---
title: "Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism"
chunk: 4/17
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_on_Animal_Magnetism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:45:20.529918+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The second of the two Royal Commissions, usually referred to as the "Society Commission", was appointed on 5 April 1784. It was composed of five eminent physicians from the Royal Society of Medicine – the physician and one of the first members of the Royal Society, Charles-Louis-François Andry (1741–1829), the physician Claude-Antoine Caille (b. 1743), the botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1836), the physician, Collège de France professor, one of the original directors of the Royal Society, and committed advocate of the therapeutic applications of electricity, Pierre Jean Claude Mauduyt de La Varenne (1732–1792), and the physician and Professor of chemistry in the Collège de France, Pierre-Isaac Poissonnier (1720–1798) – and, as Pattie remarks (1994, p. 156), "the impression given by [their] report is that the commissioners were busy practitioners who wanted to devote no more time to the project than was necessary".
Although the investigations of the "Society Commission" were less thorough and less detailed than those of the "Franklin Commission" they were essentially of the same nature, and it is a matter of fact that neither Commission examined Mesmer's practices – they only examined the practices of d'Eslon.

== Franz Mesmer ==

Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), born in Swabia, having first studied law at Dillingen and Ingolstadt universities, transferred to the University of Vienna and began a study of medicine, graduating Medicinae Doctor (M.D.) at the age of 32, in 1766: his doctoral dissertation (Mesmer, 1766) had the official title A Physico-Medical Dissertation on the Influence of the Planets.
Although he was made a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 1775, and, despite his M.D. qualification, there is no record of Mesmer ever having been accepted as a member of any medical "learned society" anywhere in Europe at any time.
Mesmer left Austria in 1777, in controversial circumstances, following his treatment of the young Austrian pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis for her blindness, and established himself, in Paris, in February 1778. He spent several years in Paris itself – during which time he published his Précis historique' (i.e., Mesmer, 1781) – interspersed with time spent in various parts of France, a complete absence from France (1792–1798), a return to France in 1798, and his final departure from France in 1802.
While in France it was his habit to travel to the town of Spa in Belgium to "take the waters"; and he was enjoying an extended stay at Spa when the reports of the two Royal Commissions were released. Mesmer lived for another 31 years after the Royal Commissions. He died at the age of 80, in Meersburg, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, on 5 March 1815.

=== Positioner of a concept ===
Rather than being the "inventor" of "a technique", as some (mis)represent the circumstances, it is clear that Mesmer's significance was in his "positioning" of an overarching "concept" (or "construct") through his creation and development – using analogies with gravity, terrestrial magnetism, and hydraulics (as they were understood at the time) – of "an explanatory model to represent the way that healers had been healing people for thousands of years" (Yeates, 2018, p. 48).
The (oft-forgotten) value and long-term significance of Mesmer's "positioning", according to Rosen (1959, pp. 7–8), is that "Mesmer's theory [in] itself ... diverted attention from the phenomena produced by animal magnetism to the agent alleged to produce them"; yet, both 1784 Commissions side-stepped this issue, and "simply ascribed the magnetic cures to imagination, but never bothered to ask how imagination can produce a cure".

=== Mesmer's "protoscience", rather than "pseudoscience" ===
According to Tatar (1990, p. 49), rather than Mesmer's proposal being some sort of "occult theory", "[Mesmer] actually remained well within the bounds of eighteenth-century thought when he formulated his theories" and "the theories [that Mesmer] invoked to explain [the agency of "animal magnetism"] fit squarely into the frame of eighteenth-century cosmology": and, moreover, "to consider animal magnetism independently of the tradition out of which it emerged is to magnify its distinctively occult characteristics and to diminish in importance those features that mirror the scientific and philosophical temper of the age in which it flourished."
Rosen (1959, pp. 4–5) noted that, it was clear that

Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism ... [within which] he employed the term magnetism to characterize a reciprocal relationship between the forces of nature and the human body, and [which] conceived of nature as the harmony of these relations in action ... contains a number of themes and theoretical concepts common to the medical world of the eighteenth century ... [which] is evident, for example, in his interpretation of disease as a disharmony attributable to a functional disturbance of the nervous fluid ... [which is a] concept ... derived from the ancient humoral pathology with its doctrines of dyscrasia and critical days, from the irritability theory of Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), and from the excitation theory of John Brown (1735–1788).
In other words, as a product of its time, Mesmer's enterprise was one of protoscience, rather than being one of pseudoscience – or, even, one of fringe science.