Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (Public Report)
primary document · 1784
SUMMARY
The principal royal commission's public report on Mesmer's animal magnetism. Convened by Louis XVI in 1784 and drawn from the Académie des Sciences and the Faculté de Médecine, the commission examined the practice of Mesmer's principal collaborator Charles d'Eslon under blind and controlled conditions. The report concludes that there is no evidence for the proposed magnetic fluid and that the observed clinical effects are attributable to imagination, expectation, and suggestion. The public report is the founding methodological document of evidence-based clinical disconfirmation in medicine and is the appropriate primary source for the case's disconfirmation stage.
NOTES
The August 1784 public report is the founding methodological document of blinded, controlled clinical investigation in the history of medicine. The methods (blindfolded patients, sham operators, deliberate misattribution of which trees were ‘magnetized’ in the Passy garden experiments) anticipate the rigorous design principles of modern clinical trials by more than a century. The report is the appropriate primary source for any historical or methodological discussion of the disconfirmation. A complete modern English translation by I.M.L. Donaldson is available through the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.