2023-12-05 04:07:00
Scientist or charlatan? The debate around the German doctor and philosopher Franz Mesmer.
The cures of the German doctor and philosopher Franz Anton Mesmer were as famous as the reaction of modern science that condemned him was violent. In addition to being the “grandfather” of hypnosis, a practice developed by James Braid in 1842, Mesmer discovered what he called “animal magnetism,” a supposedly invisible fluid that allows the human body to function, but whose erroneous distribution or imbalance in the body is the cause of diseases.
The results of his experiments were in his favor. His patients were cured of his illnesses, but the new medicine of the 18th century, competing with these more experimental approaches, did everything possible to discredit his research. Even King Louis XVI, in 1784, ordered the creation of a French Royal Commission – made up of eminences such as the founding father of the United States Benjamin Franklin – to investigate the matter.
But the Commission’s objective was to demonstrate the existence of a “new animal magnetic fluid,” not to corroborate that Mesmer’s practices were effective. They concluded that there was no evidence of the existence of such a fluid, so they disparaged Mesmer’s work and assured that his incidents and progress were the product of “imaginations.”
Animal Magnetism, edited by Cactus, brings together the texts in which Mesmer himself (1734-1815) presents that universal fluid that he believed he found in the movement of the stars, the tides, and in all living bodies. Not only does it add entertaining chronicles of his healings and the reactions of the time. What makes it even more valuable, and is the great merit of Isabelle Stengers’ presentation text – the beginning of which can be read at the end of this note – is that it shows us why Mesmer’s nonsense still continues to interest us today.
Experimental science, Stengers points out, is subject to the parable of the lantern: a man lost his keys and looks for them under a lit lantern. Someone comes over and helps him search. After a while, he dares to ask him if he is sure he lost them there. “No,” answers the other, “not at all, but it is the only place where I can see anything.”
What is revealed is the inherence between modern medicine and a kind of conceptual character, the “modern charlatan”, a character that Mesmer would embody perfectly, and that can never be completely extirpated from his bosom. This charlatan is modern because, although it does not satisfy him, he stands on the same ground as the theoretical-experimental method.
So, unlike the definitive way in which chemistry detaches itself from alchemy, or astronomy detaches itself from astrology, medicine cannot so easily banish that shadow. The task, if there was one, might be to disaccustom her to seeing only “under the light of a lantern.”
“Animal magnetism”, by Franz Mesmer, edited by Cactus.
We all know it, we are convinced that our medicine is very different from that practiced by the doctors of Molière or Louis XIV. In one way or another, it has become “modern”, in the manner of all of our knowledge and our practices that claim to be rational. That is the evidence, but I would like to question that evidence. Not to denounce it and show that, beyond appearances, nothing changed, but in order to capture in a slightly more precise way “what” changed. And to be even more precise, “what” changed for the doctor, for the one who practices medicine.
The set of knowledge that is accumulated today regarding living organisms, the set of biochemical and metabolic analysis techniques, the means of visualization and imaging will not be absent from the scene, but they will not occupy the central position, relegating medicine to the role of transmission belt between an individual patient and general biological knowledge. Nor will the group of institutions, industries, administrative regulations, and modes of financing that nevertheless contribute to shaping medical practices occupy the central position.
In short, it is not regarding talking regarding medicine in general, with its problems, its inertia, its ambitions, its more or less vicious circles or its more or less uncontrollable drifts. My question has nothing sociological either. I am not interested in knowing “who” the doctor is, but rather “what” it means to be a doctor since our medicine is modern: dealing with a “suffering body,” and dealing with it within the framework of a practice that is intended to be rational. In short: what does it mean, for the doctor, to depend on rational practice?
A first problem arises. Since what we call modern sciences has existed, every knowledge, every practice that claims to be rational, must be situated in relation to that reference. Now, in the spectrum of rhetorical and/or practical strategies deployed for this purpose, medicine represents a rather particular case, and this for at least three reasons.
On the one hand, it is a practice that we can call immemorial: in all civilizations, in all human groups, in all cultures, there are and were healers designated as such, and therapeutic knowledge transmitted from generation to generation.
On the other hand, the desire to define medicine as a rational practice is, from a historical point of view, quite independent of the production of practices that, for our part, we would judge as rational in the sense that they systematically improve the possibilities of cure of a sick person. In other words, there is no “Galileo” of medicine, who creates at the same time a discourse, a practice and a differentiation with the past that would force us to recognize that, in one way or another, “the history of modern medicine begins.” ”. Of course, one may be tempted to put Pasteur or Koch in that role, but they intervene very late, at a time when everyone thinks that medicine became modern from then on.
Finally, medicine as a profession, authorized by a diploma, the result of teaching organized by doctors themselves, long precedes the appearance of modern sciences. In Europe, medicine was taught in the medieval university, and already at that time a struggle had begun, which continues to this day, of qualified doctors once morest heterodox or traditional “healers.” From this point of view, which is that of the regulation of the right to cure, the history of Western medicine shows great continuity.
