Born Liars (19 page)

On 22 May 1784, a group of the most eminent thinkers in France gathered in the elegant gardens of the American ambassador's residence at Passy, just north of Paris. The distinguished gentlemen were there to witness a spectacle that the uninformed visitor might have taken for a bizarre initiation rite or obscure theatrical performance. A twelve-year-old boy wearing a blindfold was being guided from tree to tree by an older man. Each time they stopped by a tree, the boy would embrace it for two minutes. At the first tree, he began to sweat, cough, and foam at the mouth. At the second, he complained of dizziness. At the third, his symptoms worsened, and by the time he touched the fourth he collapsed, moaning, to the ground. The man picked the boy up and laid him out on the lawn in front of the spectators. The boy contorted into a series of strange shapes, before he abruptly rose to his feet, dusted himself down, and declared himself cured. The gentlemen did not applaud. Perhaps one or two of them nodded gravely, or wrote a note. Among them was the ambassador himself. Benjamin Franklin, we may assume, was experiencing a somewhat weary satisfaction in being proved right again.

This scene wasn't a rite, it was a test; although the man whose ideas were being tested wasn't present. The dis-coverer of ‘animal magnetism' would have nothing to do with any investigation of his methods.

Other than being immortalised in the word ‘mesmerise', if Franz Anton Mesmer is remembered at all today it's as a quack, a fraud and a showman. But Mesmer, German by birth, regarded himself as an enlightened man at the vanguard of science. As a young physician at Vienna University he became fascinated by the medical implications of Newton's discovery of gravity and set out to find whether human bodies were in harmony with celestial bodies. Mesmer experimented with passing magnets over and around his patients' bodies. His (mostly female) subjects reported strong sensations of energy rippling across them as he did so; some succumbed to violent convulsions, and afterwards felt much invigorated.

Mesmer then discovered he could derive the same effects by simply waving his hands over the patient's body. This was the apple falling from the tree. He concluded that he had
discovered a form of magnetism that was exerted by all living bodies upon one another through the medium of an invisible fluid that flowed from the stars, surrounding and penetrating everyone. Sickness resulted when its flow through the body was blocked by an obstacle; health was restored when the fluid was set free. Since the universe tended towards harmony anyway, the physician's role was merely to assist and augment natural healing. It was an art which only Mesmer and select disciples were qualified to practise. Mesmer, who was sceptical of the established church, had done nothing less than reframe the religious art of exorcism for a more secular, scientific age – and made himself a priest.

A man of few words, Mesmer cut a commanding figure; tall with piercing eyes and a broad, blank screen of a forehead. His colleagues in Vienna were hostile to his radical ideas, and so in 1778, aged 44, he moved to Paris, the centre of Europe's intellectual ferment. With the help of his wife's money, he rented a grand apartment on Place Vendome, laid down heavy, sound-muffling carpets, and filled the main room with various exotic
objets
. The room's centrepiece was an impressive-looking, if bizarre, apparatus: a ten-foot tub made of oak, filled with bottles of ‘magnetised water'. The tub had holes in the lid, out of which protruded jointed iron rods. When everything was in place, the mysterious doctor from Vienna announced that he was open for business.

Mesmer favoured communal healing sessions. They soon became the hottest ticket in town. With the curtains drawn, Mesmer's fashionably attired patients sat cross-legged in concentric circles around the tub. Holding hands in the dim light, and bound to one another by a rope cord, they formed a ‘chain' through which the fluid could flow, like electricity through a circuit. Ethereal, other-worldly music floated in from the next room. When the last whispering died away, Mesmer entered. Dressed in a lilac taffeta robe, he moved slowly amongst his patients, gently prodding them with an iron wand. Now and then he might sit directly opposite a patient, foot against foot, knee against knee, place his hand on their head or shoulder, and stare directly into their eyes. His subjects sighed, shrieked, fell into trances or collapsed, writhing, on the floor, at which point an assistant would carry them to a special, mattress-lined ‘crisis room' to restore their composure. When Mesmer's patients walked out, blinking, into the light of a Parisian afternoon, they declared themselves miraculously cured of ailments ranging from ennui to asthma to gout and epilepsy.

