THE MASTER HEALER
NATURE AFFORDS A UNIVERSAL MEANS OF
HEALING AND PRESERVING MEN.
Anton Mesmer
Franz Anton Mesmer was THE Healer of the past millennium. Mesmer graduated from the medical school in Vienna, Austria, in 1766. But, he learned true healing from nature on his own and brought it forth publicly and dramatically in Europe despite “the slings and arrows” of opposition from his orthodox colleagues. His methods developed from his own curious mind, persistent studies, and experiments with metal magnets. Like Jesus Christ, Mesmer understood healing virtue – but called it vital fluid. He named the process animal magnetism – to differentiate it from the effects of metals. He recognized faith or belief to be key to healing. Forgiveness was not mentioned in his works or writings, but the love and graces of family and friends were welcomed in support of his efforts as made obvious in the Societies of Harmony which he initiated in Paris. Mesmer recognized Harmony or Love as the key propellant of the healing fluid. Incidents from Mesmer’s healing works follow – From Franz
Anton Mesmer from Swabia, discoverer of animal
magnetism by Justinus Kerner, 1856.
Ernst Seyfert was an aide and tutor at the Castle da Horka at Rohow, Hungary, when Anton Mesmer arrived to spend several days attending the Baron. The latter had been experiencing terrifying spasms in his throat. Thinking he might suffocate and die, the Baron consulted the top physicians in Vienna without success. Eventually, he turned for help to Mesmer whose reputation had preceded him. Seyfert began viewing him with a jaundiced eye, but before long he saw the most extraordinary things happen through the Doctor’s hands and became the first to call him Wizard. While Mesmer left the Baron unrelieved, he drew crowds of patients from the village and cured many of them without fee. Before the day of Mesmer’s departure, Seyfert had become an admirer, believer and enthusiast. His remembrances follow. ~~~ A Hungarian nobleman … whose hands were so paralyzed by frost and cold that he could not lift them up: Mesmer set him on a chair, touched him before and after noon, and put a magnet under one of his feet, then put him, as others, already magnetized, from time to time, into a formed circle, which were holding hands, with the one on the right hand, the other on the left hand. On the first day before sunset, this paralytic was able to bring the right hand almost to the forehead in my presence; the next day he came farther, and on the third or fourth he could, without a few exertions, put on his hat and take it off. As long as Mesmer was at Rohow, it was easy for him to be magnetized, with the good success that, according to his assurance, he was better every day. After Mesmer's departure, he was said to be fully recovered ... ~~~ A young Jew came from about a mile from small remote spot called Sobotischt. He had already, as he afterwards told me, and confirmed by more Sobotischt Christians suffered long from an inner chest disease and was so very weak, that they had to put himself on a cart to the castle. Mesmer inquired about the state of his illness, then pointed a while from some distance with his finger to his chest, and the patient is said to have been thrown in a short time into a strong convulsion with vomiting of much matter in the presence of a great many people. For a few reasons, I was not present to my annoyance at these events; but when I came into the room soon after, and Mesmer had left us, a good friend secretly told me the whole incident. In order to convince me, I asked the Jew himself, who described the events to me as well. As a result, he was one of the first ever to arrive in the hall, and one of the last to go home because he was now better off. [A year later, the young man told Seyfert, “I have taken nothing (medicine) and yet now I am always fresh, lively, and healthy as a fish.”] ~~~ On the day on which Mesmer was going to return to Vienna, everything had already been prepared. With the intention of saying good-bye to him on boarding the coach, and wishing him a happy journey, I went down into the courtyard; but as he was taking too long, I went up the stairs where he ought to have come down. At the top of it I found a strange group, namely Mesmer, who was holding a young peasant from the mountains, and beside him a man who was being an interpreter between the two of them. All three were silent, then I with them; for I was now quite an eyewitness. Meanwhile this silence was interrupted by the accidental intrusion of the Countess, who, after she had spoken something to Mesmer, asked the peasant in an ordinary voice: “Whose servant are you?” He said, “Yours, Mighty Countess.” To the second question, “What is the matter with you?” The answer was: “I lost my hearing a few weeks ago in a violent windstorm, which this gentleman gave back to me now.” Afterwards, I accompanied Mesmer to the coach, and he did not leave us all without emotion. As far as the whole duration of the magnetization of this deaf one is concerned, it must not have given much more than half an hour, presumably because the disease was not too deeply rooted. From Observations
on Animal Magnetism, by Charles d’Eslon, Paris,
1780.
