October 27, 2010 • 24 mins
Today, Franz Mesmer is hailed as the father of hypnosis. His original pursuit was called mesmerism, but what exactly was it? How did it (supposedly) work? Listen in as Sarah and Katie explore the strange theories of Franz Mesmer.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and this makes
me feel pretty Victorians. But I want to let everybody
know that I have been to a hypnosis show before,
(00:24):
and I think, Katie, you have to yeah, back in
college Jack, in college e g. A. The show I
went to was in the gym, and the hypnotist, you know,
brought out folks from the audience. We did some of
them out and then supposedly hypnotized the rest. And it
was tame. You know. They didn't do anything that they
would be terribly ashamed of. There is actually like chickens
(00:45):
and like flapped all around the series and clucking Britney
spears dancing. I would have done that without being hypnotized,
and basic like slumping in your seat. There was definitely
no poking with needles or shooting of guns or knives
under fingernails. Would I'm really glad of because I think
that would have made me very uncomfortable to see at
a college performance. No, I want my money's worth. Oh gosh, Well, okay,
(01:09):
it's finally almost Halloween. We've been talking about these spooky
topics for the past month, and we're going to bring
our series to a cloth with a little discussion of hypnosis.
You probably saw that coming, specifically its predecessor mesmerism, which
(01:30):
if you've ever heard of it, it's probably in relation
to the word mesmerize, and it's pretty weird and spooky
on its own, but it's also connected to so many
famous names that it starts to get pretty interesting, especially
for US history lovers. The string of people connected to
it don't always have all that much in common an
illustrious list, though it is very yes and um, when
(01:53):
you look at someone the literature of the time, it
becomes really clear that regardless of whether people thought it
was a scam or not, it had a big influence
on the public consciousness during the Enlightenment and then again
during the Victorian era, which is what I always connected
to as well. Definitely, all right, so Katie, let's get
hypnotized mesmerized. Alright, So we're gonna start with friends Anton
(02:17):
mesmer who, um, you know, hypnosis had been around for
a long time, obviously connected with sorcery and magic and medicine,
but it's scientific history started with this Mesmer guy. He
was born in what is now Germany in seventeen thirty four,
and he attended the University of Vienna, and in seventeen
sixty six he wrote his dissertation on animal gravitation. And
(02:42):
that sounds not at all like what it is, but
his ideas were partly inspired by this British physician named
Richard Mead. But Mesmer's idea was that we all had
this invisible fluid inside of us, and in fact everything
in Nay had this invisible fluid, and the fluid was
(03:03):
controlled by the gravitational attraction of the planet, so like
the moon and tide exactly, so like you have internal
tides inside your body. And in seventeen seventy three he
met patient Frauleine Ulsterlin who had some physical problems, and
Mesmer decided to put his theories to the test. Let's
(03:25):
see if her tidal fluctuations are out of balance. So
he tried to create this artificial tide inside of her
by having her swallow and iron solution, which sounds terrible,
but Sarah was reminding me, there is iron in my
serious sprinkle it in he'd ever did that high school
chemistry experiment. Then he put magnets on her stomach and legs,
and she said she felt this occult force, this fluid
(03:47):
in her body and began to feel better, and eventually
she completely recovered after a few treatments. So obviously, you know,
word gets around about something like that happening, and over
time Mesmer tweaked his theory and renamed it animal magnetism,
which again doesn't sound like what it is um, And
he considered that the fluid followed the laws of magnetism,
(04:10):
so it's weird. But at this point everything was starting
to seem a little more legit and scientific. There's some
vague science following laws, but it also got weirder and
more ritualistic, and that's partly because of the rituals Mesmer
himself attached to it. He figured that disease was the
result of fluid blockages or some sort of dis equilibrium
(04:34):
of these internal tides and the operator. So the I
mean what we would consider the hypnotist today. The mesmerist
um could help restore that balance by acting as a
conduit to the greater world of magnetic fluid. So you
couldn't access that magnetic fluid just alone, but somebody else
could do it for a powerful operator, and this was
(04:56):
done with a magnetized object or by the past sing
of hands over the patient called magnetic passes, and eventually
the patient would experience what he called a crisis, which
was a trance, sometimes ending in convulsions and delirium. Wheel
We found this all a bit suggestive, very suggestive, especially
(05:17):
when you consider that most of the patients are women
and he's a guy. So he even came up with
a special tool that he invented for the purpose of
treating multiple patients at once, called I think aboucka and
unsurprisingly he gets famous for his crazy semi pseudo scientific antics.
