frame. The collective experience of a great number of centuries has
made us acquainted with the symptoms, which indicate and discriminate
them; the same experience has taught the method in which they are to
be treated. What is the object of the efforts of the physician in this
method? It is not to oppose and to subdue nature, it is to assist her
in her operations. Nature, says the father of the medical science,
cures the diseased; but sometimes she encounters obstacles, which
constrain her in her course, and uselessly consume her strength. The
physician is the minister of nature; an attentive observer, he studies
the method in which she proceeds. If that method be firm, strong,
regular and well directed, the physician looks on in silence, and
bewares of disturbing it by remedies which would at least be useless;
if the method be embarrassed, he facilitates it; if it be too slow or
too rapid, he accelerates or retards it. Sometimes, to accomplish his
object, he confines himself to the regulation of the diet: sometimes
he employs medicines. The action of a medicine, introduced into the
human body, is a new force, combined with the principal force by which
our life is maintained: if the remedy follow the same route, which
this force has already opened for the expulsion of diseases, it is
useful, it is salutary; if it tend to open different routes, and to
turn aside this interior action, it is pernicious. In the mean time it
must be confessed that this salutary or pernicious influence, real as
it is, may frequently escape common observation. The natural history
of man presents us in this respect with very singular phenomena. It
may be there seen that regimens the most opposite, have not prevented
the attainment of an advanced old age. We may there see men, attacked
according to all appearance with the same disease, recovering in the
pursuit of opposite regimens, and in the use of remedies totally
different from each other; nature is in these instances sufficiently
powerful to maintain the vital principle in spite of the improper
regimen, and to triumph at once over the distemper and the remedy. If
it have this power of resisting the action of medicine, by a still
stronger reason it must have the power of operating without medicine.
The experience of the efficacy of remedies is always therefore attended
with some uncertainty; in the case of the magnetism the uncertainty has
this addition, the uncertainty of its existence. How then can we decide
upon the action of an agent, whose existence is contested, from the
treatment of diseases; when the effect of medicines is doubtful, whose
existence is not at all problematical?
The cure which is principally cited in favour of the magnetism is
that of M. le baron de ----; all classes are acquainted with its
history. We shall not here enter into a discussion of the facts; we
shall not enquire whether the remedies precedingly employed might have
contributed to this cure. On the one hand the very critical situation
of the patient is admitted, and on the other the inefficacy of all the
ordinary means of medical science; the magnetism has been employed
and M. le baron de ---- has completely recovered. But might not a
natural crisis have singly operated this recovery? A woman of low
rank and extremely poor, who lived at the Gros-caillou, was attacked
in 1779 with a malignant fever in all its symptoms; she resolutely
refused every assistance, she only desired that a vessel which she
had near her should be kept constantly replenished with water: she
remained quiet upon the straw which served her for a bed, drinking
water continually and doing nothing more. The disease developed itself,
passed successively through its different stages, and terminated in a
complete cure[9]. Mademoiselle G----, who lived at the lesser royal
mews, had two indurations formed in her right breast, which gave her
great pain; a surgeon recommended to her the use of the Eau du Peintre
as an excellent dissolvent; at the same time informing her, that if
this remedy did not succeed in a month, it would be necessary to
extirpate them by incision. The young lady, terrified at this sentence,
consulted M. Sallin, who gave it as his opinion that the indurations
were susceptible of resolution; M. Bonvart, who was also consulted,
confirmed the opinion of M. Sallin. Before entering upon any course of
remedy, they prescribed dissipation; fifteen days after she was seized
at the opera with a violent cough, and so profuse an expectoration,
that she was obliged to be carried home; she spit in the space of four
hours about three pints of a viscid lymph; one hour after this M.
Sallin examined the breast, he discovered no trace of induration. M.
Bouvart, called in the next day, proved on his part the happy effect of
this natural crisis. If mademoiselle G---- had taken Eau du Peintre,
the honour of her cure would have been attributed to this medicine.
The uninterrupted observation of ages proves, and the professors of
physic acknowledge, that nature alone and without our interference,
cures a great number of persons. If the magnetism were absolutely
inactive, the patients, who undergo this method of cure, might be
considered as abandoned to nature. It would be absurd to chuse a method
of deciding upon the existence of this agent, which, by attributing to
it all the cures performed by nature, would tend to prove that it had
an action useful and curative, when in reality it might have no action
at all.
Upon this head the commissioners are of the opinion of M. Mesmer.
He rejected the cure of diseases, when this method of proving the
magnetism was proposed to him by a member of the academy of sciences:
“It is a mistake,” replied he, “to imagine that this kind of proof is
unanswerable; it cannot be demonstrated that either the physician or
the medicine causes the recovery of the patient[10].”