Charles d’Eslon was a French physician who became a follower and eventually Mesmer’s closest associate in his magnetic healing endeavors. ~~~ The case of the servant Picard was one of my particular knowledge. Following a disease and remedies which had been taken, his eyes became inflamed and atrophied. He became blind to the point of not being able to direct himself. His Master was attached to him and groaned that he did not have enough money to ensure the comfort of this honest boy. The Quinze-Vingts (Fifteen-Twenties Hospice for the Blind) was the only open resource, but difficult to obtain. In these circumstances, I begged to show the patient to M. Mesmer. I assigned an hour for him to come find me. Faithful to the appointment, the boy Picard was driven by a Savoyard, Chateau of the Tuileries at Marais. I made introductions: M. Mesmer touched his eyes for a few minutes: the blind one became clear seeing; and in the joy of his heart, he went down, paid his Savoyard, sent him away and went back home without a driver. Reflection succeeded the excitement of contentment, and the next day in the morning, the patient, still seeing, but tearing, came to ask me to present him again to M. Mesmer, and to get a followup treatment. I consented then to do what depended on me. His appeal to M. Mesmer was simple: “I see, sir,” he said, “and it is to you that I owe it. But I know well that I am not healed. I just beg you to accord me the entire grace. I am poor, in a state to offer you nothing, and am unable to render you any service. A good work will be your only reward. Nevertheless, I remain here and I hope you do not drive me away. The time I will not be near you, I will pass in your attic, I will find a way to establish myself.” M. Mesmer, very inconveniently lodged, not having the honor to be the owner of an attic, it was necessary to adjust this situation differently. After which the one named Picard entered treatment. He recovered his sight in a few weeks. But I have said that the eyes were atrophied, and covered with gray layers. M. Mesmer continued his treatment until perfected…. I never heard the honest boy of whom I speak reason about animal Magnetism. He is content to bless it. He enters humbly into the salon used for treatment, slips into a corner; and there, helpful and modest, he enjoys with trust the charitable care of M. Mesmer. ~~~ A boy, age of ten, was at the College some leagues from the capital. He returned to Paris August 14, 1779, with some signs of poor health. Seven days after his arrival, he complained of stomach aches. The next day, fever succeeded by disturbed nerves, trembling of the hands, arms, legs. I was called on the third day of illness, and was not deceived about the kind; I noticed on the eleventh to fourteenth an eruption that took place in the time indicated: it was a miliary fever. The eruption became very bad: it was maintained on the forehead, and from the chin to the base and around the neck. What seemed like buttons on the arms were more than a few. At the time all sweating was intercepted; skin became earthy, and the patient exhaled an odor of a corpse. The evacuations that had never been sufficient, were completely suppressed by the end of the disease. Then the distress was entire; weaknesses succeeded; cold successively took the hands, feet, legs, thighs and belly: there was no way to reheat them; exhaustion became absolute, emaciation excessive; finally, the patient fell into the kind of lethargy, which serves as harbinger of agony and death. That was the disease at the forty-fifth day. One of my colleagues and I had uselessly lavished every care to let nature take a less fatal course. In this state of despair, I persuaded M. Mesmer to come to see the patient. We arrived there around midday. He was so frightened of the freezing cold and the wasting, that he reproached me, in secret, to render useless witness to the inevitable evil. Nevertheless he took the child by the hand, and after a few minutes, the stomach and the chest were covered with a sticky moisture. The touch of the tongue procured an inner and agreeable warmth. Half an hour after, the patient urinated. Truly amazed to see produced in this short interval of animal magnetism that the forty-five days of our remedies had perhaps postponed, I pressed M. Mesmer to finish that which he had begun so well. He refused; for he saw this child beyond all hope: he saw death. But if his resistance was high, my obstinacy was stubborn as I got the better of him; and consequently the patient was placed in a bath. He remained there five quarters of an hour, saying cheerfully that he was well. In the evening, the heat returned: moisture into the whole body: the appetite returned; the patient ate a crayfish, bread and bottle of water mixed with white champagne. In the night, the sleep was