Mozart is a follower and he even performs music and
(05:39):
Mesmer's honor, and then, also unsurprisingly, there's a scandal and
the Viennese physicians expose Mesmer as a fraud. He leads
Austria in disgrace and goes to Paris in seventy eight,
and he finds a pretty willing audience in Paris, and
that's partly because the city was already so a wash
(06:00):
and all these discussions and demonstrations of gravity and magnetism
and electricity, so this idea about this magnetic force and
fluid in your body seemed to fit more or less
in with the rest of it, and he would set
the mood for these demonstrations playing the instrument du jour,
(06:20):
which was Franklin's glass harmonica to induce deeper trances and
sarah S's you have to go listen to it, which
having yet, I don't think you can. I could never
describe what it sounds like, but I mean, it's kind
of like if you've ever seen anybody play crystals with water,
except they're all stacked on top of each other, and
it can be played seamlessly, so you're not chiming away
(06:42):
at it. It's a very eerie, mysterious sound and just
sort of a weird side note on the glass harmonica. Um.
Eventually people thought that it was dangerous to your mental health,
so it's sort of ironic that it's being used in
conjunction with treatment and mesmerism. They thought that listening to
the glass harmonica if you were already in a delicate state,
(07:04):
could possibly cause mental illness, so maybe you shouldn't listen
to it. Actually, maybe small dose. Are you okay so far?
Are you feeling like that? I'm feeling all right. I
don't know. I only listened to like a couple of
YouTube videos worth I'll check in with you tomorrow. But
Marie Antoinette really liked Mesmer and he was I think
she was just bored at that court, to be perfectly honest,
(07:25):
he was frequently invited to the French court to perform
for the Queen, but that ultimately proved to be his
downfall because Louis the sixteenth was not so into this
whole thing. He's a skeptic, so he put together a
commission to investigate Mesmer's science quote unquote. The members include
Ben Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, the Paris mayor, Gen Bay, and
(07:48):
even doctors Dr Joseph Giuta, who um, you know it's
behind something that sounds a lot of similar to his name.
Yeah the YouTube. Weirdly, a few of the commission members
meet their fate with the real deal. Don't get into pseudoscience.
Then Franklin is a bit sickly at the time, so
(08:08):
this commission works from his house and Mesmer, of course,
you know, he's he wants to defend his reputation, he
has to defend it, but he also wants to distance
himself from the Commission. You don't want to go there,
Mesmer himself and demonstrate your theories and your ideas and
have it all blow up in your face, especially if
you have a suspicion that you might be a bit
(08:31):
of a fraud. It won't work quite right. Or maybe
maybe you wouldn't even think that, you would just think
of the Commission wouldn't get it right. So Mesmer sends
an assistant, Dr. Charles Doeslin to represent him. That way,
you know, if this guy messes up, Mesmer can blame
it on him. So Doeslin demonstrated some of the Mesmerism
techniques for the panel. At one point, he magnetized a
(08:53):
tree and then had this subject I d the tree
that had the most forced. Unfortunately, the twelve year old
blindfolded boy starts going in the wrong direction, saying, you know,
I feel the force increasing, tree A going down, the
line of trees going further and further away from there.
(09:14):
I can just imagine the guy watching this and you know,
based in in hand. Well, and then the kid fainted. Yeah,
and that put an end to the demonstration. So a
few of these and the Commission concludes that there's no
scientific evidence behind mesmerism. They publish a report and that's
really that. For Mesmer himself in Paris, he falls out
(09:36):
of favor almost immediately. He dies in obscurity, but he
does not fall out of memory. Now he's still in
the back of everyone's heads. One of his main fans
is our mom Marie Jacques to Shaston, a who is
a marquis and an aristocrat who starts doing these experiments
with mesmerism with the help of a young man on
(09:57):
his estate even before Mesmer was out of commiss and
and the marquis would hypnotize the guy and then leave
him with no memory. And he came to believe that
the magnetic effects depended on the operator's belief on the
rapport with the patient. So more like the two people
involved in it and the relationship between the two than
just I am mass mesmerization that Mesmer himself was doing.
(10:22):
And um, it's interesting. You know, the guy who he's
working with will talk quite openly when he's in this
mesmerized state. Tell um, you know, tell this aristocratic master
of his things that he wouldn't normally say, like I
had a fight with my sister. And then after he
gets some advice on how to deal with it. He
(10:43):
has no recollection, but he still acts on the advice.
Weird stuff like that. So it still sounds kind of
out there. But the Marquees work in Sight four on
his experiments are sometimes consider the start of modern psychotherapy.
