Here's the French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier. He first isolated oxygen. Ten years later he'll lose his head on the guillotine. The guillotine's inventor, Dr. Guillotin, is also on the committee. For six years, Franz Mesmer has swept Parisian society with his magnetic and hypnotic cures.
Illness occurs when the flow of our natural electromagnetic force becomes blocked.
The wealthy flock to Mesmer's salon to be cured by magnetic fluxes. Mesmer is a German who came to Paris in 1778. He'd been a close friend of Mozart's. Now these rationalists put Mesmer under their lens. Stephen Jay Gould tells us they know they can't look at animal magnetism directly.