mesmerized - etymology & story - podictionary 554

If I look up the word mesmerized in a modern dictionary it
will tell me that to be mesmerized is to be fascinated and almost put
into a trance, or hypnotized.  The New Oxford American Dictionary gives the following example sentence:

“she was mesmerized by the blue eyes that stared so intently into her own”

But about 250 years ago to be mesmerized meant to be fondled by a
quack doctor.  I’m exaggerating here because at the time the word
hadn’t yet been invented.  But the reason we think of being mesmerized
as being in a kind of hypnotic state of distraction was that there was
at that time one Doctor Mesmer who for some time achieved a
considerable degree of personal gain and - I understand - personal
pleasure from some ideas that would have him locked up today.

Doctor Mesmer started out as as real a doctor as any in Vienna but
soon met up with another guy who was into the healing properties of
magnets.  Mesmer grabbed onto this new curative technology with both
hands and began to attract patients, mostly women, to a kind of boudoir
clinic where he attempted to heal them by caressing them with magnets.

Because magnets don’t actually have curative powers two things then
happened.  One was that the Queen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had
him investigated and then gave him 24 hours to get out of town.  The
other was that old Doctor Mesmer found that he had just as much success
at curing patients if he dispensed with the magnets altogether and just
did the caressing with his hands.  He claimed this was a kind of animal
magnetism.

Since he’d been kicked out of Vienna he moved to Paris and opened a
new boudoir clinic where suffering ladies would come and press their
bodies against barrels filled with magnetic material and have handsome
young men effect the cure by running their hands all over the poor sick
ladies bodies.  Some particularly important cases Doctor Mesmer saw
himself, alone, in his private rooms.

Before too long The King of France was wondering what this was all
about and he too set up a panel of investigation.  You’ll recognize a
few of the names from this panel.  One was Joseph Guillotin (yes, that
Guillotin) and another was the American diplomat in town at the time, a
guy named Benjamin Franklin.

The reason that Doctor Mesmer was attracting throngs of patients was
of course that the ladies did feel better, who wouldn’t.  But the fact
was that no serious or real ailments could be cured this way and of
course the finding of the panel was that Mesmer was a quack.  But we
still remember his name whenever we are mesmerized, and it seems
usually to be by someone we find attractive.

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