And I mean I can see that to a certain
they're talking to each other and trying to drawing everything
(11:04):
out there. Yeah, so mesmerism really started to get its
second wind in the eighteen thirties and forties. It spread
to the United States and influenced William James, the psychologist
and the brother of Henry James, and it was simultaneously
supported and disproven in eighteen forty three by the English
doctor James Braid. He concluded that this whole fluid idea
(11:25):
was nonsense, but he also decided that these physical effects
were real and they were produced by quote a peculiar
condition of the nervous system induced by a fixed and
abstracted attention end quote. So this is a real thing.
You induce it through this, through this process, and then
it does have effects on your nervous It has nothing
(11:47):
to do with magnetic fluids, no internal times, and so
trying to distance this idea trying to distance the effects
of mesmerism from mesmerism itself, which has this shady reputation.
Braid coins a few new terms. One of them is
hypnotism and other is hypnosis, and he starts to investigate
(12:08):
the applications of hypnosis in paralysis and rheumatism, and you know,
just treating it more like a possible medical science. French
doctors and scientists follow his lead, and by the eighties
scientists really start tackling hypnosis as you know, as a
real thing. And at this point we can separate hypnosis
(12:28):
from mesmerism. But don't think that mesmerism went away. It
just science took a different track. I'm thinking parallel track.
We're going to get back to the chrism. But these
more modern scientists accepted that, yeah, it definitely doesn't involve
physical forces, no fluid. Instead, it had something to do
with your mind. And Sigmund Freud actually got really interested
(12:50):
in hypnosis and it's something that had a very big
effect on psychology, even though he abandoned it pretty quickly
for pre association, it was too hard to actually get
people into it. Translates that rapport fraud and um by
world War One, World War Two, we have hypnosis being
used on returning soldiers and it's not just a sideshow
(13:15):
act anymore. It's part of psychology. But interestingly, we still
don't understand what hypnosis really is. There's no generally accepted
explanation for how it works. Yeah, but I'm going to
go back to mesmerism, which did become a bit of
a sideshow act and yet still was considered somewhat it's
(13:35):
quasi medical. So between the eighteen forties and eighteen eighties
mesmerism got completely drawn into this, both spiritualism and stage demonstrations.
So it's a pop culture hit. But if you were
a self respecting physician there is you wouldn't even touch
that with Tempho Pole it would ruin your career. But
if you were an itinerant mesmerist, you might have a
(13:58):
pretty good career. It's my backup. Yeah, I think you could.
I think you could pull it off, Katie Um. So
these folks would travel around Britain, travel around different countries
and perform these shows, and the shows would bring in
a paying audience, but the main point of them was
to try to attract private clients for personal treatment because
(14:18):
they would give you the big box for mesmerizing them.
And you think that these shows might sound fine, kind
of like the U. G. A shows we described at
the beginning, But the knives under fingernails. I was not
making that up. That's unfortunately a real thing. Well and
and worse, let's see, we've got a pouring acid on
the skin, administering electric shocks, putting ammonia in people's mouths,
(14:41):
firing pistols near their ears. And the weird thing about
this is it's not just the mesmeris who are doing
this to try to prove that it's real. It's skeptics.
So people would come to the saying mesmerism is fake.
I can disprove it by you know, firing a pistol.
By this, guys total going to stand up. Yeah, So
(15:01):
you would end up with just escalating brutalities on these
poor supposedly mesmerized people. And um, you know it worked
to both ends. If the patient jumped when the gun
was fired by her ear, it's a fake. You know,
we've exposed it. If nothing happened, then people thought either
it was all real or it was such good fakery
(15:24):
that it was really really sick and disturbing. And in
case you're wondering about why we titled our podcast what
we did, that's from a New York Times article from
eight seven, and the head the headline is he was
killed by mesmeris of the exclamation point nation point and
(15:44):
I mean when I when I read it, it's it's
about this young man, Spurgeon young who died after a
few days illness and quote. It is now claimed that
death resulted from injuries received while under mesmeric influence at
the hands of amateurs in a science corner. Bowers has
summoned a jury and will make a thorough investigation. Um,
(16:06):
it's easy to see how somebody could be killed under
an amateur mesmerist demonstration if you read some of these
things they did to people well, and some people started
connecting this this idea of this you know, unconscious state
with surgery, thinking well, exactly, maybe this is a good
way to get people through something like amputation. Mesmeric and
(16:29):
anesthesia was used to amputate the leg at the thigh
of a forty two year old man named James Womble,
who said he didn't feel anything, but it was obviously
crowded out before it could get going. That's why you
haven't heard many stories about mesmeric anesthesia because you know,
things like ether came into use instead, which another sort
of strange side note there, ether and nitrous oxide were
(16:54):
they originally had applications on the stage before they were
thought of for medical purposes. Really yeah, kind of a
strange It's hard to imagine going to like the cool
ether show in town, but who knows. So with these
itinerant performances, these debates, people getting amputations in our mesmeric trance,
(17:15):
mesmerism becomes a very contentious thing and the perfect plot
point for a Romantic or Victorian writer to pursue these
altered states of consciousness into the altered states of con
especially those achieved through opium um but also quite effectively
done through hypnosis, sleepwalking, and trance. Because not every story
(17:37):
can have the opium eater and know, some of them
just have to plain trances. So according to this book
Bram Stoker and The Man Who Is Dracula, there's a
whole genre of mesmeric novels that combine Gothic elements, you know,
things that we're we're familiar with in much earlier fiction,
with these more modern scientific ideas than we have Daniel
(18:00):
Dormer The Mesmerist Secret, Edward Harron Allen's The Princess Daphne,
and obviously Bram stoker S Dracula, which is published a
little late in the game. For some of this mesmerist stuff, um,
it was definitely not in anymore the science wasn't but
it's used to great effect by Stoker. Yes, this is
(18:23):
one of my favorite books of all time and has
a prominent place on my bookshelf. But the character of
Lucy is often sleepwalking. The vampire uses mesmerism to satisfy
his blood lust, and Van Helsing uses it to fight back.
