Lettre d'un Medecin de la Faculte de Paris, A un Medecin du College de Londres.

A la Haye, 1781.

"Mesmer promoted his system of treatment, based on his confused doctrine of a universal magnetic fluid influencing tides and men alike, with books and great personal showmanship. His treatment became such a popular health care sensation in France that it was as much a social movement as a medical practice. The ancien regime considered the leaders of the animal magnetism movement to be politically dangerous. The attention Mesmer directed toward hypnosis and suggestion in psychiatry led eventually to tits scientific investigation by Braid and others. It also led to the more scientific development of suggestion in treatment, which has been termed after him "mesmerism". Following an inquiry instituted buy Louis XVI, Mesmer's career came to an abrupt end" (Morton's Medical Bibliography, Fifth Edition, Edited by Jeremy M. Norman)..

"Considered as a movement, mesmerism suggests some of the varieties of pre-Romanticism and popular science in the late eighteenth century. It did not spend itself as an intellectual force for almost a hundred years, as the mesmerist passages in the works of Hoffmann, Hugo, and Poe testify. But as a scientific theory mesmerism offered only a thin unoriginal assortment of ideas. Although Mesmer's own writings contained little sustained theorizing, they provided enough for his enemies to detect all manner of occultist and vitalistic influences and to align him with William Maxwell, Robert Fludd, J.B. van Helmont, and Paracelsus-when they did not categorize him with Cagliostro. This version of his intellectual ancestry seems convincing enough, if one adds Newton and Mead to the list. But nothing proves that Mesmer was a charlatan. He seems to have believed sincerely in his theory, although he also showed a fierce determination to convert it into cash: charging ten louis a month for the use of his "tubs."
In terms of the development of medicine, the techniques of mesmerizing proved more influential than its theory. By concentrating on the "rapport" of patient and doctor, Mesmer seems to have dealt effectively with nervous disorders. He certainly had, to put it mildly, a forceful bedside manner; and in 1784 his followers, led by the Chastenet de Puysegur brothers, extended mesmeric "rapport" into something new: mesmerically induced hypnosis. Later groups of hypnotists, abandoned the hypothesis of cosmic fluid. In the nineteenth century hypnosis, shorn of Mesmer's cosmology and perfected by James Braid and J.M. Charcot, became an accepted medical practice. And finally, through Charcot's impact on Freud, mesmerism exerted some influence on the development of psychoanalysis" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography).

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