1784

The French crown commissions two inquiries into mesmerism, one by a joint committee from the Royal Academy of Science and Faculty of Medicine of Paris, the other by members of the Royal Society of Medicine. Their charge was “to judge the legitimacy of an experimental method of healing.” In attacking animal magnetism, the commissions, aware that medicine lacked the mathematical base of physics, and uneasy appealing to the efficacy of traditional medical cures, especially for nervous diseases, bypassed the problem of epistemological certainty and focused on public relations, waging a “war of rhetoric unrivaled since the debate over late births in the 1760s.” Playwrights, actors, and journalists were invited to join the campaign in the theater and the press (L. Wilson, loc 689-698). Recurring to tactic of medical consultants who investigated the Convulsionaries in 1730s, the commissions called attention to the preponderance of female proselytes attracted to the movement and their susceptibility to convulsions” (loc 699-700). They sought to mitigate the appeal of the movement focusing on this radical aspect of the movement, and questioning whether the maladie des femmes that drew them to Mesmerists (and led to reported “cures”) were authentic (loc 857-858). The commissioners ended their report by warning that “if the mesmerists’ discontent were allowed to develop, it would grow beyond the capacity of any force to contain it.” Since the disorders for which Mesmer’s followers sought cures were primarily moral, they urged cures via “restoring and purifying the traditional values of hierarchy, privilege, and paternity” (loc 713-715).