It's it's a central point in how everything happens, and
and observing what someone is like in a trance and
(18:44):
what they can do when they're in this altered state
of consciousness, things against their will. Even so, another famous
horror writer too used it to pretty great effect. That's
Edgar Allan Poe. He became interested in mesmerism after he's
into this lecture by Andrew Jackson Davis, and his most
famous story on mesmerism is The Facts in the Case
(19:07):
of Monsieur Valdemar, and the story was so good that
people thought it might be true, even though it sounds
incredibly outrageous. Just give you, like a brief plot outline. Here.
There's this mesmerist and he's interested in the effect of
hypnosis on a dying person. So he reaches out to
(19:28):
this dying friend and gets his approval to try to
hypnotize him on his deathbed. He puts the guy into
a state of hypnosis, and then the guy starts to
talk and says, I'm dead even though he's in this
trance state. And the guy just remains like that, in
this inert state for months and months without a pulse,
(19:51):
just in this death trance, half living, half dead, And
finally the narrator jostles him out of the trance by
repeatedly saying dead, dead, dead, And when he comes to,
he immediately rots because he's been sitting there for months
dead and turns into this puddle of goo. So I
have to read this immediately. I think it sounds like
(20:14):
a really great use of mesmerism. It wasn't always used though,
in that that horrifying kind of way. People weren't always
rotting and falling into the puddles. Unfortunately, just with a
psychological kind of twist, you had a couple examples. I
think Wild in the picture of Dorian Gray, and even
Walt Whitman in poetry The Sleepers and Song of Myself,
(20:35):
and Dickens, who is of course arguably the most famous.
He is weird. He was very much influenced by mesmerism.
In fact, he takes it a step beyond somebody like
po or Wild. He's actually a mesmerist himself. He performed
mesmerism on his wife in Pittsburgh and then yeah, of
(20:58):
course on this other lady in eight and forty four.
Classic Dickens for you, and his final unfinished novel, The
Mystery of Edwin Drewd, is about an evil mesmerist who
sexually manipulates women through hypnosis, which I have never heard
of that book before. A really Candice, a former co
(21:18):
host um for y'all, who remember from way back in
the day, she's reading Drewd by Dan Simmons, and I
was trying to decide it's kind of a takeoff on
that if I had to read the Unfinished Mystery of
ed and drew before, so you can let me know, um,
But that does raise an interesting point about mesmers and
when we brought up earlier that it's pretty sexual. The
(21:38):
patients are nearly almost always women. Uh, something that may
have helped that literary success damsels and probably heard its
medical reputation too. And there's also that that crime angle
of being hypnotized and doing things against your will, which
that appears in literature for way longer. It's even in
You'll You'll hear. Actual defense is using that aside for literature.
(22:02):
I was hypnotized. Um, I don't know what to say
about even how there's some sleepwalking murder stories. I wrote
an article for the website how stuff works dot com
how sleepwalking works, and I was reading many defenses that
people have given. I had no idea I killed my wife.