The treatment of diseases can therefore furnish nothing but a result,
always uncertain, often deceitful; nor can this uncertainty be
dissipated, and all the causes of illusion compensated, but by an
infinity of cures, perhaps by the experience of successive centuries.
The object and importance of the commission demand means of a speedier
description. It was the duty of the commissioners to confine themselves
to arguments purely physical, that is, to the momentaneous effects of
the fluid upon the animal frame, excluding from these effects all the
illusions which might mix with them, and assuring themselves that they
could proceed from no other cause than the animal magnetism.
They proposed to make experiments upon single subjects, who might
be willing to submit to the various experiments which they should
invent; and who, some of them by their simplicity, and others by their
intelligence, should be capable of giving an exact and faithful
account of their sensations. These experiments we shall not confine
ourselves to relate in the order of time, but shall follow the order of
the facts they were intended to elucidate.
The commissioners in the first place resolved to make their first
experiments upon themselves, and personally to experience the action
of the magnetism. They were extremely curious to become acquainted
by their own sensations with the effects ascribed to this agent.
They therefore submitted themselves to these effects, and in such a
disposition, that they would not have been sorry to have undergone some
accidents and a partial derangement of health, which being evidently
produced by the operation of the magnetism, should have enabled them
to decide this important question upon the spot, and with their own
testimony. But in submitting themselves to the magnetism in this
manner, the commissioners have employed one necessary precaution. There
is not an individual, in a state of the fullest health, who, if he paid
a close attention to the point, would not be sensible to an infinity of
interior motions and variations, either of a pain infinitely slight, or
of heat in different parts of his body; these variations which exist at
all times are independent of the magnetism. To turn and fix in this
manner ones attention upon oneself, is not perhaps itself entirely
without its effects. There is so intimate a connection, whatever be the
vehicle of that connection, between the volitions of the soul and the
motions of the body, that it is not easy to prescribe limits to the
influence of attention, which appears to be nothing more than a train
of volitions, directed, constantly and without interruption, to the
same object. When we recollect that the arm is moved by the will as it
pleases, how can we be certain, that the attention being fixed upon
some interior part of our frame, may not excite some slight emotion in
it, direct the heat towards it, and so modify its actual situation as
to produce in it new sensations? The first thing therefore, to which
the commissioners were bound to attend, was not to observe too minutely
what passed within them. If the magnetism were a real and operative
cause, there was no need that it should be made an object of thought,
in order to its action and manifesting itself: it ought, so to express
ourselves, to compel and arrest the attention, and to render itself
perceptible to a mind that should even be distracted from it by design.
But in determining to make experiments upon themselves, the
commissioners unanimously resolved to make those experiments private,
without admitting any stranger, except M. Deslon, by whom the
operation was to be performed, or such persons as they should chuse; in
like manner they engaged not to submit to the magnetism at the public
process, in order that they might discuss freely their observations,
and be in all events the sole, or at least the first judges of the
symptoms observed.
In pursuance of these determinations, a particular apartment and a
separate bucket were destined for their use in the house of M. Deslon,
and the commissioners repaired thither once in the course of every
week. The operation was continued in each experiment for two hours and
a half, the branch of iron being in contact with the left hypochonder,
surrounded with a cord of communication, and forming from time to time
the chain of fingers and thumbs. They were magnetised either by M.
Deslon, or, in his absence, by one of his pupils; some of them for a
longer time and more frequently than others, and those with whom this
was the case were the commissioners who appeared from constitution and
habit the most susceptible. The operation was performed sometimes with
the finger and the rod of iron presented and guided along the different
parts of the body, sometimes by the application of the hands and the
pressure of the fingers, either upon the hypochonders, or upon the pit
of the stomach.
Not one of the commissioners felt any sensation, or at least none
which ought to be ascribed to the action of the magnetism. Some of
the commissioners are of a robust constitution; others have more
delicate habits, and are subject to interruptions of their health:
one of these last, was sensible of a slight pain at the pit of the
stomach, in consequence of a considerable pressure that was employed
upon that part. This pain continued all that and the next day, and
was accompanied with a sensation of fatigue and dejection. Another
felt, in the afternoon of one of the days in which the experiments
were performed, a slight irritation of the nerves, to which he is
very subject. A third, endowed with a still greater sensibility, and
especially with an extreme restlessness of the nerves, was subject to
a higher degree of pain and a more perceptible irritation; but these
lesser accidents are the result of perpetual and ordinary variations
in the state of their health, and are of consequence foreign to the
operation they had undergone, or proceed only from the pressure
employed upon the region of the stomach. The commissioners do not speak
of these slight details, but from a scrupulous fidelity; they relate
them, because they have imposed it as a law upon themselves constantly
and in every particular to lay the truth.
The commissioners could not avoid being struck with the difference of
the private experiment made upon themselves from the public process.
