The apricot tree is the experiment everyone remembers, and the Report itself calls it “entirely conclusive”. But it sits in the middle of a sequence, and the sequence is the argument. The commissioners said they would not tell the experiments “in the order of time, but shall follow the order of the facts they were intended to elucidate”, and the facts run from the smallest sensation of heat to a full convulsion started and stopped on a word. What follows is that run, in the words of the 1785 translation.

Jumelin’s hall

The commissioners had reached a hypothesis, that the few effects they had seen were “the fruits of anticipated persuasion”, when they heard of a physician named Jumelin who was magnetising people at the house of the dean of the Faculty. They met him in a body at Majault’s. He “declared to them that he was a disciple neither of M. Mesmer, nor of M. Deslon”, and had “formed his principles and digested his process from what he had heard upon the subject in conversation.” He used finger, rod and hands, “but without any distinction of poles.”

“Eight men and two women submitted to the operation in the first experiment, and felt nothing; at length a woman, who waits in the hall of M. Alphonse le Roy, doctor of physic, having been magnetised in the forehead, but without touching her, said that she felt the sensation of heat.” Wherever his fingers went, she felt heat: face, stomach, back. One of eleven; and the commissioners reasoned that she “had experienced certain sensations, only because she had probably an imagination more easily excited than the rest: the opportunity was favourable for clearing up the point. The sensibility of this woman being perfectly established, the business was only to protect her from the illusions of the imagination, or at least to leave her imagination without any thing to direct its operations.”

“She was accordingly blindfolded and magnetised; the phenomena no longer answered to the places towards which the magnetism was directed. Magnetised successively upon the stomach and in the back, she felt only a heat in her head, a pain in both eyes and in the left ear.” With the bandage off and Jumelin’s hands on her hypochondria, she felt heat and then fainted. “When she was tolerably recovered, the experiment was resumed, she was blindfolded, M. Jumelin was removed, silence recommended, and the woman was induced to believe that the operation was performing. The effects were the same, though no operation, either near or distant, was performed; she felt the same heat, the same pain in her eyes and in her ears; besides which she felt a heat in her back and loins.” After a quarter of an hour Jumelin was signalled to magnetise her in earnest, and “The sensations diminished instead of augmenting.”

The commissioners drew out what mattered. “While the woman was permitted to see the operation, she placed her sensations precisely in the part towards which it was directed; that on the other hand, when she did not see the operation, she placed them at hazard, and in parts very distant from those which were the object of the magnetism.” The next day “upon a man who was blindfolded, and upon a woman who was not blindfolded, the result was precisely the same; it was evident their answers were determined by the questions that were put to them, that is, the question pointed out where the sensation was expected to be; in the room of directing the magnetism upon them, all that was done was the exalting and directing their imagination.” A child of five, magnetised afterwards, “felt nothing but the heat which he had just before contracted at play.”

To the objection that Jumelin’s method was a bad one: “at the present moment it was not proposed to bring the magnetism, but the imagination to the proof.”

The servant and the man of learning

The commissioners now set a rule for themselves: to blindfold subjects who had already been magnetised, “for the most part not to magnetise them at all, but to put to them interrogations, so framed as to point out to them their answers. This mode of proceeding was not calculated to deceive them, it only misled their imagination. In reality, when no operation was performed upon them, their sole answer ought to have been, that they felt no sensation”. They went to Jumelin’s house, and the bandage of elastic gum and eiderdown, “which they employed in all the succeeding experiments”, was put on his servant.

“The servant of M. Jumelin was persuaded that the operation was performing upon him. Upon this he felt an almost universal sensation of heat, and certain emotions in the region of the belly, together with an extreme heaviness; by degrees he grew drowsy and appeared upon the point of falling asleep.” Then, eyes uncovered, with an iron rod at his forehead, “he experienced sensations of pricking: the bandage being then replaced and the circumstance repeated, he was conscious to no sensation. The rod of iron was then removed, and the patient being interrogated if he felt nothing in his forehead, he declared that he felt something move backward and forward from one side of it to the other.”

“M. B——, a man of learning, and particularly acquainted with the science of medicine, was then blindfolded, and presented us with the same spectacle, feeling certain sensations when he was not acted upon, and often feeling nothing when the operation was performed. These sensations went to such a length, that, previously to the being magnetised in any manner, but believing that the operation had been performing for ten minutes, he felt a heat in his loins which he compared to that of a stove.”

