‎MESMER, (F.A.)‎
‎Mémoire sur la Découverte du Magnétisme Animal; par M. Mesmer, ....‎

‎A Geneve, et se trouve à Paris, Chez P. Fr. Didot le Jeune, Librairie-Imprimeur de Monsieur, 1779. (2), vi, 85, (1) pp. 8vo. Contemporary marbled calf, spine elaborately gilt in compartments (corners lightly bumped). Printing and the Mind of Man, 225; En Français dans le Texte, 171; Garrison-Morton 4992.1; Grolier 100 'Medicine', 47; Norman M4. The very rare first edition. Discussing and describing one of the best-remembered 'alternative' medicines of all time. Mesmer maintained 'that a magnetic fluid pervades the universe, exists in every living being, and affects the nervous system. Experimenting with the use of his "magnetism" he found that there was a healing magnetic power in his own hands and that he could obtain results in treating nervous disorders without a magnet, a faculty which he called ''animal magnetism''' (PMM). Whilst 'Mesmerism' in its own right was discredited, Mesmer's theories laid the foundation for hypnosis and suggestion theories. Indeed Mesmer himself induced sleep, known as 'Mesmeric sleep' which term was used before James Braid coined the term 'hypnosis'. 'Since his time the investigation of how to release subconscious states through auto- and hetero-suggestion has continued, and the whole field of extra-sensory perception and spiritualism has affinity with mesmerism [as does] the development of psychoanalysis' (PMM).Mesmer lived for some time in a comfortable town house in Vienna before he moved to Paris, where he had enough time and money to indulge his passion for music. He was well befriended with the Mozarts and Mozart's first opera, Bastien und Bastienne took place in Mesmer's garden, and Mozart later made room for mesmerism in a scene in Cosi fan tutte.But there is another side to this book as well, a political side. 'The crashing failure of the Social Contract, Rousseau's least popular book before the Revolution, raises a problem for scholars searching for the radical spirit in the 1780's: if the greatest political treatise of the age failed to interest many literate Frenchmen, what form of radical ideas did suit their tastes? One such form appeared in the unlikely guise of animal magnetism or mesmerism. Mesmerism aroused enormous interest during the pre-revolutionary decade; and although it had originally no relevance whatsoever to politics, it became, in the hands of radical mesmerists like Nicolas Bergasse and Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a camouflaged political theory very much like Rousseau's' (R. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France, Boston, 1968). - Some light marginal browning. ‎

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