October 20, 2018 • 24 mins
We're revisiting a 2010 Halloween episode from Sarah and Katie. 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?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Before we get started with this episode, we
have one last live show to announce for We will
be in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the National World War
Two Museum on Tuesday, November six. Okay, we know that
selection day, but we don't want coming to our show
to keep you from the polls. We are both going
to vote early before we leave for New Orleans, and
(00:20):
Louisiana offers early voting as well, so we encourage you
to do so. You can find out more about this
show and get a link to buy tickets at missed
in History dot com slash tour. Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody.
Since it is October, we are revisiting a past Halloween episode.
This one is from It is by hosts Katie and Sarah,
(00:43):
and it is about Franz Mesmer and the creation of Mesmerism.
They get into everything from how Mesmerism influenced the field
of psychology to the truly horrifying and even deadly stunts
that people did during stage shows, both to try to
prove that Mesmerism was real and to prove that it
was not. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in
(01:07):
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 victorian. But I
want to let everybody know that I have been to
a hypnosis show before, and I think, Katie, you have
(01:29):
to yeah, back in college, Back 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 and like flapped all around this
(01:51):
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 poe king with needles or shooting
of guns or knives under fingernails, which 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, it's finally almost Halloween.
(02:15):
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. We probably saw that coming,
specifically its predecessor mesmerism, which if you've ever heard of it,
(02:36):
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
(02:56):
yes and um, when you look at some of the
literature of the time 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
(03:19):
start with friends Anton 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
(03:42):
his dissertation on animal gravitation. And 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 nature had this
(04:05):
invisible fluid, and the fluid was 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 fraud Line Alsterlin,
who had some physical problems, and Mesmer decided to put
(04:27):
his theories to the test. Let's see if her tidal
fluctuations are out of balance. So he trying 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
(04:50):
felt this occult force, this fluid 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
(05:12):
the fluid followed the laws of magnetism, 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
(05:37):
or some sort of dis equilibrium of these internal tides
and the operator. So the I mean what we would
consider the hypnotists 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
(05:58):
a powerful operation. And this was done with a magnetized
object or by the passing 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 when you consider that most
(06:23):
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 a bucket, And unsurprisingly he gets famous
for his crazy semi pseudo scientific antics. Mozart is a
follower and he even performs music and Mesmer's honor and then,
(06:45):
also unsurprisingly, there's a scandal and the Viennese physicians expose
Mesmers of fraud. He leaves Austria in disgrace and goes
to Paris in seventeen seventy eight, and he finds a
pretty willing audience in Paris, and that's partly because the
city was already so awash and all these discussions and
(07:06):
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, which was Franklin's glass harmonica, to
(07:28):
induce deeper trances, and Sarah says, you have to go
listen to it, which having it, 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 stocked on top of
each other, and it can be played seamlessly, so you're
not chiming away at it. It's a very eerie, mysterious
(07:49):
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, could possibly cause mental illness,
(08:11):
so maybe you shouldn't listen to it. Actually, maybe in
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, he was
frequently invited to the French court to perform for the Queen,
(08:33):
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 even doctors. Doctor Joseph Giuta,
(08:55):
who um, you know it's behind something that sounds a
little might do his name, Yeah, 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
(09:20):
at the time, so 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
(09:42):
might be a bit 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 it doesn't demonstrated of
the mesmerism techniques for the panel. At one point he
(10:04):
magnetized a tree and then had this subject I d
the tree that had the most force. 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 the tree. I can just imagine the guy watching
(10:28):
this and you know, basin 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 of favor almost immediately he dies in obscurity,
(10:52):
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 Shastana, who
is a marquis and an aristocrat who starts doing these
experiments with Mesmerism with the help of a young man
on his estate even before Mesmer was out of commission,
(11:13):
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.
(11:34):
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
(11:55):
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 seventeen eighty four
on his experiments are sometimes considered the start of modern psychotherapy.
And I mean I can see that to a certain extent.
They're talking to each other and trying hit drawing out
(12:16):
everything out there. Yeah, So mes barism 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
(12:37):
fluid idea was nonsense, but he also decided that these
physical effects were real and they are 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
(12:59):
has nothing to do with magnetic fluids 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
(13:21):
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
(13:41):
from mesmerism. But don't think that mesmerism went away. It
just science took a different track. I'm thinking parallel traic y,
we're going to get back to the torism. But these
more modern scientists accepted that, yeah, definitely doesn't involve physical forces,
no fluid. Instead, it had something to do with your mind.