I was sleep walking altered states of consciousness. Time to
(22:27):
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(22:50):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and this makes
me feel pretty Victorians. But I want to let everybody
know that I have been to a hypnosis show before,
(00:24):
and I think, Katie, you have to yeah, back in
college Jack, in college e g. A. The show I
went to was in the gym, and the hypnotist, you know,
brought out folks from the audience. We did some of
them out and then supposedly hypnotized the rest. And it
was tame. You know. They didn't do anything that they
would be terribly ashamed of. There is actually like chickens
(00:45):
and like flapped all around the series and clucking Britney
spears dancing. I would have done that without being hypnotized,
and basic like slumping in your seat. There was definitely
no poking with needles or shooting of guns or knives
under fingernails. Would I'm really glad of because I think
that would have made me very uncomfortable to see at
a college performance. No, I want my money's worth. Oh gosh, Well, okay,
(01:09):
it's finally almost Halloween. We've been talking about these spooky
topics for the past month, and we're going to bring
our series to a cloth with a little discussion of hypnosis.
You probably saw that coming, specifically its predecessor mesmerism, which
(01:30):
if you've ever heard of it, it's probably in relation
to the word mesmerize, and it's pretty weird and spooky
on its own, but it's also connected to so many
famous names that it starts to get pretty interesting, especially
for US history lovers. The string of people connected to
it don't always have all that much in common an
illustrious list, though it is very yes and um, when
(01:53):
you look at someone the literature of the time, it
becomes really clear that regardless of whether people thought it
was a scam or not, it had a big influence
on the public consciousness during the Enlightenment and then again
during the Victorian era, which is what I always connected
to as well. Definitely, all right, so Katie, let's get
hypnotized mesmerized. Alright, So we're gonna start with friends Anton
(02:17):
mesmer who, um, you know, hypnosis had been around for
a long time, obviously connected with sorcery and magic and medicine,
but it's scientific history started with this Mesmer guy. He
was born in what is now Germany in seventeen thirty four,
and he attended the University of Vienna, and in seventeen
sixty six he wrote his dissertation on animal gravitation. And
(02:42):
that sounds not at all like what it is, but
his ideas were partly inspired by this British physician named
Richard Mead. But Mesmer's idea was that we all had
this invisible fluid inside of us, and in fact everything
in Nay had this invisible fluid, and the fluid was
(03:03):
controlled by the gravitational attraction of the planet, so like
the moon and tide exactly, so like you have internal
tides inside your body. And in seventeen seventy three he
met patient Frauleine Ulsterlin who had some physical problems, and
Mesmer decided to put his theories to the test. Let's
(03:25):
see if her tidal fluctuations are out of balance. So
he tried to create this artificial tide inside of her
by having her swallow and iron solution, which sounds terrible,
but Sarah was reminding me, there is iron in my
serious sprinkle it in he'd ever did that high school
chemistry experiment. Then he put magnets on her stomach and legs,
and she said she felt this occult force, this fluid
(03:47):
in her body and began to feel better, and eventually
she completely recovered after a few treatments. So obviously, you know,
word gets around about something like that happening, and over
time Mesmer tweaked his theory and renamed it animal magnetism,
which again doesn't sound like what it is um, And
he considered that the fluid followed the laws of magnetism,
(04:10):
so it's weird. But at this point everything was starting
to seem a little more legit and scientific. There's some
vague science following laws, but it also got weirder and
more ritualistic, and that's partly because of the rituals Mesmer
himself attached to it. He figured that disease was the
result of fluid blockages or some sort of dis equilibrium
(04:34):
of these internal tides and the operator. So the I
mean what we would consider the hypnotist today. The mesmerist
um could help restore that balance by acting as a
conduit to the greater world of magnetic fluid. So you
couldn't access that magnetic fluid just alone, but somebody else
could do it for a powerful operator, and this was
(04:56):
done with a magnetized object or by the past sing
of hands over the patient called magnetic passes, and eventually
the patient would experience what he called a crisis, which
was a trance, sometimes ending in convulsions and delirium. Wheel
We found this all a bit suggestive, very suggestive, especially
(05:17):
when you consider that most of the patients are women
and he's a guy. So he even came up with
a special tool that he invented for the purpose of
treating multiple patients at once, called I think aboucka and
unsurprisingly he gets famous for his crazy semi pseudo scientific antics.
Mozart is a follower and he even performs music and
(05:39):
Mesmer's honor, and then, also unsurprisingly, there's a scandal and
the Viennese physicians expose Mesmer as a fraud. He leads
Austria in disgrace and goes to Paris in seventy eight,
and he finds a pretty willing audience in Paris, and
that's partly because the city was already so a wash
(06:00):
and all these discussions and demonstrations of gravity and magnetism
and electricity, so this idea about this magnetic force and
fluid in your body seemed to fit more or less
in with the rest of it, and he would set
the mood for these demonstrations playing the instrument du jour,
(06:20):
which was Franklin's glass harmonica to induce deeper trances and
sarah S's you have to go listen to it, which
having yet, I don't think you can. I could never
describe what it sounds like, but I mean, it's kind
of like if you've ever seen anybody play crystals with water,
except they're all stacked on top of each other, and
it can be played seamlessly, so you're not chiming away
(06:42):
at it. It's a very eerie, mysterious sound and just
sort of a weird side note on the glass harmonica. Um.
