@inproceedings{01HRAA4WS9AMBWP8P1XJSWN6N5,
  abstract     = {{Few controversies capture the high stakes of the battle for medical legitimacy like the Parisian mesmerism affair of the early 1780s. The physician Franz Anton Mesmer claimed he could wield a universal magnetic fluid to cure patients’ diseases. His magnetic treatments became increasingly popular in Paris, which sparked curiosity and distrust among the medical and scientific authorities. Eventually, in 1784, the French government appointed two institutional commissions to investigate the credibility and legitimacy of the new therapy. Their conclusions, which were published in two reports, were clear: the therapy was dangerous and, therefore, illegitimate. However, the publication of these reports detonated into an intense public debate in which the integrity of the conducted investigations was questioned. In particular, various commentators contested the commissioners’ accounts of magnetic “crises” and argued that these did not provide closure on the question of the therapy’s (il)legitimacy. 

In this paper, we discuss how the meaning of “crisis” was constantly contested, repositioned and redefined in the public debate of 1784 and how these interventions (re)shaped the legitimacy of magnetic therapy. On the one hand, I argue that the commissioners redefined the mesmeric usage of the term “crisis” as a strategy to denounce the therapy as an “art of provoking [harmful] convulsions”. On the other hand, I show that critics contested this description and, in turn, reconceptualized “crisis” to legitimize and explain (proper) magnetic effects displayed by the body. The paper thus demonstrates that control over the term “crisis” determined the legitimacy of magnetic practices.}},
  author       = {{Conickx, Chloé}},
  booktitle    = {{EAHMH Conference 2023, Abstracts}},
  keywords     = {{mesmerism,medicine,legitimacy,Enlightenment}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  location     = {{Oslo, Norway}},
  title        = {{Crises around the baquet : negotiating the legitimacy of magnetic therapy in the mesmerism debate (1784)}},
  year         = {{2023}},
}