All was calm and silence in the one, all restlessness and agitation
in the other; there multiplied symptoms, violent crises, the ordinary
state both of body and mind interrupted and overthrown, and nature
wrought up to the highest pitch; here the body free from pain, and
the mind from anxiety, nature preserving her ordinary course and her
equilibrium, in a word the absolute privation of every kind of effect:
the stupendous influence, which creates such an astonishment in the
public process, appears no longer; the magnetism stripped of its energy
seems perfectly supine and inactive.
The commissioners, having at first submitted to the experiment only
once a week, were desirous to ascertain whether a continuity of
experiment would produce any effect; they submitted to it three days
successively, but their insensibility was the same, and the magnetism
appeared with respect to them perfectly impotent. This experiment, made
at once upon eight different subjects, several of whom were subject to
habitual derangements of health, authorises the conclusion that the
magnetism has little or no action in a state of health, or even in a
state of lesser infirmity. We then resolved to make experiments upon
persons really diseased, and we chose them out of the lower class.
Seven of these were assembled at Passy, at the house of Dr. Franklin;
the operation was performed upon them by M. Deslon in the presence of
all the commissioners.
The widow Saint-Amand, asthmatic, having the belly, legs and thighs
swelled; and dame Anseaume, who had a swelling upon her thigh, felt
no sensation; the little Claude Renard, a child of six years of age,
scrophulous, almost consumptive, having the knees swelled, the legs
bent inward, and the articulation nearly deprived of motion, a very
interesting child, and possessing a greater degree of understanding
than is usual at his age, was likewise conscious to no sensation; any
more than Geneviève Leroux, nine years of age, subject to convulsions,
and to a disorder greatly resembling that which is called St. Vitus’s
Dance. François Grenet experienced some effects; he had a distemper
in his eyes, particularly in the right, in which he had scarcely
any sight, and in which there was a considerable tumour. When the
operation was directed towards the left eye, by approaching and moving
backward and forward the thumb very near and for a considerable time,
he was sensible of a pain in the ball of the eye, and the eye watered.
When the operation was directed to the right eye, which was the most
disordered, he felt no sensation in it; he felt the same pain in the
left eye, and nothing in any other part of the body.
Dame Charpentier, who had been thrown down against a log of wood by a
cow two years before, had experienced the most unfortunate consequences
from this accident; she lost her sight, recovered it afterwards in
part, but remained in a state of habitual infirmities; she declared
that she had two ruptures, and the belly of so great sensibility, that
she could not bear the pressure of the strings of her petticoats: this
sensibility belongs to the case of nervous irritation; the slightest
pressure upon the region of the belly is capable of determining this
irritation, and producing, through the correspondence of the nerves,
effects in every part of the body.
The operation was performed upon this woman as upon the rest by
the application and the pressure of the fingers; the pressure was
extremely painful to her: afterwards, in directing the finger towards
the rupture, she complained of a pain in her head; the finger being
placed before her face, she said she could not draw her breath. Upon
the repeated motion of the finger upwards and downwards, she had
sudden starts of the head and shoulders, like those which are commonly
occasioned by surprise mixed with terror, for instance that of a
person who has some drops of cold water suddenly thrown in his face.
She appeared to have the same startings when her eyes were closed.
The fingers being held under her nose, while her eyes were shut, she
complained of a sensation of faintness so long as they were continued
there. The seventh subject, Joseph Ennuyé, experienced sensations of a
similar nature, but much less considerable.
Of these seven patients four felt no sensation at all; three
experienced some effects from the operation. These effects deserved to
engage the attention of the commissioners, and demanded an accurate
examination.
The commissioners, to obtain further light, and to define their
ideas upon this part of the subject, resolved to make the experiment
upon patients, placed in other circumstances, and selected from the
polite world; such as could not be suspected of sinister views, and
whose understanding made them capable of enquiring into and giving
a faithful account of their sensations. Mesdames de B---- and de
V----, messieurs M---- and R---- were admitted to the private bucket
together with the commissioners; they were intreated to remark their
sensations, without fixing upon them too regular an attention. M.
M---- and madame de V---- were the only persons who experienced any
sensation. M. M---- had an indolent tumour over the whole articulation
of the knee, and a constant pain in the patella. He declared, during
the operation, that he felt nothing in any part of his body, except
in the moment that the finger was guided before the diseased knee;
he then thought that he felt a slight degree of heat in the place,
in which he has habitually the sensation of pain. Madame de V----,
attacked with a nervous disorder, was several times upon the point of
falling asleep during the operation. The experiment having continued
for an hour and nineteen minutes without interruption, and for the
greater part by the application of the hands, she was sensible to
nothing but a sensation of irritation and dejection. These two subjects
underwent the experiment only once. M. R----, whose distemper was
the remainder of an obstruction in the liver, the consequence of a
very violent disorder of that kind ill cured, underwent the operation
three times and felt nothing. Madame de B----, severely attacked with
obstructions, underwent the experiment constantly at the same time
with the commissioners, and felt nothing; it is necessary to observe,
that she submitted to the magnetism with an extreme tranquility, which
originated in the highest degree of incredulity.
