they leave convinced they are being healed.

The doctor’s name is Franz Anton Mesmer. He was born in 1734 near Lake Constance, trained as a doctor in Vienna, and claimed to have found a universal fluid that flows through every living thing. He called it “animal magnetism.”

In Vienna, his methods had ended in scandal. The trouble began with a famous young pianist, Maria Theresia von Paradis, blind since childhood, whom he had taken on as a patient. When her family took her away from him in 1777, the city turned against him, and he moved to Paris.

There, he became a sensation. Aristocrats, writers and even members of the royal court queued for his sessions. Within a few years, Paris was full of magnetic tubs, magnetic societies and magnetic pamphlets.

In other words, Mesmer had become the most talked-about doctor in Europe, without any proof that his fluid existed.

This is the man at the centre of it all.

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Public domain.

This was the tub his patients gathered around, called the baquet. It was filled with water and iron filings, and Mesmer claimed it stored his magnetic fluid.

“Le Baquet de Mesmer,” engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

By 1784, the fashion had grown so large that King Louis XVI decided to investigate. He appointed a royal commission of scientists and doctors, and their names read like a roll call of the Enlightenment.

At its head was Benjamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France and the most famous scientist alive. With him sat the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and a physician named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

Their method was brilliantly simple. They tested the treatment on people who did not know whether they were being magnetised. Patients were blindfolded. Some were told they were being treated when they were not; others were treated without being told.

The results were clear. People had “crises” when they believed they were being magnetised, and felt nothing when they did not. In Franklin’s garden at Passy, a boy was led to a series of trees, one of which had been “magnetised.” He fainted at the wrong one.

In other words, they had discovered what we now call the placebo effect, and they had invented an early version of the blind trial to prove it.

Mesmer’s reputation collapsed. He left Paris, wandered for years and died, largely forgotten, in 1815, at Meersburg on Lake Constance, not far from where he was born.

A large gathering of patients at one of Mesmer’s sessions, engraving. Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0).

But his name refused to die. His followers kept magnetising people for decades, and by the 1820s English had a new verb: to mesmerise. In 1843, the Scottish surgeon James Braid offered a more scientific name for the trance states, hypnotism.

Slowly the meaning softened. Today you can be mesmerised by a dancer, a sunset or a goal, and nobody thinks of iron rods or a lilac coat. “Mesmerising” has become an everyday word for spellbinding.

I used the word for years before I learned where it came from. Now I hear it differently. When someone tells me a speaker was mesmerising, I think of Franklin in his garden, calmly asking: but would it still work if you did not know?

For more on Mesmer’s life, from Vienna to Paris to his final years, start here: Franz Mesmer →

The royal commission proved there was no magnetic fluid. Mesmer lost the argument in 1784… and won a permanent place in the dictionary.

Three Things Worth Knowing

Curious & Controversial

Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Hearing

Hear Mozart’s joke for yourself. In the finale of Act I of Così fan tutte, the maid Despina, disguised as a doctor, cures two “poisoned” young men with her mesmeric stone, and the orchestra trills as the magnet does its work.

Where: any recording of Così fan tutte, or a staged production near you.  Price: free on most music streaming services.  Insider tip: Follow along with a translation of the libretto. The doctor’s nonsense Latin is half the fun.

Worth Reading

Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain — Alison Winter (1998). A historian follows mesmerism to Victorian Britain, where it was performed in theatres, used in surgery and argued over by Dickens and his friends.

Explore Further

Read: Franz Mesmer →, his life, his patients and the 1784 commission.

Tonight’s Quiz

1. Who led the royal commission that investigated Mesmer in 1784?

A) Voltaire

B) Benjamin Franklin

C) Isaac Newton

D) Thomas Jefferson

2. What did the commission conclude caused the patients’ reactions?

A) Magnetic fluid

B) Electricity

C) Their imagination

D) The glass harmonica

3. In which Mozart opera does a fake doctor use a “mesmeric stone”?

A) The Magic Flute

B) Don Giovanni

C) Così fan tutte

D) The Marriage of Figaro

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

Mesmer was wrong about the fluid and right about the power of belief. The commission proved him wrong, and he still won the last word, literally.

Tomorrow is Friday… we gather up the week, from a poet above the Gates of Hell to a doctor with a magnet, and add one new way of looking at all of them.

In good taste,
Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily