Mesmer later traced his theory of animal magnetism to his doctoral thesis, Dissertatio physico-medica de planetarum influxu. A year later he began practice as a member of the faculty of medicine in what was one of Europe’s most advanced medical centers for the Vienna school was then in its prime, owing to the patronage of Maria Theresa and the leadership of Gerhard van Swieten and Jan Ingenhousz. Having changed to medicine and completed the standard course of studies, he received his doctorate in 1766. He then attended the University of Ingolstadt for a brief period and in 1759 entered the University of Vienna as a law student. The man and the “ism” represent a period when medicine was attempting to assimilate advances in the physical and biological sciences and when scientists often indulged in cosmological speculations that read like science fiction today but passed as respectable varieties of Newtonianism in the eighteenth century.Īfter preliminary studies in a local monastic school, Mesmer spent four years at the Jesuit University of Dillingen (Bavaria), presumably as a scholarship student preparing for the priesthood.
Mesmerism therefore may have been the product of an ambitious arriviste but not of a mountebank. By the time he began to propound his theory of animal magnetism or mesmerism, Mesmer had risen through the educational systems of Bavaria and Austria and had advanced to a position of some prominence in Viennese society through his marriage to a wealthy widow, Maria Anna von Posch, on 16 January 1768. His father was a forester employed by the archbishop of Constance his mother, the daughter of a locksmith and his family, large (Franz Anton was the third of nine children), Catholic, and not particularly prosperous. Mesmer was born and raised in the Swabian village of Iznang near the Lake of Constance.
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