1784

Baron de Breteuil, minister of France’s royal household, appoints two scientific committees to investigate and report to King Louis XVI on the medical credentials of mesmerist doctrine and the mesmerist movement. Relying on clinical trials that had become customary with all innovative medical treatments in the late Ancien Regime, the committees found that mesmerism (animal magnetism) was a sham, with susceptibility to it a function of suggestibility, poverty, and ignorance (Brockliss & Jones, loc 5880ff.).