quiet: the child awoke asking to eat; finally a foul evacuation relieved the exhausted nature. The rest of this cure required three or four weeks. I saw little of this young man recently; but I have seen him. He was bold, alert, and had all the signs of good health. Reflexions: It is sometimes asked whether M. Mesmer makes cures? I would ask if ordinary Medicine cites much of this evidence? Then can I say that, not to tire my readers, I prune the aggravating, surprising and interesting details. I have sometimes heard boldly stated that M. Mesmer has no discovery, and that if he did extraordinary things, it was by seductive imagination. I note that this is not the case of this application. No one was told of the arrival of M. Mesmer. The patient did not know him: he had never heard of him, and he was also far too weak to deal with him in the least willingly. But, if M. Mesmer had no other secret than making the faded imagination act for health, would it not still be a great marvel? For if the medicine of imagination was for the best, why do not we do the medicine of imagination? No more to return seriously to these two objections, I will quote a fact which seems to me to combat them both quite well. ~~~ I was called to a house in Paris by a justly esteemed surgeon. I saw the spectacle of a young lady, extended on her bed, unconscious, and in a state of convulsions for five days. The evacuations were suppressed, and the convulsive movements were so violent, that the efforts of four people were needed to oppose them. I noticed that the patient lie on her back, only supported on the bed with the head and the heels. The surgeon had employed all the resources of the art: I could not do better. So I determined to request M. Mesmer. It was very-late, and we could not reach him until ten o'clock regarding the patient. M. Mesmer having examined her, informed me that it perhaps would take three or four hours to bring her back from this state; and unfortunately the circumstances did not permit him to remain that time there with her. The feeling for humanity had to cede to necessity, and return to the operation the next day. We were somewhat consoled with this untoward contre-temps, in that we thought to recognize that there was no danger to life. However M. Mesmer withdrew only after having obtained evacuation through urine. The next day, at nine o'clock in the morning, on the arrival of M. Mesmer, the state was the same. I made my way there at ten. At eleven the patient regained her entire awareness: evacuations were restored, and after three days she was in a condition to render herself to the treatment of M. Mesmer. I will not speak of the result of this treatment. However, it is one of the most singular, the most apparent and most instructive I have ever seen at the house of M. Mesmer. The example of a person unconscious for five days leaves little escape, I think, for the partisans of the imagination.  Ben Franklin at the Glass Harmonica D’Eslon discovered that physicians were not immune to crises after he passed through his own. During one of his treatments, Mesmer played the glass harmonica for d’Eslon. Even as he produced his ethereal music, Mesmer directed animal magnetism towards the young man. His doctor-patient eventually “begged for mercy” because of the turmoil (crisis) he felt roiling up inside himself. For ten years I have been subject to a pain of the stomach, from an obstruction in the small lobe of the liver. It bothered me frequently, and I always stood on guard against anything that could offend or hurt this part. Some days I was obliged to release the buttons of my jacket to breathe at my ease and without pain. Today I strike my stomach without discomfort. I have also an embarrassment in the head and a continual cold spot in the right temple, which bothers me much on days of work or of fatigue. These two inconveniences of long times served me to consent to the experiments of M. Mesmer. He even had many times the pleasure to play the [glass] harmonica or pianoforte in their favor; not without my being obliged to give him every time thanks for the music. I told him one day very seriously that I should be treated if I had time. “Good!” he replied, “Do you not come here every day? You are cautious: put yourself to the treatment, you will remain whenever you want or you can, if you do not get entire healing, you get half, a quarter, an eighth: it will be some gain.” I followed his advice; and in fact, I was like the others, my crises, my evacuations, my liver pain, torment of the head; my forehead was peeling, and I found myself relieved. Say how much I kept these effects, I really can not. My treatment has been too fragmented, to subject myself to any calculation. From Record
of the Most Interesting Pieces on Animal Magnetism
by Antoine Court de Gebelin, 1784.
