Top Highlights

• Their investigation of mesmerism led to the world’s first placebo trials, using sham procedures to test a medical treatment. Not only that. The commission’s report was the first account of the placebo phenomenon itself.
• Mesmer had shifted the locus of magnetic healing from cosmic gyrations to himself. The echoes of divine healing were obvious, but Mesmer insisted his theory was as scientific as Newton’s Principia. Thoughts, beliefs, and expectations had nothing to do with magnetic healing, let alone divine intervention. Magnetism blanketed the earth, and these hea...
• In public demonstrations, Mesmer triggered, and then quieted, convulsions in patients using commanding gestures, just like Gassner had in his exorcisms. It wasn’t that Gassner was a fraud, Mesmer charitably concluded.
• Most physicians of the time were fond of blistering, bleeding, purgatives, and enemas. They considered Mesmer’s noninvasive techniques to be nothing more than hocus-pocus. Far from accepting Mesmer as one of their own, the French medical establishment was aching to prove he was a huckster. When the king finally called for an investigation, they had...
• The power of expectations surpasses our capacity for self-deception, however. In fact, our real world is in many ways an expected world. What we see, hear, taste, feel, and experience is produced from the top down as much as it is from the bottom up. Our minds organize chaos. We fill in blanks with well-learned forms, patterns, and assumptions. Our...