Friday, April 13, 2012

Franz Anton Mesmer

Before I talk about Mesmer, I'd like to celebrate the one year existence of this blog. Yaaay! Attracted more traffic than I thought (since my hope was a million a day but my more realistic expectation was zero). Nice to see that that's approaching 150k hits now. Although sometimes I fear the end is near. And then I'm not talking about the rapture but about this blog. But we will see, sometimes I do seem to still come up with inspiriation.

Inspiration such as when someone says to me "oh, that's just mesmerizing!" and I ask (in stead of reacting to the marvel) "do you know where that word came from?" It's a reference to Mesmerism which is in turn the invention of Franz Anton Mesmer. At a time when such new things as magnetism were being discovered, this man thought he'd try and use this for therapeutic means which is also known as animal magnetism. He devised enormous metal tubs that he connected people to and put them in some sort of trance and his subjects were reported as having all sorts of visions and of course Mesmer could cure them. So was Mesmer a gifted healer, a misguided man of hope or a charlatan? Who the hell cares, the guy devised enormous metal tubs, hooked people up to it and it didn't even occur to them that this might be funny! Now thát's hilarious!

 Mesmer doing his thing without any tools. Yeah baby I like it raw!

 Tub action.

 Picture of the legendary tub itself. Not sure where this is.

 For those curious cats who want to build a tub of their own.

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