And Sigmund Freud actually got really interested in hypnosis, and
(14:05):
it's something that had a very big effect on psychology,
even though he abandoned it pretty quickly for free association.
It was just too hard to actually get people into it.
Translates that rapport Freud and um. By World War one
world War two, we have hypnosis being used on returning soldiers,
and it's not just a sideshow act anymore. It's part
(14:29):
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 yes, quasi medical. So between the eighteen
(14:50):
forties and eighteen eighties, mesmerism got completely drawn into this,
both spiritualism and stage demonstration. So it's a pop called
sure hit. But if you were a self respecting physician
there is you wouldn't even touch that with tempo pole.
It would ruin your career. But if you were an
itinerant mesmerist, you might have a pretty good career. That's
(15:11):
my backup career. Actually, 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 they would give
(15:32):
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, firing pistols near their ears.
(15:55):
And the weird thing about this is it's not just
the mesmerists who are doing this to try to prove
that it's real. It's skeptics. So people would come to
this saying mesmerism is fake. I can disprove it by
you know, firing a pistol by this stand up. Yeah,
so you would end up with just escalating brutalities on
(16:17):
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
that it was really really sick and disturbing. In case
(16:48):
you're wondering about why we titled our podcast what We Did.
That's from a New York Times article from and the
head The headline is he was killed by mesmerism exclamation
formation point and I mean when I when I read it,
it's it's about this young man, Spurgeon young who died
(17:09):
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 this science corner,
Bowers has summoned to jury and will make a thorough investigation. Um.
It's easy to see how somebody could be killed under
an amateur mesmerist demonstration if you read some of these
(17:34):
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
anesthesia was used to amputate the leg at the thigh
of a forty two year old man named James Womble,
(17:54):
who said he didn't feel anything. Um, but it was
obviously crowded out before it could it going. That's why
you haven't heard many stories about mesmeric anesthesia, because you know,
things like ether came into you instead, which another sort
of strange side note there, ether and nitrous oxide were
they originally had applications on the stage before they were
(18:17):
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 mesmerism
becomes a very contentious thing and the perfect plot point
(18:41):
for a Romantic or Victorian writer to pursue these altered
states of consciousness into the altered states of especially those
achieved through opium um but also quite effectively done through hypnosis, sleepwalking,
and trance. Because not every story can have the opium
euter and know, some of them just have to plane
try so. According to this book Bram Stoker and The
(19:04):
Man Who Is Dracula, there's a whole genre of mesmeric
novels that combine Gothic elements, you know, things that were
we're familiar with in much earlier fiction, with these more
modern scientific ideas. And we have Daniel Dormer, The Mesmerist Secret,
Edward Harron Allen's The Princess Daphne, and obviously Bram Stoker's Dracula,
(19:27):
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 one of my favorite
books of all time and has a prominent place on
my bookshelf. But the character of Lucy is often sleepwalking.
(19:50):
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 what they can
do when they're in this altered state of consciousness, things
against their will. Even so, another famous horror writer too,
(20:13):
used it to pretty great effect. That's Edgar Allan Poe.
He became interested in mesmerism after he attended this lecture
by Andrew Jackson Davis, and his most famous story on
mesmerism is the Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar,
and the story was so good that people thought it
might be true, even though it sounds incredibly outrageous. Just
(20:37):
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 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,
(21:00):
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, 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,
(21:22):
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 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 puddles. Unfortunately,
(21:44):
just with a psychological kind of twist. You had a
couple examples, I think wild in the picture of Dorian Gray. Yeah,
and even Walt Whitman in poetry The Sleepers and Song
of Myself and Dickens, who is of course arguably the
most famous so novel. He is weird. He was very
much influenced by mesmerism. In fact, he takes it a
(22:06):
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 course on this other lady in
eighteen forty four. Classic Dickens for you, and his final
unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drewd, is about an
(22:27):
evil mesmerist who sexually manipulates women through hypnosis, which I
have never heard of that book before, really, Candice a
former co 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
(22:47):
Mystery of Edmund Drewd before, so you can let me know, um.
But that does raise an interesting point about mesmeris and
when we brought up earlier that it's pretty sexual. The
patients are nearly almost all these 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
(23:09):
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 defenses using that. Aside from literature,
I always hypnotized. Um, I don't know what to say
about even how there's some sleep walking murder stories. I
wrote an article for the website how stuff works dot
(23:31):
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. Thank you so much
for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
(23:51):
or a Facebook you are l or something similar during
the course of the show, that may be obsolete now.
So here is our current contact information. We are at
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then we're at missed in the history all over social media.