Mesmer had arrived in Paris in the year of Voltaire's death, when the city's chattering classes, already bored with the dry old Enlightenment strictures of reason and scepticism, were falling in love with a new enchantment: popular science – and barely-examined pseudo-science. The world was full of mysterious, wonderful forces: Newton's gravity, Franklin's electricity, Lavoisier's oxygen, the gases of the Montgolfiers that – did you see? – could transport men through the air. Who was to say that Mesmer's invisible fluid was less real than these or the countless other substances (ether, miasma, phlogiston) said to be permeating the world?

In these hothouse conditions Mesmerism quickly become a sensation, and Mesmer one of the most talked-about men in Europe. He grew wealthy from a steady stream of rich patients, and by franchising his methods to secret societies. Mesmer's practice was discussed in journals, portrayed in salacious cartoons, parodied on stage, sponsored by Queen Marie Antoinette, and hotly argued over in academies, cafes and salons. There were more pamphlets produced on Mesmerism than on politics during this period, even as the French state creaked and revolution brewed. Mesmer's followers regarded him as the man who had solved the problem of human suffering. His critics denounced him as a charlatan, and a dangerous seducer who preyed on the women he stroked and excited.

Mesmer's popularity was a source of anxiety to conventional doctors and scientists, whose credibility and livelihoods were at stake. In 1784 the king agreed, after considerable lobbying, that it was time to draw a line separating science from superstition, truth from lies. He formed a Royal Commission to establish once and for all whether Mesmer's treatments worked through the action of animal magnetism, or simply because people were deceived into
thinking
that they worked. The commissioners included Antoine Lavoisier, now regarded as the father of modern chemistry, the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a professor of anatomy who gave his name to the device that would eventually slice off the heads of Lavoisier and Bailly. Even in this august company, the commission's most prestigious member was Franklin.

Given that this was a purely domestic affair it might seem odd that the king should request the involvement of the American ambassador, especially one whose primary job was squeezing loans out of his government in order to underwrite an experiment in republicanism. But Franklin held a special place in the hearts of the French. Back home, he was an admired but distant figure, whose affection for England and France made him suspect in the eyes of some. In France, however, he was revered. Monsieur Franklin was lionised as the man who tamed lightning and founded America. He was esteemed for his devotion to liberty and free-thinking, and adored for his exuberant, lavishly dispensed charm. His image was found everywhere, in paintings and prints, on snuff boxes, rings and coins. Placing Franklin on the commission was a shrewd move on the king's part: if anyone could convince the public that this investigation wasn't a cynical exercise in the humiliation of an over-popular foreign celebrity, it was the ultimate foreign celebrity himself.

Franklin had met the man whose methods he'd been charged with investigating. Oddly enough, their paths had crossed due to a kind of musical placebo: the armonica, a glass-based instrument, known for its healing qualities. It was an instrument that Franklin had invented and Mesmer loved.
²³
The German had one in his mansion in Vienna and liked to play it for guests, including his friend Leopold Mozart and Leopold's son, Wolfgang Amadeus, who later composed several pieces for the instrument. Mesmer took it to Paris and in 1779 he invited Franklin and Madame Brillon, a mutual friend, to his home to hear him play. At least, that was the pretext. Mesmer was still angling for the approval of the Establishment at that time, and he spent the evening attempting to engage Franklin in a discussion of his magnetic fluid. Franklin took great interest in his host's armonica-playing.

By the time the Royal Commission was formed, Mesmer had given up his search for official approval, and he refused to cooperate with it. He knew that the Establishment cronies gathered in Franklin's garden would label him a fraud: that was what their instincts for self-preservation compelled them to do. As far as he was concerned, what mattered was that his methods
worked
. Hundreds of satisfied patients would testify to that. ‘It is to the public I appeal,' he said, cannily framing the contest as one between the honest masses and a corrupt elite. The commissioners, serious men, weren't asking whether Mesmerism worked, however, but
why
. When Mesmer's patients collapsed on to his thick-pile carpets, what were they falling for?

