8 MARCH/APRIL 2019PROFILES
soon found himself inundated with as
many as 20 patients a day. The baquet
thus became his self-devised method of
mass treatment and his sessions a form
of group therapy. Patients held hands
around the magnetized vessel, their
physical connection further facilitating
the flow—and health-giving power—ofanimal magnetism. The combination of
soft lighting, soothing music, and Mes-
mer’s enthralling movements around the
room produced what is now recognized
as a form of hypnotism. In the 18th cen-
tury it was called mesmerism.
Mesmer hoped the medical and scien-
tific communities would be swayed by hispatients’ glowing testimonials. The
French Academy of Sciences and the Roy-
al Society of Medicine both repeatedly
rebuffed or ignored Mesmer and his
claims of a miraculous panacea.The King’s Commission
In the years leading up to the French Rev-
olution, mesmerism started to take on a
significantly political dimension. Open-
ly challenging the institutions of the
ancien régime, Mesmer argued that free-
dom was as necessary for happiness as it
was for health. Because physical harmo-
ny and social harmony shared a connec-
tion, the republic should be founded on
the sovereignty of citizens, not a monar-
chical and feudal system.
In August 1784 King Louis XVI (whose
wife, Marie-Antoinette, was a patient of
Mesmer’s) ordered a commission to eval-
uate Mesmer and his treatment methods.FRANZ MESMER set up his first
consulting room in Vienna in- In the picture, St. Michael’s
Church rises above Vienna’s
Michaelerplatz.
SEBASTIANO SCATTOLIN/FOTOTECA 9X
MESMER AND MOZART
A PROMINENT figure in Vienna’s fashionable
music scene, Mesmer was a friend and patron
of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The composer
later immortalized Mesmer in his 1790 opera
Così fan tutte, in which two characters are re-
vived with the aid of a magnet: “This is... the
stone which the great Doctor Mesmer discov-
ered... and then became so famous in France.”
ALBUM