That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands
(24:16):
of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
Hey, everybody. Before we get started with this episode, we
have one last live show to announce for We will
be in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the National World War
Two Museum on Tuesday, November six. Okay, we know that
selection day, but we don't want coming to our show
to keep you from the polls. We are both going
to vote early before we leave for New Orleans, and
(00:20):
Louisiana offers early voting as well, so we encourage you
to do so. You can find out more about this
show and get a link to buy tickets at missed
in History dot com slash tour. Hey, Happy Saturday, everybody.
Since it is October, we are revisiting a past Halloween episode.
This one is from It is by hosts Katie and Sarah,
(00:43):
and it is about Franz Mesmer and the creation of Mesmerism.
They get into everything from how Mesmerism influenced the field
of psychology to the truly horrifying and even deadly stunts
that people did during stage shows, both to try to
prove that Mesmerism was real and to prove that it
was not. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in
(01:07):
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 victorian. But I
want to let everybody know that I have been to
a hypnosis show before, and I think, Katie, you have
(01:29):
to yeah, back in college, Back 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 and like flapped all around this
(01:51):
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 poe king with needles or shooting
of guns or knives under fingernails, which 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, it's finally almost Halloween.
(02:15):
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. We probably saw that coming,
specifically its predecessor mesmerism, which if you've ever heard of it,
(02:36):
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
(02:56):
yes and um, when you look at some of the
literature of the time 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
(03:19):
start with friends Anton 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
(03:42):
his dissertation on animal gravitation. And 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 nature had this
(04:05):
invisible fluid, and the fluid was 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 fraud Line Alsterlin,
who had some physical problems, and Mesmer decided to put
(04:27):
his theories to the test. Let's see if her tidal
fluctuations are out of balance. So he trying 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
(04:50):
felt this occult force, this fluid 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
(05:12):
the fluid followed the laws of magnetism, 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
(05:37):
or some sort of dis equilibrium of these internal tides
and the operator. So the I mean what we would
consider the hypnotists 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
(05:58):
a powerful operation. And this was done with a magnetized
object or by the passing 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 when you consider that most
(06:23):
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 a bucket, And unsurprisingly he gets famous
for his crazy semi pseudo scientific antics. Mozart is a
follower and he even performs music and Mesmer's honor and then,
(06:45):
also unsurprisingly, there's a scandal and the Viennese physicians expose
Mesmers of fraud. He leaves Austria in disgrace and goes
to Paris in seventeen seventy eight, and he finds a
pretty willing audience in Paris, and that's partly because the
city was already so awash and all these discussions and
(07:06):
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, which was Franklin's glass harmonica, to
(07:28):
induce deeper trances, and Sarah says, you have to go
listen to it, which having it, 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 stocked on top of
each other, and it can be played seamlessly, so you're
not chiming away at it. It's a very eerie, mysterious
(07:49):
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, could possibly cause mental illness,
(08:11):
so maybe you shouldn't listen to it. Actually, maybe in
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, he was
frequently invited to the French court to perform for the Queen,
(08:33):
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 even doctors. Doctor Joseph Giuta,
(08:55):
who um, you know it's behind something that sounds a
little might do his name, Yeah, 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
(09:20):
at the time, so 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
(09:42):
might be a bit 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 it doesn't demonstrated of
the mesmerism techniques for the panel. At one point he
(10:04):
magnetized a tree and then had this subject I d
the tree that had the most force. 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 the tree. I can just imagine the guy watching
(10:28):
this and you know, basin 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 of favor almost immediately he dies in obscurity,
(10:52):
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 Shastana, who
is a marquis and an aristocrat who starts doing these
experiments with Mesmerism with the help of a young man
on his estate even before Mesmer was out of commission,
(11:13):
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.
(11:34):
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
(11:55):
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 seventeen eighty four
on his experiments are sometimes considered the start of modern psychotherapy.
And I mean I can see that to a certain extent.
They're talking to each other and trying hit drawing out
(12:16):
everything out there. Yeah, So mes barism 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
(12:37):
fluid idea was nonsense, but he also decided that these
physical effects were real and they are 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
(12:59):
has nothing to do with magnetic fluids 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
(13:21):
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
(13:41):
from mesmerism. But don't think that mesmerism went away. It
just science took a different track. I'm thinking parallel traic y,
we're going to get back to the torism. But these
more modern scientists accepted that, yeah, definitely doesn't involve physical forces,
no fluid. Instead, it had something to do with your mind.
And Sigmund Freud actually got really interested in hypnosis, and
(14:05):
it's something that had a very big effect on psychology,
even though he abandoned it pretty quickly for free association.