Court de Gebelin was a French philologist and writer who discovered Dr. Mesmer in his moment of great need. I relate purely & simply what I experienced, what I saw, what I believe; if I am wrong, I will be very grateful to those who straighten me out; & if I speak the truth, and my feeble voice can contribute to the healing of some, I congratulate myself for not being afraid to make testimony to that which I believe the truth. I was at death, I am healed. This fact is probably somewhat interesting: that which can have more advantage, is to know the cause or the happy physician who restored me: if it is imagination, Nature, or the cleverness of Aesculapius: for my dear fellow citizens share in all this; they laugh when I tell them that I have been healed; and of force of mind, they well confuse the question, so that they almost would persuade me that I have not been sick, or that I have not been healed. Gebelin had been ill for nine months when he gave up on ordinary medicine in August 1782. At the time, he was suffering with an eye inflammation and blood in his urine. With an injured leg, sores then on the same leg, he could not walk. The patient also had hemorrhoids, boils, devouring thirst, the left leg swollen and the right defleshed. Gebelin had given up and was quietly awaiting death. I have seen myself gradually develop these terrible symptoms that left me no more hope. Swelling and pains, thirst and torments, the desperate winds, hemorrhoids, total collapse, lack of appetite, everything has left in a short time: the thick tenacious bile was flowing like water: color and livid pale face gave way to a more natural one: the feet have acquired a life they had lost for over twenty years: I walk better and better, withstand fatigue more than I was doing a year ago; and this is not an illusion: those who saw me suffering and who sympathized with my state, congratulated me every day for that rapid progress that made my best-being. I add that I do not owe the betterment to any remedy; I did not take anything internally, and that no one made me any external application of any visible remedy. “Not possible,” they say. I agree that it is hard to digest, very hard, and that if you had told me ten years ago that one day I would be cured in this way, I would have laughed. “It is imagination, it is nature that earned you the best: the imagination persuades what we do not see and feel: Nature, and especially Nature in Spring, revives all beings, and renders them an activity they had not.” I got it; the delirious imagination makes us see that which we do not: it has on us a power greater perhaps than on those same not thinking who make this objection to us: I surely do not ignore that Nature can save us, the amazing and salutary crises which are sometimes more: but I am very convinced that our scholarly Physicians take care not to resort to such solutions: they too would fear if one said unto them: “If imagination, if Nature have so powerful remedies, if they are so effective, how is that you do not yield to the masters? How are they so powerful outside your hands, so weak when you wish to use it? How is it the trust we have in you does not inflame the imagination? And how, with this imagination, Nature and your deep knowledge, do you not operate with the same effect that you seem to attribute to Nature alone, or to the mobile illusions and vagaries of the imagination? With more resources, would you produce less effects?” Dr. Mesmer was brought to Gebelin’s home on Annunciation Day. M. Mesmer examined my leg, passed and re-passed the hand over this excessive swelling, and told me: “My treatment could be useful to you.” “Very well! But I can neither walk nor ride in a carriage: and I remain without expectation.” M. Mesmer retired after telling me it was absolutely necessary to walk, to leave the bed, to cover with bandages down the leg to give tone to the muscles, drink cream of tartar. But the next day, I could put on the shoe, put two buttons on the knee: so there was improvement in less than twenty-four hours. It is with this imagination not stimulated that I saw all symptoms disappear successively and quickly: thirst after two or three days; swelling of the thigh and its pains after seven or eight; then I could already walk back: the winds disappeared at the same time, and made room for the larger appetite: after thirty-six hours I began to be purged, once in twenty-four, then once in the twelve, then six in six; and after fifteen day, ten to twelve times per day. I know it is claimed, that it is impossible to persuade men, that it is rising up for those who dare to publish and print they