The physicians among the commissioners then “made an infinite number of experiments upon different subjects whom they either magnetised themselves, or persuaded that they underwent the operation. They performed the operation indifferently, either opposite to, or in the direction of the poles or at right angles with them, and in each case obtained the same effects; experiencing in all these experiments no other difference, than that of an imagination more or less susceptible.”

The surgeon who played Mesmer’s pupil

A footnote here prints a letter of 30 July 1784 from the surgeon Sigault, known for an operation on the pelvis, who had run an experiment of his own. “Having given the persons who inhabited a large house in the Marais, to understand that I was a pupil of M. Mesmer, I produced various effects upon the woman of the house. The magisterial tone and the serious air I affected, together with certain gestures, made a very great impression upon her”, and she fainted, vomited her dinner and was left “in a state of weakness and sinking, perfectly incredible. I repeated the same trick upon several persons, and succeeded more or less, according to their different degrees of sensibility and credulity.” He cured an artist’s headache on the Pont-Royal with a few gestures; he told a hatter’s apprentice he would draw the pain down his arm and out at his thumb, “and was perfectly well for two hours. At that period he stopped me in the street to tell me that his pain was returned.” At a convent grating, a young lady who had heard he was Mesmer’s pupil “was terrified, trembled extremely, and besought me for God’s sake to proceed no further.” Sigault added that he had felt the thing himself: told that he was about to be touched, he felt his chest tighten and his heart beat, “But having immediately composed himself, the gestures and the process of the magnetism were employed in vain, and made no impression upon him.”

The cups at the Arsenal

After the tree and the two women at Passy, Dame P——, the woman with films over her eyes, was tried again, at Lavoisier’s house at the Arsenal, with cups. The doctrine held that a susceptible patient would convulse at a magnetised cup and ignore the rest; d’Eslon recommended that the cups be presented “in the direction of the poles”, so that the presenter did not himself magnetise her.

“Dame P—— was sent for to the arsenal, to the house of M. Lavoisier, where M. Deslon was; she began with falling into a crisis in the ante-chamber, before she had seen either the commissioners or M. Deslon, and merely from the knowledge she had that she was about to see him; a distinguished effect of the influence of imagination.” Recovered, she was shown several china cups that had not been magnetised; “at the second basin she began to feel the usual symptoms, and at the fourth fell into a complete crisis.” It might be said that she was simply still in crisis from the antechamber. “But a circumstance which is decisive, is that having asked for something to drink, the basin which had been magnetised by M. Deslon himself was presented to her; she drank with perfect calmness and said that she felt herself much better. The basin and the magnetism had therefore failed of their effect, since the crisis was tranquilised in the room of being augmented.” Later, while Majault examined her eyes, “the magnetic basin was presented to the back of her head, and continued there for twelve minutes; she was unconscious of the operation and felt no effect from it”. Left alone in the antechamber, she convulsed whenever anyone came near. Told that nothing had been done to her, she replied: “If you did nothing to me, I should not be in the condition in which I am.”

The young lady who lost her voice

Jumelin had told the commissioners of a young lady of twenty whom he had deprived of speech by magnetising her. They repeated it at his house, blindfolded, and first tried to get the effect without any operation; she felt things, “but we were not able to strike her imagination, with the force that was necessary for the success of the experiment. The operation was then really performed, the bandage not being removed; and the success was the same.” The bandage came off, and “her imagination was now attacked at once through the different channels of sight and hearing”, with more effect but still no dumbness. “She observed herself, that the hand by which she was magnetised in the forehead, ought to descend to the level of the nose, recollecting that that was its situation at the time in which she had felt the loss of her voice. What she demanded was accordingly performed, and in three quarters of a minute she was dumb; nothing was now to be heard from her but low and inarticulate sounds”. It lasted a minute. The commissioners concluded that the imagination often “has need that you should touch several cords at a time”: it was not enough that she was told she was magnetised; she had to see the gesture she remembered.

They added a story from d’Eslon’s house: a woman newly arrived there met the look of one of his pupils as she came out of a crisis, “had her eyes set in her head for three quarters of an hour”, and “always saw before her this very eye fixed to regard her; and she bore it uninterruptedly in her imagination, sleeping as well as waking, for three days.”

