Free Supernatural by Colin Wilson Page B

hand, they started again.Clearly, Mesmer was controlling the baron’s vital fluids and making them flow at will.With enough of this, he reasoned, all the blockages should be cleared away, like masses of twigs and leaves in a stream, and the energies should flow unimpeded.So they did; when Mesmer returned to Vienna, the baron was cured.
    Undeterred by mounting hostility, Mesmer thought of new ways of distributing the magnetic fluid: he ‘magnetised’ jars of water, connected up the jars with metal bands, and placed the apparatus in a large wooden tub half-filled with iron filings and water.Patients sat with their feet in the water, or sat with their backs against magnetised trees.The results were remarkable—but his colleagues pointed out that leaving scantily clad men and women in close contact with one another would probably stimulate their vital fluids anyway ...
    Mesmer’s good angel was off-duty on the day he agreed to treat a blind young pianist named Maria Theresa Paradies, a protégée of the Empress.He was unaware that her blindness was due to a detached retina.Oddly enough, after a few weeks of treatment in Mesmer’s house, the girl became convinced she could see dimly.A Profesor Barth was sent to examine her, and he admitted privately to Mesmer that she seemed to have improved.But his report stated that she was still blind—which was undoubtedly true.The girl had be be dragged away from Mesmer’s house by force.And Mesmer, tired of insults and threats, decided to move to Paris in 1778.
    Here he met with the same mixture of acclaim and vilification.Dr Charles D’Eslon, personal physician to the king’s brother, became an ardent admirer, and lectured on Mesmer’s ideas to the Society of Medicine on September 18, 1790.Mesmer’s mixed-group cures continued to attract dozens of wealthy patients, who would sit with their feet in the wooden tub or baquet, and form a chain and press their bodies together to facilitate the flow of vital fluid.One patient, Major Charles du Hussay, was cured of the after-effects of typhus, which had turned him into a trembling wreck, by a ‘crisis’ that made his teeth chatter for a month, but which left him perfectly restored.Cases like this so impressed the king that he offered Mesmer a lifelong pension to remain in France; Mesmer demanded half a million francs for research.When the king refused, he left France—on the same day that D’Eslon was lecturing to the medical faculty—and returned only when his patients contributed 350,000 gold louis, many times more than what he had asked for.But Mesmer had made an enemy of the king, who appointed a ‘commission’ of scientists to look into Mesmer’s ideas.It included the great American Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Lavoisier (who was to lose his head in the Revolution) and the inventor of a new decapitation machine, a certain Dr Guillotin.It is an episode that reflects discredit on Franklin, who was much prejudiced against Mesmer.He was also ill, so that he did not actually attend any of the ‘experiments’.But he signed the report which dismissed ‘animal magnetism’ as mere imagination.Mesmer was actually absent from France at the time (1794) and was not even consulted.He returned, but nothing could restore his fortunes.A hostile doctor introduced himself as a patient, allowed Mesmer to ‘cure’ him, then wrote a report denouncing him as a quack.This kind of thing was unanswerable.After the Revolution (during which he lost all his money) Mesmer fled.The Austrian police prevented him from returning to Vienna.He spent his last quarter of a century living quietly in Constance, not far from his birthplace.
    Now it may seem to many open-minded readers that Mesmer’s critics were by no means incorrect: that his theories were absurd, and that his cures were, indeed, due to ‘suggestion’.Yet this is really to miss the point.We must remember, to begin with, that medicine in the time of Mesmer was completely