---
title: "Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism"
chunk: 6/17
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_on_Animal_Magnetism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:17:13.409273+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Post-Mesmer ===
In late 1782, and eighteen months before the Royal Commission, d'Eslon had (acrimoniously) parted ways with Mesmer; and, despite a brief reconciliation, the relationship was terminated in late 1783. On 28 December 1783, d'Eslon wrote a letter to the Journal de Paris, which not only described the difficulties he had experienced with Mesmer, but also announced that he was opening his own (entirely independent) clinic.
Following his break with Mesmer, d'Eslon not only launched his own clinical operation on his break with Mesmer, d'Eslon took all of the patients he had brought to Mesmer with him – but also began teaching his own theories and practices (i.e., rather than those of Mesmer). According to d'Eslon's own account (d'Eslon, 1784b, pp. 25–26), Mesmer had taught 300 students, 160 of whom were medical men (médecins), and d'Eslon himself had taught 160 medical men (this group included 21 members of the Paris Faculty of Medicine).
Given that many of those who had privately paid Mesmer for the details of "the secret" were greatly dissatisfied, and had "[justifiably] accused [Mesmer] of having enunciated a theory which was merely a collection of obscure principles" (Binet & Féré, 1888, p. 13), it seems that d'Eslon's version was little better. Greatly confused by d'Eslon's version of "the secret", d'Eslon's  student and associate, François Amédée Doppet, is said to have remarked that those to whom d'Eslon had revealed "the secret" doubted it even more than those to whom it had not been revealed.
It was under these circumstances that a decision was made to investigate the work of d'Eslon – although he was already ostracized from the Paris Faculty of Medicine – when "d'Eslon, through influential friends, and tact, and other favourable circumstances, procured [the commissions'] establishment [specifically] to investigate animal magnetism as practised in his own clinic" (Gauld, 1992, p. 7, emphasis added).

=== Last days ===
Once d'Eslon had been expelled from the rank of docteur-régent, his membership of the Faculty of Medicine was never reinstated; and unlike Mesmer, he remained in Paris following the publication of the reports of the two Commissions. Although apparently in good health in the preceding months, he died somewhat suddenly in Paris, on 21 August 1786, at the age of 47, from a complex of disorders including pneumonia, a malignant fever (une fièvre maligne), and renal colic.

== Aspects of Mesmer's evolving practices ==

=== Mesmer's early experiments with magnets ===

It is significant that Mesmer, initially impressed by the therapeutic enterprises of the Jesuit astronomer, explorer, and healer Maximilian Hell (1720–1792) – which involved the application of steel magnets that had been specifically shaped either to fit particular body contours, or to match the actual dimensions of a specific organ (e.g., the liver) – and, immediately recognizing the prima facie plausibility of Hell's approach, purchased a number of steel magnets from Hell in 1774 and began applying them to his patients; however, as Pattie reports (1994, p. 2), Mesmer "had [entirely] abandoned the use of magnets" by 1776, because his own clinical experimentation had proved them to be utterly useless.
By 1779, Mesmer (1779, pp. 34–35) was expressing his concern that many had "confused" – such as the "Berlin Academy" in 1775 – and were continuing to "confuse" the "properties" of his (abstract/theoretical) magnétisme animal with those of an actual physical magnet (l'aimant): objects of which, he stressed, he had only ever spoken of as possible "conductors" of "animal magnetism".

He argued that from this "confusion" of his "animal magnetism" with "mineral magnetism", his use of magnets – which, although "useful", were always "imperfect', unless they had been applied according to la théorie du Magnétisme animal – was being consistently misrepresented and misunderstood.

=== The glass armonica ===
Mesmer developed particular theatrical therapeutic rituals, often accompanied by the sounds of the Glass Armonica – an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin himself – that were associated with a wide range of (figurative) magnetic connotations, such as the use of "magnetic wands", and the treatment tub known as "the baquet", which, in the view of Yeates (2018, p. 48), were "obviously, designed to amplify each subject's 'response expectancy' (Kirsch, 1997, etc.) via impressive 'metonymical acts' (Topley, 1976, p. 254)".

=== The "baquet" ===

The baquet (lit. 'tub') was a device of Mesmer's design, that he had constructed by analogy with the newly invented "Leyden bottle" – i.e., "the first electric condenser [i.e. capacitor] in history" (Morabito, 2019, p. 90) – which was "supposed by analogy to 'store' animal magnetism" (Forrest, 1999, p. 20).
In its initial conception, Mesmer's "baquet" was "a vat containing bottles of magnetized water from which steel bars escaped through which the 'magnetization' took place in the [subjects or patients], who were arranged around the tub holding their hands" (Morabito, 2019, p. 90). According to Mesmer's own description, in the (undated) Catechism that he had delivered exclusively to his followers,