The paper partition

The partisans of magnetism might still say that identity of effects did not prove identity of causes: imagination could do it, and so could magnetism. The commissioners answered first with a principle, “to admit no new causes without an absolute necessity”, and then with the experiment that put magnetism alone to the proof.

“For this experiment they made choice of two rooms, contiguous to each other, and united by a door of communication. The door was taken away, and a frame of wood substituted in its place, with transverse bars, and covered with a double texture of paper. In one of these rooms was a commissioner, who undertook to make minutes of the transaction, and a lady, who was given out to be just arrived from the country, and to have a suit of linen, which she wanted to have made up. Mademoiselle B——, a sempstress by profession, who had been already employed in the experiments at Passy, and whose sensibility to the magnetism was well known, was sent for. Every thing was arranged against her arrival in such a manner, that there was but one seat upon which she could place herself, and that seat stood within the frame of the door of communication.”

On the other side a commissioner who was a physician and “had upon former occasions performed the magnetical operation with success” magnetised her through the paper for half an hour, at a foot and a half, “in a direction opposite to that of the poles, in conformity to the rules taught by M. Deslon”. Paper could be no obstacle; the theory said the agent passed through doors and walls, “beside M. Deslon had positively declared that the magnetism passes through paper.” “During the operation she conversed with much gaiety, and, in answer to an inquiry concerning her health, she readily replied, that she was perfectly well: at Passy she had fallen into a crisis in the course of three minutes; in the present instance she underwent the operation of the magnetism without any effect for thirty minutes. The only reason of this difference must be that here she was ignorant of the operation, and that at Passy she thought it had been performed.”

The commissioners foresaw the objection that she might that day have been less susceptible, “and for that reason made the following experiment.” The same commissioner came into her room, got her consent, and magnetised her openly, at the same distance, “by the intervention of gestures only, together with the employment of the right finger and the rod of iron”, but now “in the direction of the poles, or in the transverse line. On this account according to the principles of the magnetism no effect ought to have been produced. In three minutes however she felt a sensation of dejection and suffocation; to these succeeded an interrupted hiccup, a chattering of the teeth, a contraction of the throat, and an extreme pain in her head; she was restless in her chair; she complained of a pain in the loins; now and then she struck her foot with extreme quickness on the floor; afterwards she stretched her arms behind her, twisting them extremely as at Passy; in a word the convulsive crisis was complete and accompanied with all the regular symptoms. All these accidents appeared in consequence of a process of twelve minutes, though the same process employed for thirty minutes a little before had been ineffectual.”

Then the ending, which is the part that proves the imagination can calm as well as agitate. “The commissioner who magnetised her, observed that it was time to have done; at the same time presenting to her his two forefingers in the form of a cross; and it is proper to observe that in so doing he magnetised her in the direction of the poles, in the same manner as he had done through the whole experiment; no actual alteration had therefore been made, and the process being continued, the impressions ought also to have continued. But the declared intention of the operator was sufficient to dissipate the crisis; her heat and the pain in her head were immediately alleviated. The disorder of her frame was in this manner followed from place to place, announcing at the same time that it was going to disappear. In this manner in obedience to the voice to which the imagination was subjected, the contraction of the throat ceased, then the accidents of the breast, lastly those of the stomach and the arms. The whole required only three minutes”.

What the sequence shows

Read in order, the experiments climb. Heat that moves with the hand; heat that moves with the question; heat with no hand at all. Drowsiness from being told. A stove in the loins before anything had been done. Then a crisis at the wrong tree, a crisis at an empty chair, a crisis at a shut door, a crisis at the wrong cup and calm at the right one, dumbness on a remembered gesture. And at the end, nothing for thirty minutes under the real procedure done secretly, a full convulsion in twelve under the wrong procedure done openly, and three minutes to stop it on a word. Each step takes one thing away or adds one thing back, and the commissioners say at each step which it is. That is why the tree, which on its own is one boy on one afternoon, can carry the weight the Report puts on it: it is a rung, not the ladder.

Sources

• Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and Other Commissioners, London: J. Johnson, 1785, the English translation of the Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal, Paris, 1784. All quotations, read in the Philadelphia reprint of 1837 and checked against the 1785 printing. archive.org (1785), archive.org (1837), archive.org (French, 1784)