Quotes About Mesmer

There's a Mesmer in our midst. We must consult with Gizmo immediately!

History extols, not the beginner but the completer. She puts the victor on a pedestal, while leaving the mere combatant in obscurity. Thus has it been with Mesmer, the first of the new psychologists, whose ungrateful task it was to be born before his time.

Good fortune and bad are both fine tests of a man's character. Mesmer had not been boastful or presumptuous in the days of his fame, and now, when the world had suddenly forgotten him, he was modest and stoical. Far from making any attempt to attract attention to himself, when an endeavor was made to recall him into the limelight he rejected the overture.

The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness.

While trances had long been associated with biblical figures and medieval saints, American audiences of this era had become familiar with a new type of dream state, the mesmeric or hypnotic trance first noted by the eighteenth century Austrian doctor Friedrich Anton Mesmer.