Today, we have a guest author. Mary Elizabeth Raines is a hypnotist and a trainer of hypnotists. She runs the Laughing Cherub web site
http://www.laughingcherub.com/ and she is the person who hypnotized me so I could see what hypnosis was like. She wrote the statement below after reading my post on the little baby that grew.
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The Little Baby Who Grew…So Sleepy
To me, one of the things that is "so cool" about our baby nation's ventures into the world is that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and Lafayette were also involved in the birth of what is now called hypnotism.
All modern hypnotists can trace the ancestry of their line of teachers back to Mesmer. Lafayette studied eagerly with the granddaddy of hypnosis, and even got George Washington to correspond with Mesmer. When Lafayette returned to the U.S., he gave some of, if the not very first, lectures on "magnetism" in the country, and then proceeded to study the healing practices of Indian tribes, recognizing that what they did was related to what Mesmer did. Thomas Jefferson, old sourpuss, was the one we think dissuaded George Washington from further interest.
Benjamin Franklin invented (or refined) an instrument called the glass harmonica. Mesmer was one of the very few people who could play this instrument, and certainly was the main glass harmonica-ist in Vienna. He sometimes played the glass harmonic to his clients after healing them. In 1784, a scientific/medical panel of the some of the greatest minds in France was assembled by the King of France to study the work that Mesmer did. On the panel were gentlemen such as Bailly (major of Paris), Lavoisier (discovered oxygen), and Monsieur Guillotine (no explanation necessary).
They "busted" Mesmer's work, deciding that there was nothing to what he was doing; all the cures, they stated, were simply the result of the power of suggestion. (!!!) Soon after, Mesmer had to leave Paris and shut down his practice there, because his popularity went out the window. I think he was actually saved by the condemnation of the panel, because in a very short time wealthy gents like him were loosing their heads right and left. Anyhow, who do you think headed this panel investigating his work? None other than our own Benjamin Franklin! (And, in a fascinating footnote--because this stuff is full of fascinating footnotes--Franklin's own grandson then proceeded to study with Mesmer.)
