asked him to come and start the horse. “He did so,” Quimby continued,
and at the time I was so weak I could scarcely lift my whip. But excitement took possession of my senses, and I drove the horse as fast as he could go, up hill and down, till I reachedhome and, when I got into the stable, I felt as strong as I ever did. From that time I continued to improve, not knowing, however, that the excitement was the cause…
Quimby grew intrigued at how the frenetic carriage ride seemed to lift his symptoms of tuberculosis. As his spirits rose, he noticed, so did his bodily vigor. The carriage ride formed Quimby’s earliest notions that the mind had an effect on the body. But it would take the experience of an occult philosophy called Mesmerism, which was then reaching America from Paris, to make Quimby ponder the full possibilities. Mesmerism, the work of self-styled eighteenth-century Viennese healer Franz Anton Mesmer, ignited a new range of hypotheses about the human mind.
Mesmer’s Revolution
Born in 1734, Franz Anton Mesmer was a German-speaking physician of the late Enlightenment era. In the 1770s, Mesmer theorized that all of life was shot through with an invisible ethereal fluid, which he called
animal magnetism
. If this vital fluid was out of alignment, Mesmer reasoned, illness resulted. He claimed to correct the flow of animal magnetism by placing a patient into a trance state, or a
magnetized
condition. Mesmer induced trances by making a series of hand and eye gestures, or “passes,” around a subject’s face and head. Once a subject was entranced, his vital energies, Mesmer believed, could be realigned. Most notably, Mesmer also discovered that trance subjects were receptive and malleable to his commands.
This is the practice that was redubbed “hypnotism” in the early 1840s by Scottish physician James Braid. Braid considered it a mental process and not an occult manipulation of unseen energies. Indeed, Mesmer himself did not perceive his method as an occult healing, but as a practice in league with Enlightenment-age principles.
Mesmer attained his greatest public acclaim, and notoriety, in 1778 after moving to Paris, a place already roiling with intrigues and tensions in the years preceding the French Revolution. Mesmer conducted public
séances
, or sittings, where he would attempt to heal patients in a dramatic group atmosphere. During Mesmer’s séances, people suffering from maladies ranging from consumption to joint pain to melancholia were seated, hands linked, around a wooden tub, or
baquet
, containing iron rods and fillings, which had been specially “magnetized” to realign a subject’s vital energies. During séances, patients were expected to experience convulsions and fainting—which Mesmer dubbed “crises”—as a signal that their bodily magnetism was responding to treatment.
While Mesmer acknowledged that his treatments depended upon sympathies between the patient and Mesmerist (someone who practiced his art), he rarely probed the matter further. “There is only one illness and one healing,” Mesmer wrote, steadfastly insisting on the existence of an invisible fluidic flow. The eighteenth-century healer possessed neither a vocabulary nor the background to pursue questions about mind-body healing and subliminal states. The question of mental suggestion went unasked.
Many advocates of social reform in France took a deep interest in Mesmerism. To these enthusiasts, the susceptibility of all people, from peasants to noblemen, to enter a Mesmeric trance validated the ideal of an innate equality within human beings. Indeed, in France of the late eighteenth century, every advance in science or industry took on political overtones. To Mesmer’s supporters, efforts to discredit Mesmerism amounted to the ploy of entrenched aristocratic interests, such as the French Academy of Sciences, to suppress a medical practice that was outside their purview and that could be used to aid common