Experiments were made at other times upon different subjects, but
without the assistance of the bucket. One of the commissioners, in a
violent head-ach, had the operation performed upon him by M. Deslon
for half an hour; one of the symptoms of his disorder was an extreme
cold in his feet. M. Deslon brought his foot near that of the patient,
the foot was never the warmer, and the head-ach lasted its ordinary
term. The patient, having placed himself near a fire, obtained from it
the salutary effects which heat has constantly procured him, without
experiencing, either during that day or the night following, any effect
from the magnetism.
Dr. Franklin, though the weakness of his health hindered him from
coming to Paris, and assisting at the experiments which were there
made, was magnetised by M. Deslon at his own house at Passy. The
assembly was numerous; every person who was present underwent the
operation. Some sick persons, who had come with M. Deslon, were subject
to the effects of the magnetism in the same manner as at the public
process; but madame de B----, Dr. Franklin, his two relations, his
secretary, and an American officer, felt no sensation, though one of
Dr. Franklin’s relations was convalescent, and the American officer had
at that time a regular fever.
The experiments we have related, furnish a number of facts, calculated
to illustrate, and fit to be compared with each other, and from which
the commissioners were at liberty to deduce certain inferences. Of
fourteen sick persons five only appeared to feel any effect from the
operation, nine felt no effect at all. The commissioner, who had
the head-ach and coldness in the feet, derived no benefit from the
magnetism, nor did his feet recover their natural heat. This agent
has not therefore the property which has been attributed to it of
communicating heat to the feet. The magnetism has also been said
to have the property of discovering the species, and particularly
the seat of diseases, by the pain, which the action of this fluid
infallibly occasions in that part. Such an advantage would be of
great consequence; the fluid which was the instrument of it would
be a valuable means in the hands of the physician, often deceived
by equivocal symptoms: but François Grenet felt no sensation, no
pain, but in the eye least affected. If the redness and tumour of
the other eye had not furnished external symptoms, in judging from
the effect of the magnetism we should have been led to conclude that
it was undistempered. M. R---- and madame de B----, both attacked
with obstructions, and madame de B---- with great severity, as they
were conscious to no sensation, would have received no intelligence,
either respecting the species, or the seat of their disease. And yet
obstructions are among the disorders, which are said to be particularly
subject to the action of the magnetism; since according to the new
theory the free and rapid circulation of this fluid through the nerves,
is a means of opening the channels and destroying the obstacles, that
is, the obstructions, which it encounters in its passage. It is at
the same time said that the magnetism is the touchstone of health:
if therefore M. R---- and madame de B---- had not experienced the
derangements and the sufferings inseparable from obstructions, they
would have had a right to believe that they enjoyed the best health
in the world. The same thing may be said of the American officer: the
magnetism therefore announced as the discoverer of diseases completely
failed of its effect.
The heat that M. M---- felt in the patella, is an effect too slight
and fugitive to authorise any conclusions. It may be suspected
that it proceeded from the cause already descanted on, a too great
attention to observe what passes within us: the same attention would
discover similar sensations at any other time, when the magnetism
was not employed. The drowsiness experienced by madame de V---- must
undoubtedly be ascribed to the regularity and fatigue of preserving the
same situation; if she was sensible to any vaporous emotion, it must be
remembered that it is a known property of nervous affections, to have
much dependency upon the attention that is paid them; to renew them it
is only necessary to hear them spoken of, or to think of them. It is
easy to judge what ought to be expected from a woman, whose nerves are
extremely irritable, and who, being magnetised for an hour and nineteen
minutes, had during that time no other subject of reflection than
that of the disorders which are habitual to her. She might have had a
nervous crisis more considerable than that we have described, without
our having a right to be surprised at it.
There remains then only the effects produced upon dame Charpentier,
François Grenet and Joseph Ennuyé, which can be supposed to derive
from the operation of the magnetism. In comparing these three
particular facts to the rest, the commissioners were astonished
that three subjects of the lower class should be the only ones who
felt any thing from the operation, while those of a more elevated
rank, of more enlightened understandings, and better qualified to
describe their sensations, have felt nothing. Without doubt François
Grenet experienced a pain and a watering in the eye when the thumb
was approached very near to it; dame Charpentier complained, that in
touching her stomach the pressure corresponded to her rupture; and the
pressure might have been in part the cause of what she felt; but the
commissioners suspected that these sensations were augmented by moral
causes.