Reflections

Before the advent of anaesthesia, surgery was a mad scramble to perform the procedure in the shortest possible time. One of the methods that were tried to save the patient from pain was mesmerism. Mersmerism was developed by the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer( 1734-1815).He postulated in his doctoral thesis that the planets affected human health and all humans had a universal fluid which could be manipulated to cure the sick and cure the blind. Not surprisingly, he spectacularly failed to do so in Vienna and had to leave the city where he had his practice in 1777. A Jesuit healer, Father Hell, was active at the same time in Vienna. His preferred method of treatment was a magnetic steel plate which he waved about his patients . Mesmer proposed that the magnetic field unblocked his earlier hypothesized subtle magnetic fluid and cured the sick. Later he claimed that simply waving a magnetized pole over a person could do the trick. He managed to use this technique to hypnotise his s...