It was just too hard to actually get people into it.
Translates that rapport Freud and um. By World War one
world War two, we have hypnosis being used on returning soldiers,
and it's not just a sideshow act anymore. It's part
(14:29):
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 yes, quasi medical. So between the eighteen
(14:50):
forties and eighteen eighties, mesmerism got completely drawn into this,
both spiritualism and stage demonstration. So it's a pop called
sure hit. But if you were a self respecting physician
there is you wouldn't even touch that with tempo pole.
It would ruin your career. But if you were an
itinerant mesmerist, you might have a pretty good career. That's
(15:11):
my backup career. Actually, 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 they would give
(15:32):
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, firing pistols near their ears.
(15:55):
And the weird thing about this is it's not just
the mesmerists who are doing this to try to prove
that it's real. It's skeptics. So people would come to
this saying mesmerism is fake. I can disprove it by
you know, firing a pistol by this stand up. Yeah,
so you would end up with just escalating brutalities on
(16:17):
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
that it was really really sick and disturbing. In case
(16:48):
you're wondering about why we titled our podcast what We Did.
That's from a New York Times article from and the
head The headline is he was killed by mesmerism exclamation
formation point and I mean when I when I read it,
it's it's about this young man, Spurgeon young who died
(17:09):
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 this science corner,
Bowers has summoned to jury and will make a thorough investigation. Um.
It's easy to see how somebody could be killed under
an amateur mesmerist demonstration if you read some of these
(17:34):
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
anesthesia was used to amputate the leg at the thigh
of a forty two year old man named James Womble,
(17:54):
who said he didn't feel anything. Um, but it was
obviously crowded out before it could it going. That's why
you haven't heard many stories about mesmeric anesthesia, because you know,
things like ether came into you instead, which another sort
of strange side note there, ether and nitrous oxide were
they originally had applications on the stage before they were
(18:17):
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 mesmerism
becomes a very contentious thing and the perfect plot point
(18:41):
for a Romantic or Victorian writer to pursue these altered
states of consciousness into the altered states of especially those
achieved through opium um but also quite effectively done through hypnosis, sleepwalking,
and trance. Because not every story can have the opium
euter and know, some of them just have to plane
try so. According to this book Bram Stoker and The
(19:04):
Man Who Is Dracula, there's a whole genre of mesmeric
novels that combine Gothic elements, you know, things that were
we're familiar with in much earlier fiction, with these more
modern scientific ideas. And we have Daniel Dormer, The Mesmerist Secret,
Edward Harron Allen's The Princess Daphne, and obviously Bram Stoker's Dracula,
(19:27):
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 one of my favorite
books of all time and has a prominent place on
my bookshelf. But the character of Lucy is often sleepwalking.
(19:50):
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 what they can
do when they're in this altered state of consciousness, things
against their will. Even so, another famous horror writer too,
(20:13):
used it to pretty great effect. That's Edgar Allan Poe.
He became interested in mesmerism after he attended this lecture
by Andrew Jackson Davis, and his most famous story on
mesmerism is the Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar,
and the story was so good that people thought it
might be true, even though it sounds incredibly outrageous. Just
(20:37):
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 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,
(21:00):
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, 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,
(21:22):
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 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 puddles. Unfortunately,
(21:44):
just with a psychological kind of twist. You had a
couple examples, I think wild in the picture of Dorian Gray. Yeah,
and even Walt Whitman in poetry The Sleepers and Song
of Myself and Dickens, who is of course arguably the
most famous so novel. He is weird. He was very
much influenced by mesmerism. In fact, he takes it a
(22:06):
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 course on this other lady in
eighteen forty four. Classic Dickens for you, and his final
unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drewd, is about an
(22:27):
evil mesmerist who sexually manipulates women through hypnosis, which I
have never heard of that book before, really, Candice a
former co 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
(22:47):
Mystery of Edmund Drewd before, so you can let me know, um.
But that does raise an interesting point about mesmeris and
when we brought up earlier that it's pretty sexual. The
patients are nearly almost all these 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
(23:09):
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 defenses using that. Aside from literature,
I always hypnotized. Um, I don't know what to say
about even how there's some sleep walking murder stories. I
wrote an article for the website how stuff works dot
(23:31):
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. Thank you so much
for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
(23:51):
or a Facebook you are l or something similar during
the course of the show, that may be obsolete now.
So here is our current contact information. We are at
a story podcasts at how stuff works dot com, and
then we're at missed in the history all over social media.
That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands
(24:16):
of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
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