In deference to Franklin's age (seventy-eight) and his physical discomfort with travelling (he had a painful kidney stone), much of the commission's work was carried out at Passy. In Mesmer's place, Doctor Charles Deslon agreed to act as the advocate for Mesmerism. Deslon, a former court physician, was the only convert to Mesmerism from the medical establishment, and had been expelled from the faculty of medicine for his heresy. He was eager to prove that Mesmerism was legitimate; Mesmer denounced and disowned his former disciple for his cooperation.

After spending a few weeks listening to Deslon lecture on the theory of Mesmerism, the commissioners underwent mesmerising themselves, to little effect (Franklin reported only boredom). They then embarked on a series of elegant experiments. In one, they told a female subject falsely that she was being mesmerised by Deslon, behind a door in the next room. This was enough to send her into a violent crisis. Another woman, previously very responsive to mesmeric treatment, was blindfolded and ministered to by Deslon without her knowledge, yet reported no effects at all. Five cups of water were held before another of Deslon's patients; the fourth produced convulsions, yet she calmly swallowed the fifth, the only one to have been mesmerised. Then there was the experiment with which we opened this story. Deslon ‘magnetised' an apricot tree in Franklin's garden by passing his wand across it. Deslon was then invited to choose the subject of the test – he deemed the sickly boy especially sensitive to animal magnetism. The boy went into a crisis before reaching the magnetised tree. With these experiments the commissioners had designed the first application of placebo-controlled blind testing in the history of modern medical science.

The commission's report, published in September 1784, is a masterpiece of the clear thinking for which Franklin and his colleagues were renowned. It carefully explains how the investigation looked for evidence of the existence of Mesmer's magnetic fluid but found none. The effects were real – there was no suggestion that the sickly boy or any of the other subjects were faking their crises or their recoveries – but it was necessary to look elsewhere for causes:

Thus forced to give up on our search for physical proof, we had to investigate mental circumstances, operating now no longer as physicists but as philosophers . . . Whereas magnetism appears nonexistent to us, we were struck by the power of two of our most astonishing faculties: imitation and imagination. Here are the seeds of a new science, that of the influence of the spiritual over the physical.

Mesmerism remained popular in France for a few years more, though after his humiliation by the Establishment Mesmer himself left Paris for England and Italy, hoping for a new start that never came. He died in relative obscurity in 1815, by the shores of Lake Constance in Germany, not far from where he was born. The chimes of an armonica sang him to his rest. Deslon died in August 1786, while being mesmerised.

* * *

The authors of the Mesmerism report found that the cures by animal magnetism were in fact produced by social and mental causes (‘imitation and imagination'). Crucially, they were careful not to dismiss such effects as irrelevant or unworthy of study. The ‘new science' they proposed implied something like a fusion of what today we call social sciences – psychology, anthropology, sociology – with biological medicine.

For two centuries, the medical profession failed to cultivate the seeds sown by Franklin and Lavoisier. In its struggle to distance itself from superstition, magic and quackery, it built a wall between science and everything intangible. As a result, the ‘influence of the spiritual over the physical' became something of a taboo question, regarded by physicians and researchers alike as beneath or behind them. Doctors saw themselves as scientists of the physical world whose object of study happened to be the human body, a machine of nature that operated according to reliable laws. (This is also, of course, how Mesmer saw things.) As the medical historian David Morris puts it, if you conceive of the body as a machine, then believing in the power of lies to erase pain is ‘as irrational as filling the gas tank of a car with tea'.

Only in recent years has it begun to be accepted that sickness and health aren't just biological affairs. ‘Imitation' is increasingly viewed as playing a significant role in the health of individuals and populations. Mesmer's treatment worked more powerfully when his patient was surrounded by other patients sharing the same experience, and there's now plenty of evidence to show that our behaviours and health are strongly influenced by those around us, including large-scale studies that track the spread of conditions like heart disease and obesity through social networks.