Animal Magnetism

Some notes, based on Franz Mesmer's Dissertation on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism

The work of animal magnetism is, foremost, a natural and universal one.

"The spheres exert direct action on all parts that go to make up animate bodies, in particular the nervous system, by an all-penetrating fluid" (34).

This "direct action" is denoted by an "ebb and flow" (sea analogy) or what Mesmer also refers to as "intensification and remission" of the properties of matter. Thus, as the planets effect the ebb and flow of the tide, so to do they cause the intensification and remission of properties of the organic body. This body is like a needle--unmagnetized, its direction is random and open to whatever influences it, but magnetized it may maintain its initial position. The body, once disturbed, is unharmonious, until a general agent restores the harmony (36).

His first extensive case study is with Franzl Oesterline, whose symptoms he describes as "who for several years had been subject to a convulsive malady, the most troublesome symptoms of which were that the blood rushed to her head and there set up the most cruel toothache and earache, followed by delirium, rage, vomiting, and swooning" (36). (symptoms we would now align with hysteria). Mesmer tries to replicate the magnetic force necessary to reset her, to "imitate artificially" the celestial forces he believes are interfering with her. Mesmer can magnetize other people. He's NOT drawing from the universal fluid, he's drawing it from how own inner harmony.

Mesmer in France

Arriving in France in 1778, Mesmer brought a fully articulated concept of animal magnetism to bear upon the Parisian medical and courtly society. His practice ballooned in the span of 6 months, and it is at this moment that the practice of manipulating animal magnetism took on a truly social dimension.

Alternative Outline:

1. general intro to animal magnestism 2. "the blockage" - illness as a disruption in the body's internal harmony 3. the magnetic poles of the body and the magnetic "pass" - how mesmer theorized the body as a compass 4. the circuit - the simple circuit we see with mesmer and Franzl, and the more complex social circuit that emerges when his work in france becomes group-based a. the baquet 5. the crisis - the attack the removes the blockage, re-aligning one's magnetic balance

"an 'antimedical' movement movement was already afoot in the 1770s that was attempting to promote reliance on the healing powers of nature rather than the radical interventions of physicians" (Crabtree 15). (Perhaps cite from Foucault and the Lectures on Psychiatric Power alchemical processes of nature)