ABSTRACT
Mesmer was an Austrian, born in 1734 near Lake Constance, who first trained for the priesthood, later changed his mind and studied law at Vienna University, and then finally transferred to medicine, obtaining his degree in 1766 at the age of 32. Early in 1768 he married a rich widow and it was his wife’s cousin Francisca Oesterlin on whom he first tried his ‘magnetic treatment’. Mesmer described her medical problem in the following terms: ‘She was attacked several years before by a convulsive disease, the most troublesome symptoms of which were that blood rushed with impetuosity to the head, and excited in that part agonising pain in the teeth and ears which was followed by delirium, maniacal elatement, vomiting and syncope’.
