Mesmer

Franz Anton Mesmer was born in 1734 in Iznang, a village on the German shore of Lake Constance. He studied medicine in Vienna, where he developed the theory of 'animal magnetism'—the idea that an invisible fluid permeated the universe and that disease arose from its obstruction in the human body. Mesmer believed he could manipulate this fluid with magnets and, later, with his bare hands, restoring its flow and curing patients of ailments ranging from paralysis to blindness to hysterical fits. In 1778, after a scandal in Vienna involving a young blind pianist whose sight briefly seemed to improve under his treatment, Mesmer moved to Paris.

In Paris, Mesmer became a celebrity. He established a fashionable clinic on the Place Vendôme and treated patients in theatrical group sessions around a wooden tub called a baquet, filled with iron filings and water. Patients held iron rods protruding from the tub, touched each other to conduct the magnetic fluid, and listened to soft music played on a glass harmonica. Mesmer, dressed in a lilac silk robe, moved through the room touching patients with a magnetized wand. Convulsions, weeping, and sudden recoveries were reported. The aristocracy flocked to him.

In 1784, Louis XVI appointed a royal commission—including Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin—to investigate Mesmer's claims. The commission conducted rigorous controlled experiments and concluded that animal magnetism did not exist; the effects were produced entirely by imagination and expectation. Mesmer's reputation collapsed. He left Paris and died in obscurity in 1815. But his technique survived him: James Braid, a Scottish surgeon, demonstrated in the 1840s that Mesmer's trance states were real, even if their cause was not. He renamed the phenomenon 'hypnosis.'

The verb 'mesmerize' appeared in English in the 1820s and 1830s, initially meaning specifically to induce trance through animal magnetism. Within a generation it had broadened to mean any state of absorbed, unresisting fascination—to be mesmerized by a performer, a sunset, an idea. The scientific apparatus fell away; the experience remained. Mesmer's theory was entirely wrong, but the phenomenon he described—a state of heightened suggestibility and concentrated attention—was real. He gets the word even though he got the explanation backwards.