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Franklin and his fellow investigators asked the same thing in 1784. How does one describe the real bonds people form over false beliefs? As fake news propagates along feeds both human and algorithmic, the question seems newly urgent. As they freely admitted in a report of their experiments, “nothing can be more astonishing than the sight of these convulsions he that has not had it, can have no idea of it.” The patients were “entirely under the government of the person who distributes the magnetic virtue: in vain they may appear to be in a state of the extremest drowsiness, his voice, a look, a sign from him rouses them.” And yet there was no magnetic virtue. The difficulty facing Franklin and his fellow commissioners was that whatever their doubts about animal magnetism, they did not doubt the sincerity of the patients’ physical responses to Mesmer’s manipulations. But the work of debunking Mesmer’s practice had only just begun. Their stillness proved that animal magnetism, as Adams triumphantly reported, did not exist. The needles of the electrometers alone remain unperturbed. The sight is well worth picturing: bewigged men of science fuss with their instruments while, all around, women compromise themselves. They took their electrometers to one of Mesmer’s hoedowns all the same. The commissioners do not appear to have seriously considered that the invisible, imponderable, all-pervasive animal-magnetic fluid might be real.
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Who better than Benjamin Franklin, electrical experimenter and American envoy to France, to protect the values of the Enlightenment? Franklin joined chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier as co-chair of a commission whose members included astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, inventor of the guillotine Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, and other members of the faculties of medicine and the natural sciences. So were the faculty of medicine’s earnings in patient fees. Such a thing could not be permitted to go on, and so-as diplomat John Adams reported to a Boston correspondent-“the King has thought necessary to appoint a number of physicians and academicians, with…Franklin at their head, to enquire into it.” Social order was threatened by Mesmer’s orgasmic cures. The physical tokens of the cure varied: some patients coughed and convulsed, while others became catatonic. These proceedings brought patients under Mesmer’s thrall, permitting him, so it seemed, to rebalance their animal-magnetic fluids with artful flourishes of his magnetic wand or hand. To restore a healthy circulation, the doctor and his assistants stalked about dramatically, waving metal wands and pressing on people’s stomachs. Mesmer said all illnesses had the same cause: a blockage in the flow of animal magnetism. They met in his richly appointed treatment salon, where they gathered around a bucket filled with shards of glass and water that concentrated the life-giving animal-magnetic fluid. Mesmer’s patients-most of them female and well-to-do-found him through word-of-mouth and in pamphlets advertising his metaphysical talents. While he called his practice animal magnetism, his opponents would coin, and his successors would eventually adopt, the term mesmerism. Mesmer had made a few false starts in Austria, including the time he promoted a theory of “animal gravitation,” before taking Paris by storm in 1778.
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His theory did not seem as implausible in 1784 as it does now it crossed ancient humoral medicine with the best accounts then available of how electricity and magnetism worked. He claimed he could cure illnesses by manipulating this invisible fluid in the ailing body. Mesmer said that animal magnetism crackled all around us, though it was especially concentrated in human nerves. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison all rejoiced to know that Mesmer would no longer impose on credulous Parisians with his invisible fluid of animal magnetism, a living or vital counterpart of mineral magnetism. In 1784, America’s soon-to-be second, third, and fourth presidents celebrated the publication of a report debunking the practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, a Vienna-educated physician whose name gives us the word mesmerizing.
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