had been healed by M. Mesmer: I know that everything that can seduce has been tried, and has been by men whose knowledge and talents seemed to have to put in equal respect: I also know that I can not fight against them, not being from any Faculty and never making profession of the most useful science on this earth, the one to conserve and to heal. But though I am the weakest of Champions that M. Mesmer could have, facts and truth speak so victoriously in his favor, with these weapons I am not afraid to put myself forward, and invite the Public to give to his discovery the attention it deserves. Charles du Haussay, Major of Infantry and Knight of the Royal and Military Order of St. Louis, had suffered from typhus in the Indies and was a physical wreck. Broken in mind and body, he made his way to Dr. Mesmer. The following is an extract of Haussay’s testimony: “Justice demands that I should give to the public the particulars of my disease, and of the effects produced on me by the proceedings of Dr. Mesmer. “On the night of the 24th of December, 1757, I was with the rest of the army in the encampment before the town of Zell, in Hanover; fatigued and want of rest for an exceedingly cold night. When the drum beat to arms, two grenadiers raised me up, for at first I was unable to move, much less to stand on my feet. But soon the excitement of the action, and the natural energy of health and youth, over came the consequences of my imprudence. The war ended without much perceptible injury to my system, but two years after the peace was concluded I experienced a very severe disease in the chest, which the constant use of milk succeeded in removing. “Some time after, a kind of humor appeared on my face; it rapidly increased and covered the whole front, the eyes, the nose, and the cheeks. Physicians tried uselessly to remedy this disorder. I perceived that it not only grew worse, but my legs began to refuse me their support. However, I went in 1772 to Martinique, where the typhus fever reduced me to the last extremity. It ended in a general paralysis, which compelled me to go back to France, in hope of finding there some relief from my infirmities. “After four years of useless experiments and the constant attendance of eminent physicians, among whom I can name several members of the Royal Society of Medicine of Paris, who personally know me and my case, I consented, as a last resort, to accept the proposition of Dr. Mesmer to try the proceedings of a method heretofore unknown. When I arrived at his establishment, my head was constantly shaking — my neck was bent forward — my eyes were protruding from their sockets and greatly inflamed — my tongue was paralyzed, and it was with the utmost difficulty that I could speak – a perpetual and involuntary laugh distorted my mouth — my cheeks and nose were of a red purple — my respiration was very much embarrassed, and I suffered a constant pain between my shoulders; all my body trembled, and my legs tottered most awkwardly. In a word, my gait was that of an old drunkard, rather than that of a man of forty. “I know nothing about the nature of the means resorted to by Dr. Mesmer; but that which I can say with the greatest truth, is, that without using any kind of drugs, or other remedy than ‘Animal Magnetism,’ as he styles it, he made me feel the most extraordinary sensations from head to foot. I experienced a crisis characterized by a cold so intense that it seemed to me that ice was coming out from my limbs; this was followed by a great heat, and a perspiration of a very fetid nature, and so abundant at times as to cause my mattresses to be wet through. This crisis lasted over a month; since that time I have rapidly recovered, and now, after about four months, I stand erect and easy — my head is firm and upright — my tongue moves very well, and I speak as plainly as anybody — my nose, eyes, and cheeks are natural — my color announces my age and good health — my respiration is free —my chest has expanded — I feel no pain whatever — my limbs are steady and vigorous — I walk very quickly, without any care, and with ease — my digestion and appetite are excellent — in a word, I am perfectly free from all infirmities. “I certify that this statement is in every particular conformable to truth. Given under my hand and seal, at Paris, the 28th of August, 1778. Signed “CH. DU HAUSSAY, “Major of infantry, and Knight of the royal and military order of St. Louis.” |
The Great Physician
Love Heals
“Even as there is only one nature, one life, one health,
there is, only one disease, one remedy, one healing.”
Mesmer
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