Mesmerism: What Mesmer Did, and What Survives in Magnetism Today

In the spring of 1784, Louis XVI appointed nine scientists to test whether a Vienna-trained medical graduate's 'animal magnetism' was real. The panel included Benjamin Franklin, then U.S. ambassador in Paris, and Antoine Lavoisier. They blindfolded subjects, told some they were being magnetized when they were not, and watched the convulsions arrive on cue. The fluid, they wrote, did not exist. The effects did. Two hundred and forty years later, that finding is still the most honest way to explain what magnetism practitioners do.

This article covers the history: what Mesmer did, what the commission concluded, and how one theory split into hypnosis on one side and hands-on magnetism on the other. If you want the plain description of a session and what practitioners claim, read our explanation of magnetism as a hands-on practice first.

What did Mesmer actually do in Vienna and Paris?

Mesmer, trained in medicine in Vienna, treated people from the 1770s by passing his hands over their bodies and, at first, by applying magnets. He dropped the magnets when he noticed the effects happened without them. His conclusion, recorded in his 1779 Mémoire, was that a universal fluid flowed through every living thing and that illness came from blockages in it. He called the force animal magnetism, 'animal' meaning living, as opposed to mineral magnetism.

Our magnetism manual puts it this way: Mesmer borrowed the familiar physical phenomenon of magnets attracting and repelling, and reasoned that a similar but invisible force existed inside living beings. That is the whole theory in one sentence.

Vienna turned against him after a public failure with a blind pianist, and he moved to Paris in 1778. There he built the baquet: a wooden tub of water and iron filings with rods sticking out, around which a dozen clients sat holding hands while Mesmer walked among them in a lilac robe. Sessions ended in a 'crisis', often convulsions, that he considered the sign of healing. It was fashionable, expensive, and by 1784 the talk of the city.

The three names in every French manual

• Mesmer (1734-1815): the fluid theory and the passes.
• Puységur (1751-1825): a pupil who, in 1784, found that a magnetized farmhand fell into a calm, talkative 'magnetic sleep' rather than a convulsive crisis. Our manual calls this the turning point toward what was later named hypnosis.
• Deleuze (1753-1835): the librarian who systematized the practice in 1813 and, in our manual's words, reflected more on the mind and imagination's effect on the body than on the fluid itself.

What did the 1784 Franklin commission conclude?

It concluded that animal magnetism, as a physical fluid, did not exist, and that every observed effect could be produced by imagination alone. The commissioners, working with Mesmer's associate Charles Deslon rather than Mesmer himself, ran what many historians consider the first blinded placebo trials. A woman told that Deslon was magnetizing her from behind a door convulsed; when he really was, unannounced, nothing happened. A subject 'magnetized' a tree in a garden and a boy fainted at the wrong tree.

The report, published in August 1784, is short and readable. Its key line: imagination without magnetism produces convulsions; magnetism without imagination produces nothing. A second, secret report to the king warned about the moral risks of the crisis room. Mesmer left Paris within a year.

How did one theory become both hypnosis and magnetism?

The split happened along the line the commission drew. Those who accepted that the mind produced the effects followed Puységur's magnetic sleep. The Abbé Faria taught in Paris in 1813 that 'lucid sleep' came from the subject's own concentration. In 1843 the Scottish surgeon James Braid coined 'hypnotism' to cut all ties with the fluid, and from Braid the line runs through Charcot, Bernheim and, in the 20th century, Milton Erickson.

Those who kept the hands kept the fluid, or at least the language of it. In France, Belgium and Switzerland the magnétiseur became a recognized folk figure: the village healer who 'takes the fire' out of a burn, sweeps a painful shoulder, and is often called by the family before anyone else. Our manual traces this lineage back past Mesmer to Paracelsus and to an Egyptian papyrus of 1500 BCE that instructs, in translation, 'place the hand on the pain and tell the pain to go away.'

