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FILE 057 · VOL X · You Already Said Yes
Ben Franklin Proved Mind Control Was Fake. The King Got a Second Report.
They did not prove it was fake. They proved it worked without him.
Based on: Mesmer and the Franklin Commission
Intake record
| Recovered from | Private archive, Paris; a bundle of letters in a French noble family's papers |
|---|---|
| Contents | Letters (1784 to 1785), a copy of a commission report, a small iron rod |
| Finder | Archivist for the family |
| Status | The secret report referenced here is historical and has been published. The letters have not. |
Recovered file
In 1778, a German physician named Franz Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris with a theory that made him the most fashionable man in France. [1]
He claimed that every living body was filled with an invisible fluid, a kind of cosmic energy he called animal magnetism, and that illness came from blockages in its flow. He could cure those blockages, he said, by directing the fluid with his hands, his gaze, and iron rods. His treatments were theater. Patients, most of them wealthy women, sat in a darkened room around a great wooden tub filled with iron filings and bottles of so-called magnetized water, with iron rods sticking out of it, which they pressed against their bodies. Music played on a glass harmonica. Mesmer, in a lilac silk coat, moved among them, touching, staring, pointing. Patients trembled, wept, laughed, fainted, and fell into violent convulsions that the room called crises, and that were said to be the moment of cure. [1]
Paris went mad for it. And Louis XVI, worried, ordered an investigation.
In 1784 he appointed a royal commission. Its members included Benjamin Franklin, then the American ambassador to France; the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry; and a physician named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, whose name would soon be attached to a very different invention. [2]
They did something that had almost never been done before. They designed blindfolded experiments. They told patients they were being magnetized when they were not, and the patients had crises. They magnetized patients without telling them, and nothing happened. They led a young man to a series of trees in Franklin's garden, one of which had been magnetized; he collapsed in a convulsion before the wrong tree. It was, historians say, one of the first placebo-controlled experiments in the history of science. [2]
The commission concluded that there was no magnetic fluid. Every effect, it said, was produced by the imagination. [2]
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 057 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
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