Friedrich anton mesmer biography samples

(b.

Friedrich anton mesmer biography samples

Iznang, Germany, 23 May 1734; d. Meersburg, Germany, 5 March 1815)

medicine, origins of hypnosis.

Mesmer was born and raised in the Swabian village of Iznang near the Lake of Constance. His father was a forester employed by the archbishop of Constance; his mother, the daughter of a locksmith; and his family, large (Franz Anton was the third of nine children), Catholic, and not particularly prosperous.

By the time he began to propound his theory of animal magnetism or mesmerism, Mesmer had risen through the educational systems of Bavaria and Austria and had advanced to a position of some prominence in Viennese society through his marriage to a wealthy widow, Maria Anna von Posch, on 16 January 1768.

Mesmerism therefore may have been the product of an ambitious arriviste but not of a mountebank. The man and the “ism” represent a period when medicine was attempting to assimilate advances in the physical and biological sciences and when scientists oft