In the United States the two branches had very different fates. Hypnosis became a regulated, title-sensitive profession; our article on hypnosis title rules by state covers that. European-style magnetism barely arrived. Our May 2026 survey of U.S. training providers found the term 'magnetic healing' occupied by static magnet products, by the Mexican biomagnetic-pair method, and by rebranded hands-on programs, with no native pipeline for the French tradition and a 70 percent online format mix.

What are the passes, and how are they taught today?

A pass is a slow hand movement over the body, without contact, in a set direction. Three families survive in the French tradition, and our magnetism manual teaches all three with written instructions that a student can be examined on.

1. 1

   Long descending passes (grand courant)

   Stand above the head with fists closed. Open the palms and sweep slowly down the body, without touching, to beyond the feet. Close the fists and return along the side of the table, never back up over the client. The manual asks for 5 to 10 minutes of this to open the session and a shorter repeat to close it.

2. 2

   Short passes (petit courant)

   The same movement confined to one limb, used on a painful knee or a cold forearm. The manual pairs it with the practitioner's reading of warm zones and cold zones on the body.

3. 3

   Transverse passes

   Arms crossed above the head, then uncrossed outward, repeated while moving down the body. The tradition describes this as clearing; the manual allows the practitioner to add a spoken intention if that fits the client's beliefs, and to work the whole body or one zone only.

4. 4

   Ascending pass to finish

   The client sits, feet flat, legs uncrossed, and the practitioner sweeps from feet to head. The manual notes this is rarer and exists to close and ground the session.

Two other manoeuvres appear in the same chapter. Circles, counter-clockwise to disperse and clockwise to stimulate. And the breath: pursed lips for a cool stream over a hot zone, an open 'O' for a warm stream over a cold one, with one explicit rule, no warm breath over the heart. These are the hands of a village magnétiseur written down.

What does a modern magnetism session look like?

It looks like a quiet 45 to 60 minutes on a massage table, clothed, with a practitioner moving around you and rarely touching. The final protocol in our manual lists 16 steps in order. Welcome and listening to fix the goal of the session. The practitioner's own grounding. First contact. A survey of warm and cold zones. Then the sequence of passes above, specific work on the zones raised at intake, a dynamic long pass, a re-check of the same zones, and the seated ascending pass to end.

Students also learn to write case notes. The manual's format limits each note to the person's initials, age, date, duration, whether it is a first session or a follow-up, and a short summary. It is explicit: do not tell the person's life story; we want to see your ability to summarize and to debrief the client at the end.

What do we claim, and what do we refuse to claim?

We claim that a trained practitioner can deliver a calm, repeatable, well-documented session that most clients find deeply relaxing, and that the technique has a written lineage older than the United States. We refuse to claim a fluid, a cure, or an outcome. The manual's own history chapter cites Kirlian photography and magnetite in the body as supporting evidence; I ask our faculty to teach those as historical arguments, not as proof, because they are not proof.

I chose to keep the full Mesmer-to-commission history in our curriculum's first module for a practical reason: a practitioner who can tell a skeptical client, accurately, that Benjamin Franklin tested this in 1784 and found imagination did the work, earns more trust than one who cannot. If that honesty appeals to you, our in-person magnetism program runs 3 classroom days (21 teaching hours), plus about 19 hours of personal study between sessions, for $1,500.

Why does the lineage matter if the fluid does not exist?

Because the lineage is what makes the technique teachable and examinable. A practice with named manoeuvres, durations, an order of operations and a case-note format can be taught to ten people and checked by an instructor. A practice that is 'just intention' cannot. That is the difference between a certification and a weekend of vibes, and it is the argument we make in our piece on why who taught your teacher matters.

Mesmer was wrong about the mechanism and right that people relax when a calm person spends an hour attending to them with slow, deliberate movement. The commission said as much in 1784. A modern practitioner keeps the second half and drops the first, and says so out loud.