Animal Magnetism
We continue our trip through the history of medicine and its accompanying popular fallacies…
The alternative medicine gods intervened when Mesmer came across Father Hell (A.K.A. Rudolf Maximilian Höll – he of the moon’s Hell crater – a Jesuit priest and astronomer), who was using magnetism in an effort to cure pain from conditions like arthritis. Upon viewing Hell’s work, Mesmer had an epiphany: every single disease must be caused by a magnetic “imbalance” or “blockage” in the body. The body must contain a magnetic fluid that, of course, would be influenced by the earth’s gravitational force, like the tides, and could therefore be realigned or unblocked by magnets, healing the body.
He decided to call this magical fluid “nervous fluid” or, more marketably, “animal magnetism”.
This idea wasn’t really new. It “was, in fact, a basic tenet of occult movements such as astrology and alchemy.”* But Mesmer was nothing if not sure of his own genius.
Eventually, his delusion resulted in the belief that he no longer needed magnets to realign the animal magnetism; he could achieve the same results with the sheer force of his will and the waving about of his hands. That should have told him something about the magnets’ (and his own) actual ability to cure, but no . . .
The French
aristocracy (particularly the women) went nuts for this theory, flocking to
the “House of Mesmer” for spa-like experiences involving metal rods, “magnetised
water” and some highly questionable touching, which later got Mesmer into hot, possibly magnetised, water.
In the mid-1800s, a man heard a lecture on mesmerism from a visiting Frenchman. He became an instant convert, giving up his clockmaking business to practise his own brand of mesmerism. He believed that sickness could be cured by the power of one’s own mind, not only by a practitioner. That man’s name was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. You might recognise it. A few years later, he treated a desperately ill woman named Mary Patterson, later Mary Baker Eddy, who founded Christian Science on ideas adapted from Quimby’s.
Quimby is today known as the father of New Thought, which in many ways is almost indistinguishable from the New Age (not to mention quite a few of the New Apostolic Reformation’s practices) and has spawned such things as The Secret (apparently, the only thing secret about The Secret was that it doesn’t work). As time went on, Quimby began to teach that, not only could the mind cure sickness, but also it could bring wealth, success, positive results . . . in other words, prosperity. Think positive thoughts. Name it and claim it.
Another of Quimby’s devotees was a “preacher” by the name of John Alexander Dowie, who invented most of the scam tactics employed by modern-day faith healers. In fact, commentators such as Barry Morton have drawn direct lines of descent in terms of ideas and influence to many of the most famous faith healers and prosperity-gospel preachers:
Phineas Quimby
John Alexander Dowie
W. E. Kenyon, Kenneth Hagin (who plagiarised Kenyon), and Oral Roberts
Kenneth Copeland (and Benny Hinn)
Todd White, Bill Johnson et
al.
and:
Phineas Quimby
John Alexander Dowie and Charles Parham
John G. Lake
Kenneth Copeland**
No surprises there.
So why do people like Mary Baker Eddy become so convinced that this stuff works? Part of it, of course, is the placebo effect. This is not, as many people think, the power of the mind to cure the body – that’s veering back into New Thought. It’s the ability of your thoughts to improve symptoms that are regulated by the brain, such as pain. It won’t, for example, fix your broken ankle or cure your leukaemia.
This is linked to something called confirmation bias, mixed in with simple biology. The symptoms of many illnesses hit a peak of “worseness” before you begin to improve. It is when people reach the height of those symptoms (or the depths, depending on how you look at it) that they go and get treatment. They then begin to naturally improve and so attribute their healing to the treatment they received, whether or not it actually made a difference. Alternatively, their belief in the treatment will cause them to place more weight on the ways in which they are feeling better and less on the ways they are still suffering. In other words, confirmation bias is cherry-picking, from the available information, that which aligns with your existing belief (e.g. that a certain treatment works) and ignoring the rest. Only today I read a doctor – yes, a doctor – touting the benefits of Ivermectin during his bout of COVID. He was apparently over the worst of it in 13 days, thanks to Ivermectin! The only problem is, if you look up the mean duration of hospitalisation for COVID, it’s . . . wait for it . . . 13 days.
The placebo effect is very useful for faith healers, as is a little chemical called adrenaline, which is powerful enough to get you out of a wheelchair in the right circumstances. Faith healers also rely on theatricality, which primes people to think a certain way and increases the placebo effect, and hypnotism. Ever wondered by Benny Hinn has two hours of “worship” before he begins to speak? It’s because certain tones and rhythms, when repeated over and over, will lull you into a hypnotic state in which you’re more susceptible to suggestion. So look out for those preachers, like Todd White, who have to have a keyboard droning away on one or two chords the whole time they’re speaking.
In the 1860s, Louis Pasteur demonstrated through formal experimentation the relationship between disease and these itty-bitty things called “germs”, building on the work of people like Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered that doctors were killing women by working on a cadaver and then delivering babies without washing their hands in between. We call this the Germ Theory of Disease – that microorganisms and other, non-living pathogens cause many of the diseases we know about.
In future posts, I hope to discuss how the media affects our understanding of science and how we should really be interpreting scientific studies and articles – hint, the process doesn’t include watching fear-mongering videos from random people on YouTube. I also hope to cover pseudosciences such as homeopathy and naturopathy, and why, like democracy, evidence-based medicine isn’t perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve got.
*Lydia King and Nate Pedersen (2017) Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, p.284. New York, NY: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.
**Hang on, I'm starting to see a pattern here.
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