Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls

Fuller, Robert C. Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

Franz Mesmer believed that through the use of magnets he could manipulate an invisible energy or fluid that he called ‘animal magnetism,’ which existed in all beings, to cure patients. The focus of mesmerism was the balancing of this energy. His famous quote, “There is only one illness and one healing,” meant that mesmerism was a panacea because disorders and their cure were part of the same system. Mesmerism influenced 19^th-century American thought-healers such as Andrew Jackson Davis and Phineas P. Quimby, an early mentor of Mary Baker Eddy. Fuller claims that traces of mesmerist theory laid the groundwork for mental cure systems and psychology. Fuller’s criticism is that mesmerists and psychological and faith healing systems tend toward intense individualism, even solipsism, and fail to take account of the morality of institutional structures that “link subjective vitality with responsible social conduct” (183).

ISBN-10: 081227847X
ISBN-13 (Hardcover): 978-0812278477

See also annotations:

A Story Untold: A History of the Quimby-Eddy Debate by Keith McNeil

Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery by Robert Peel

Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James by Ann Taves

Certain Trumpets; the Call of Leaders by Garry Wills

“The Case of Edward J. Arens and the Distortion of the History of New Thought” by Gordon J. Melton

“Christian Science and the Puritan Tradition” by Thomas C. Johnsen

Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America, by Gordon J. Melton