METHUSELAH ARCHIVE / INTERVENTIONS / MAGNETIC SOMNAMBULISM (ARTIFICIAL SOMNAMBULISM)

MAGNETIC SOMNAMBULISM (ARTIFICIAL SOMNAMBULISM)

regimen · 1784–1820
category:regimen
delivery:Individual magnetic treatment in which the operator induced a calm, sleep-like 'lucid' state (somnambulisme provoqué) by passes of the hands and concentrated will, rather than the convulsive group crises of Mesmer's baquet. In the induced state the subject would speak, respond to the magnetizer, and, it was claimed, perceive the seat of illness and prescribe for it; on recovering, the subject typically remembered nothing. At Buzancy, Puységur also magnetized a large elm on the village green and had patients sit around it holding cords tied to the tree.
price tier:elite
era:1784–1820
current status:historical
regulatory:withdrawn
SHORT PITCH (AS SOLD)
A gentler successor to Mesmer's convulsive crises: a magnetic treatment that put the patient into a lucid 'magnetic sleep' in which they were said to diagnose their own disease and prescribe its cure, propagated through aristocratic magnetic societies.
THE ACTUAL EVIDENCE
No controlled evidence supported the central claims. The 1784 royal commission (Franklin, Lavoisier, Bailly, Guillotin, and others) found no magnetic fluid and attributed the observed effects to imagination, expectation, and suggestion. When the Académie Royale de Médecine examined magnetic somnambulists in 1826-1831, the Husson report acknowledged some effects of magnetizing, such as induced sleep, but did not confirm the claimed clairvoyant diagnosis; the Burdin prize of 1837, offered for a somnambulist who could read without using the eyes, was never awarded. The induced state itself is a genuine psychological phenomenon and is recognized as a forerunner of hypnosis, but the magnetic-fluid mechanism and the clairvoyant-diagnosis claims were not supported.
PRACTITIONERS
INGREDIENTS
CASES
CLAIMS
SOURCES
  1. Détail des cures opérées à Buzancy, près Soissons, par le magnétisme animal (1784)
  2. Recherches, expériences et observations physiologiques sur l'homme dans l'état de somnambulisme naturel, et dans le somnambulisme provoqué par l'acte magnétique (1811)
  3. The Marquis de Puységur, Artificial Somnambulism, and the Discovery of the Unconscious Mind (2024)
  4. Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (Public Report) (1784)
  5. Later French Commissions (2011)
NOTES

Magnetic somnambulism is the form animal magnetism took after 1784 in the hands of the Marquis de Puységur. Where Mesmer sought a convulsive ‘crisis’ around the baquet, Puységur found that magnetizing some subjects produced a quiet, sleep-like state in which they appeared lucid, talked, took direction, and (he claimed) could perceive and prescribe for disease. The proposed cause was still Mesmer’s universal magnetic fluid; the visible product was the induced trance. That trance was real, and the nineteenth century would eventually study it as suggestion and hypnosis once the fluid was discarded. The grander claim attached to it, that the somnambulist gained a clairvoyant diagnostic faculty, did not survive controlled examination: the 1784 royal commission found no fluid, and the Académie Royale de Médecine’s later inquiries and the unclaimed 1837 Burdin prize for eyeless reading left the clairvoyance claims unsupported.