Eventually people thought that it was dangerous to your mental health,
so it's sort of ironic that it's being used in
conjunction with treatment and mesmerism. They thought that listening to
the glass harmonica if you were already in a delicate state,
(07:04):
could possibly cause mental illness, so maybe you shouldn't listen
to it. Actually, maybe small dose. Are you okay so far?
Are you feeling like that? I'm feeling all right. I
don't know. I only listened to like a couple of
YouTube videos worth I'll check in with you tomorrow. But
Marie Antoinette really liked Mesmer and he was I think
she was just bored at that court, to be perfectly honest,
(07:25):
he was frequently invited to the French court to perform
for the Queen, but that ultimately proved to be his
downfall because Louis the sixteenth was not so into this
whole thing. He's a skeptic, so he put together a
commission to investigate Mesmer's science quote unquote. The members include
Ben Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, the Paris mayor, Gen Bay, and
(07:48):
even doctors Dr Joseph Giuta, who um, you know it's
behind something that sounds a lot of similar to his name.
Yeah the YouTube. Weirdly, a few of the commission members
meet their fate with the real deal. Don't get into pseudoscience.
Then Franklin is a bit sickly at the time, so
(08:08):
this commission works from his house and Mesmer, of course,
you know, he's he wants to defend his reputation, he
has to defend it, but he also wants to distance
himself from the Commission. You don't want to go there,
Mesmer himself and demonstrate your theories and your ideas and
have it all blow up in your face, especially if
you have a suspicion that you might be a bit
(08:31):
of a fraud. It won't work quite right. Or maybe
maybe you wouldn't even think that, you would just think
of the Commission wouldn't get it right. So Mesmer sends
an assistant, Dr. Charles Doeslin to represent him. That way,
you know, if this guy messes up, Mesmer can blame
it on him. So Doeslin demonstrated some of the Mesmerism
techniques for the panel. At one point, he magnetized a
(08:53):
tree and then had this subject I d the tree
that had the most forced. Unfortunately, the twelve year old
blindfolded boy starts going in the wrong direction, saying, you know,
I feel the force increasing, tree A going down, the
line of trees going further and further away from there.
(09:14):
I can just imagine the guy watching this and you know,
based in in hand. Well, and then the kid fainted. Yeah,
and that put an end to the demonstration. So a
few of these and the Commission concludes that there's no
scientific evidence behind mesmerism. They publish a report and that's
really that. For Mesmer himself in Paris, he falls out
(09:36):
of favor almost immediately. He dies in obscurity, but he
does not fall out of memory. Now he's still in
the back of everyone's heads. One of his main fans
is our mom Marie Jacques to Shaston, a who is
a marquis and an aristocrat who starts doing these experiments
with mesmerism with the help of a young man on
(09:57):
his estate even before Mesmer was out of commiss and
and the marquis would hypnotize the guy and then leave
him with no memory. And he came to believe that
the magnetic effects depended on the operator's belief on the
rapport with the patient. So more like the two people
involved in it and the relationship between the two than
just I am mass mesmerization that Mesmer himself was doing.
(10:22):
And um, it's interesting. You know, the guy who he's
working with will talk quite openly when he's in this
mesmerized state. Tell um, you know, tell this aristocratic master
of his things that he wouldn't normally say, like I
had a fight with my sister. And then after he
gets some advice on how to deal with it. He
(10:43):
has no recollection, but he still acts on the advice.
Weird stuff like that. So it still sounds kind of
out there. But the Marquees work in Sight four on
his experiments are sometimes consider the start of modern psychotherapy.
And I mean I can see that to a certain
they're talking to each other and trying to drawing everything
(11:04):
out there. Yeah, so mesmerism really started to get its
second wind in the eighteen thirties and forties. It spread
to the United States and influenced William James, the psychologist
and the brother of Henry James, and it was simultaneously
supported and disproven in eighteen forty three by the English
doctor James Braid. He concluded that this whole fluid idea
(11:25):
was nonsense, but he also decided that these physical effects
were real and they were produced by quote a peculiar
condition of the nervous system induced by a fixed and
abstracted attention end quote. So this is a real thing.
You induce it through this, through this process, and then
it does have effects on your nervous It has nothing
(11:47):
to do with magnetic fluids, no internal times, and so
trying to distance this idea trying to distance the effects
of mesmerism from mesmerism itself, which has this shady reputation.