At what point does one move from a corporate law – which designates medicine as a profession that defends its monopoly – to a right that might effectively, that is, for us, presume rationality, a right that might invoke a “true” difference? between the practices of doctors and those of charlatans? It is a matter of discussion on a case-by-case basis and, even today, the difference is not always very clear. However, I would like to build my approach to so-called modern medicine from the question of the “charlatan”, and more precisely from the transformation of the mode of denunciation of which the “charlatan” is the object and the transformation of his identity.
Franz Mesmer, father of hypnosis and animal magnetism.
This choice reflects above all the fact that, in medicine, the topic of rationality has a polemical accent that it does not have anywhere else. Of course, chemistry differed from alchemy, astronomy from astrology, Darwinian biology from the “fixist” doctrine of species, in a polemical way. But in all these cases the controversy is part of the story of the origins or of the instructional pedagogy. The astrologer does not obsess the astronomer, who does not experience any fear of being confused with that “other” whom he has generally never met. No procedure inherent to the profession of astronomer aims to establish the difference with the knowledge of astrologers. The controversy is emblematic, but it does not create obligation or problem. In the case of medicine, on the other hand – and think here of the so-called “alternative” medicines – the reference to the charlatan remains central, it is incessantly reminded and re-explained to the public, to the press, to the powers that be. public, and also implicitly organizes, we will see, medical and pharmaceutical research.
This choice also translates the fun possibility of pointing out an “inaugural scene”, that is, a precise moment and at the same time an episode of multiple facets where the stakes and dilemmas in which I propose to recognize modern medicine are explicitly brought together, identified and displayed. .
That scene is set in Paris in 1784. Two commissions are appointed to investigate the practices of the Viennese doctor Franz Anton Mesmer, and above all to test the claims that founded those practices. According to Mesmer, the tub around which his patients gather would concentrate a magnetic fluid that, through the crises it provokes, would have the power to cause the cures that have made him famous. We know that mesmerian fluid is not part of the modern therapeutic arsenal, and therefore did not withstand research.
However, it must be emphasized that at that time Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” was without a doubt a candidate for founding a finally scientific medicine. The reference to an unknown fluid, to which only living beings would be sensitive, did not disqualify it a priori. It is invisible, all right, but isn’t the same true of Newtonian attraction, whose existence was recognized from its effects? In this sense, Mesmer’s tub might have been recognized as a device that is both therapeutic and demonstrative, given that its healing power would constitute at the same time the demonstration of the existence of the fluid that explains its effects.
It might have been recognized… if Mesmer’s device had resisted being “put into controversy.” With Dr. Léon Chertok, I studied in detail the procedure of the commission appointed by King Louis XVI, to which the great scientists of the time, such as Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin, belonged. It is enough to say that, following having tried without much success to “debug” the phenomena that occurred around the Deslon magnetizer vat (Mesmer had closed the door to the researchers), following having subjected themselves to the “fluid”, following having subjected to some poor people, then to people of high society, all without being able to settle the issue, the commission invented a much more active method of investigation. He asked an accomplice magnetizer to magnetize a “gifted subject” without warning him, to pretend to magnetize another subject, or even to magnetize a place on the body of a subject who is blindfolded by announcing that he was being magnetized by another. The commission was then able to conclude that “the fluid without the imagination is impotent, while the imagination without the fluid can produce the effects attributed to the fluid.” In short, as far as its effects demonstrated its existence, the fluid did not exist.
This scene is going to stay with us and the first element that I would extract from it is the new definition of “charlatan” that it entails. In order to explain the cures that, despite everything, undoubtedly took place around Mesmer’s vat, the “interdisciplinary” commission observed: “There are men, apparently attacked by the same disease, who were cured by following contrary regimes and adopting completely different regimes; Nature is therefore powerful enough to maintain life in spite of the wrong regime, and to triumph both over the evil and the remedy. If she has that power to resist remedies, all the more reason she has the power to operate without them.”
As for the second commission, composed only of doctors, it went further: “The hope that the patients conceived, the exercise to which they devoted themselves every day, the interruption of the remedies that they might previously abuse and whose quantity is so often harmful in this case, are repeated and sufficient causes of the results said to have been observed in similar circumstances.
In other words, the cure proves nothing. I propose to define medicine in the modern sense, as opposed to traditional therapies or medieval medicine, not by a doctrine or by practices, which are in continuous mutations, but by the awareness of that fact. It has a correlation: the objective pursued by medicine (to cure) is not enough to make the difference between rational practice and charlatan practice. The imperative of rationality and the denunciation of the charlatan become in this sense supportive: the charlatan is defined from now on as one who claims his cures as evidence.
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