8oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF MESJMEPvISM* 



Br J. N. LANGLEY, F. K. S. 



SCATTERED about in the literature of the seventeenth and eight- 

 eenth centuries are many records of the cure of divers human 

 maladies in simple and mysterious-seeming ways. Valentin Greate- 

 rakes, in Charles II's reign, was, we are told, " famous for curing vari- 

 ous diseases and distempers by a stroak of the hand only." His power, 

 he thought, was a special gift from Heaven. Many people, however, 

 were not slow to say that he had dealings with the devil. In some 

 cases wonders were wrought by touching the affected parts of the 

 patient with a magnet. Maxwell, who in 1679 published a short trea- 

 tise on magnetic medicine, attributed the cures brought about by this, 

 and by some other unusual forms of medical practice, to the accumu- 

 lation of a subtile fluid in the body of the patient. This subtile fluid 

 was diffused through all things in nature ; a fortunate few among 

 men had an inborn power of controlling its distribution. Such men 

 could cure all diseases ; they could indeed, he says, by adding to their 

 own proper quantum of fluid, make themselves live forever, were not 

 the influence of the stars adverse. 



In 1775 the theory of animal magnetism was put forward in Vienna 

 by Friedrich Anton Mesmer. Neither his theories nor his facts differ 

 very greatly from those of some of his predecessors. There exists, he 

 said, in nature a universal fluid ; in virtue of this, the human body 

 possesses " properties analogous to those of a magnet ; there are to be 

 distinguished in it poles equally different and opposite, which may 

 even be communicated, changed, destroyed, and restored ; even the 

 phenomenon of inclination is observed therein." By means of this 

 magnetic fluid all the maladies of man could be healed. A few years 

 later Mesmer left Vienna for Paris. At first he magnetized his patients 

 by gazing steadily at them, or by means of "passes"; but, as patients 

 became more numerous, he brought them into a proper magnetic con- 

 dition by other methods, often of a very fantastic nature. The patients 

 did not, when magnetized, all show the same symptoms : some passed 

 into a heavy sleep, some became insensible to touch, or even to stimuli 

 ordinarily painful ; some became cataleptic, some were seized with 

 local or general convulsions. This last condition was called a crisis, 

 and was the triumph of the mesmei'izer, the moment when the disease 

 was considered to be forcibly expelled from the system. Nowadays it 

 is the last state a physician would care to produce in a patient. 



For a time Mesmer's success was enormous. His admirers sub- 

 scribed for him a sum of nearly 350,000 francs, receiving in return 



* Abridged from an address delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, March 

 14, 1884. 