Braid coins a few new terms. One of them is
hypnotism and other is hypnosis, and he starts to investigate
(12:08):
the applications of hypnosis in paralysis and rheumatism, and you know,
just treating it more like a possible medical science. French
doctors and scientists follow his lead, and by the eighties
scientists really start tackling hypnosis as you know, as a
real thing. And at this point we can separate hypnosis
(12:28):
from mesmerism. But don't think that mesmerism went away. It
just science took a different track. I'm thinking parallel track.
We're going to get back to the chrism. But these
more modern scientists accepted that, yeah, it definitely doesn't involve
physical forces, no fluid. Instead, it had something to do
with your mind. And Sigmund Freud actually got really interested
(12:50):
in hypnosis and it's something that had a very big
effect on psychology, even though he abandoned it pretty quickly
for pre association, it was too hard to actually get
people into it. Translates that rapport fraud and um by
world War One, World War Two, we have hypnosis being
used on returning soldiers and it's not just a sideshow
(13:15):
act anymore. It's part of psychology. But interestingly, we still
don't understand what hypnosis really is. There's no generally accepted
explanation for how it works. Yeah, but I'm going to
go back to mesmerism, which did become a bit of
a sideshow act and yet still was considered somewhat it's
(13:35):
quasi medical. So between the eighteen forties and eighteen eighties
mesmerism got completely drawn into this, both spiritualism and stage demonstrations.
So it's a pop culture hit. But if you were
a self respecting physician there is you wouldn't even touch
that with Tempho Pole it would ruin your career. But
if you were an itinerant mesmerist, you might have a
(13:58):
pretty good career. It's my backup. Yeah, I think you could.
I think you could pull it off, Katie Um. So
these folks would travel around Britain, travel around different countries
and perform these shows, and the shows would bring in
a paying audience, but the main point of them was
to try to attract private clients for personal treatment because
(14:18):
they would give you the big box for mesmerizing them.
And you think that these shows might sound fine, kind
of like the U. G. A shows we described at
the beginning, But the knives under fingernails. I was not
making that up. That's unfortunately a real thing. Well and
and worse, let's see, we've got a pouring acid on
the skin, administering electric shocks, putting ammonia in people's mouths,
(14:41):
firing pistols near their ears. And the weird thing about
this is it's not just the mesmeris who are doing
this to try to prove that it's real. It's skeptics.
So people would come to the saying mesmerism is fake.
I can disprove it by you know, firing a pistol.
By this, guys total going to stand up. Yeah, So
(15:01):
you would end up with just escalating brutalities on these
poor supposedly mesmerized people. And um, you know it worked
to both ends. If the patient jumped when the gun
was fired by her ear, it's a fake. You know,
we've exposed it. If nothing happened, then people thought either
it was all real or it was such good fakery
(15:24):
that it was really really sick and disturbing. And in
case you're wondering about why we titled our podcast what
we did, that's from a New York Times article from
eight seven, and the head the headline is he was
killed by mesmeris of the exclamation point nation point and
(15:44):
I mean when I when I read it, it's it's
about this young man, Spurgeon young who died after a
few days illness and quote. It is now claimed that
death resulted from injuries received while under mesmeric influence at
the hands of amateurs in a science corner. Bowers has
summoned a jury and will make a thorough investigation. Um,
(16:06):
it's easy to see how somebody could be killed under
an amateur mesmerist demonstration if you read some of these
things they did to people well, and some people started
connecting this this idea of this you know, unconscious state
with surgery, thinking well, exactly, maybe this is a good
way to get people through something like amputation. Mesmeric and
(16:29):
anesthesia was used to amputate the leg at the thigh
of a forty two year old man named James Womble,
who said he didn't feel anything, but it was obviously
crowded out before it could get going. That's why you
haven't heard many stories about mesmeric anesthesia because you know,
things like ether came into use instead, which another sort
of strange side note there, ether and nitrous oxide were
(16:54):
they originally had applications on the stage before they were
thought of for medical purposes. Really yeah, kind of a
strange It's hard to imagine going to like the cool
ether show in town, but who knows. So with these
itinerant performances, these debates, people getting amputations in our mesmeric trance,
(17:15):
mesmerism becomes a very contentious thing and the perfect plot
point for a Romantic or Victorian writer to pursue these
altered states of consciousness into the altered states of con
especially those achieved through opium um but also quite effectively
done through hypnosis, sleepwalking, and trance. Because not every story
(17:37):
can have the opium eater and know, some of them
just have to plain trances. So according to this book
Bram Stoker and The Man Who Is Dracula, there's a
whole genre of mesmeric novels that combine Gothic elements, you know,
things that we're we're familiar with in much earlier fiction,
with these more modern scientific ideas than we have Daniel
(18:00):
Dormer The Mesmerist Secret, Edward Harron Allen's The Princess Daphne,
and obviously Bram stoker S Dracula, which is published a
little late in the game. For some of this mesmerist stuff, um,
it was definitely not in anymore the science wasn't but
it's used to great effect by Stoker. Yes, this is
(18:23):
one of my favorite books of all time and has
a prominent place on my bookshelf. But the character of
Lucy is often sleepwalking. The vampire uses mesmerism to satisfy
his blood lust, and Van Helsing uses it to fight back.
