MESMERISM. 663 



remedy, of course, he had discovered. He rubbed and pressed 

 his patients, and touched them with an iron rod, made them sit 

 silently in circles, in a room rather darkened and furnished with 

 mirrors, music playing all the time. After him, a school was es- 

 tablished at Lyons and Ostend by a Chevalier Barbarin, where no 

 manipulations were used and all was accomplished by the energy 

 of the operator's volition. Faith removed their mountains, and 

 their motto was " Veuillez le bien allez et guerissez." At a 

 third school, that of the Marquis de Puysegur at Strasburg, very 

 gentle manipulations were employed, and the operators made 

 them frequently at some distance from the patient. 



Such results appeared as caused a commission of inquiry to 

 be ordered, in 1784, by the government of France. The whole 

 was ascribed to imagination, imitation, and touching ; the matter 

 declined, and Mesmer retired to Switzerland. Still it was prac- 

 tised not only in the three first schools of Mesmer, Barbarin, 

 and Puysegur, but assiduously cultivated in many parts of Ger- 

 many, and lingered still among us, for a Miss Preston in Blooms- 

 bury Square, who died lately, practised it during the best part 

 of her life ; and I recollect that, about twenty years ago, numbers 

 went to a magnetiser at Kennington. I some years ago saw 

 lectures upon it advertised in the prospectuses of the medical 

 courses in German universities, at Heidelberg for instance. 

 Of late the subject has been revived among the physicians of 

 Germany and France, and at Berlin a magnetic clinical ward 

 has been opened ; and a commission of the Royal Academy of 

 Medicine sat in 1826, in Paris, to inquire into it anew. 



J. B. V T an Helmont, born at Brussels in 1577, certainly shows 

 in his works that he was well acquainted with animal magnetism 

 and practised it. His cures by its means, were, like most miracles, 

 ascribed by the wicked to the assistance of the devil. His language 

 is so distinct, that " we might almost conceive," says Mr. Col- 

 quhoun, " that we were reading the works of some disciple of 

 Mesmer:" and indeed many Continental and English writers of the 

 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contended for an universal 

 magnetic power, which produced the dependence and reciprocal 

 action of bodies, and especially the phenomena of life ; and al- 

 lowed extraordinary eifects to be produced in another living 

 being, even at a great distance, by the will or imagination of 