It's it's a central point in how everything happens, and
and observing what someone is like in a trance and
(18:44):
what they can do when they're in this altered state
of consciousness, things against their will. Even so, another famous
horror writer too used it to pretty great effect. That's
Edgar Allan Poe. He became interested in mesmerism after he's
into this lecture by Andrew Jackson Davis, and his most
famous story on mesmerism is The Facts in the Case
(19:07):
of Monsieur Valdemar, and the story was so good that
people thought it might be true, even though it sounds
incredibly outrageous. Just give you, like a brief plot outline. Here.
There's this mesmerist and he's interested in the effect of
hypnosis on a dying person. So he reaches out to
(19:28):
this dying friend and gets his approval to try to
hypnotize him on his deathbed. He puts the guy into
a state of hypnosis, and then the guy starts to
talk and says, I'm dead even though he's in this
trance state. And the guy just remains like that, in
this inert state for months and months without a pulse,
(19:51):
just in this death trance, half living, half dead, And
finally the narrator jostles him out of the trance by
repeatedly saying dead, dead, dead, And when he comes to,
he immediately rots because he's been sitting there for months
dead and turns into this puddle of goo. So I
have to read this immediately. I think it sounds like
(20:14):
a really great use of mesmerism. It wasn't always used though,
in that that horrifying kind of way. People weren't always
rotting and falling into the puddles. Unfortunately, just with a
psychological kind of twist, you had a couple examples. I
think Wild in the picture of Dorian Gray, and even
Walt Whitman in poetry The Sleepers and Song of Myself,
(20:35):
and Dickens, who is of course arguably the most famous.
He is weird. He was very much influenced by mesmerism.
In fact, he takes it a step beyond somebody like
po or Wild. He's actually a mesmerist himself. He performed
mesmerism on his wife in Pittsburgh and then yeah, of
(20:58):
course on this other lady in eight and forty four.
Classic Dickens for you, and his final unfinished novel, The
Mystery of Edwin Drewd, is about an evil mesmerist who
sexually manipulates women through hypnosis, which I have never heard
of that book before. A really Candice, a former co
(21:18):
host um for y'all, who remember from way back in
the day, she's reading Drewd by Dan Simmons, and I
was trying to decide it's kind of a takeoff on
that if I had to read the Unfinished Mystery of
ed and drew before, so you can let me know, um,
But that does raise an interesting point about mesmers and
when we brought up earlier that it's pretty sexual. The
(21:38):
patients are nearly almost always women. Uh, something that may
have helped that literary success damsels and probably heard its
medical reputation too. And there's also that that crime angle
of being hypnotized and doing things against your will, which
that appears in literature for way longer. It's even in
You'll You'll hear. Actual defense is using that aside for literature.
(22:02):
I was hypnotized. Um, I don't know what to say
about even how there's some sleepwalking murder stories. I wrote
an article for the website how stuff works dot com
how sleepwalking works, and I was reading many defenses that
people have given. I had no idea I killed my wife.
I was sleep walking altered states of consciousness. Time to
(22:27):
wake up everybody, because it's time for listener mail. And
today we just have a correction for you. And we
would say the names of everyone who sent this email in,
but it would take a really long time. We misspoke
and our Curse of Macbeth podcast. Um, what we had
meant to say was that Lincoln was reading a copy
(22:50):
of Macbeth days before his assassination. In the passage he
was reading was about the witches, the Witches right and
other king being assassinated. But the play he was attending
wasn't Macbeth. It was our American cousin, and I actually
knew that, but wrote it really confusingly in the outlines,
so I apologize for that. We do know that it's
(23:11):
not make that. If you have any corrections to send
us or good ideas for podcasts, our email addresses History
podcast at how stuff works dot com. We've also got
a Twitter feed and missed in History and Facebook fan page,
and if you'd like to learn a little bit more
about our subject for today, you can type in sleep
(23:32):
walking or hypnotism on our home page at www dot
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
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