Mesmer Magnetism Essay

Some teachers say that they have had the dream of being a teacher their entire life. I on the other hand would not strive for this dream until my second semester of college at the College of Southern Nevada, and I often ponder how different my life would have been if I would have had a teaching end goal from the beginning.

The magnetic field rotates 180 degrees when the battery slider moves from one side of the battery to the other.

In the “Surgeon as Priest,” Richard Selzer dives into the religious and scientific aspects of being a surgeon. He explores and divides the certain aspects of “healing” into five parts, each section demonstrating the different perspectives on healing (spiritually & scientifically) that eventually builds the metaphorical bridge between surgeon and priest. With the use of figurative language and other rhetorical devises, he connects each section of his essay to show his transformation from a scientific healer to a spiritual healer.

Today we know that depression, anxiety and other psychological symptoms can contribute to physical sensations and a sense of being physically unwell and we also have an understanding of psychosomatic illness. Another important contribution was Mesmer’s recognition of the unconscious, although he did not speak of it as such. He experienced the power of the unconscious in that he contributed to the discovery of the hypnotic state, which can be a powerful therapeutic tool in therapy. Although he was labeled a fraud on the basis that there was no proof that he had discovered a new physical fluid, it is an important finding just the same that his clients were cured on the basis of suggestion. This is important in terms of how the psychological relates to the physical. Another contribution to psychology is that Mesmer sought to be both a scientist and a practitioner, and that this model of the dual role of a therapist is important for therapists working in psychology today. Finally, Mesmer mentored an important figure in the history of psychology who recognized that the belief in the efficacy of cure, desire to cure and the therapeutic relationship were fundamental factors in successfully working with clients in therapy. These beliefs are central to the practice of clinical psychology in our world today. There is no doubt that Mesmer is a curious figure in the history of psychology. He contributed to

I chose to analyze the primary source of “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” written by Cotton Mather. He was born on February 12th of 1663 into a wealthy family of New England Puritan ministers. Cotton Mather started school at the age of twelve at Harvard College. He graduated and chose to become a member of the clergy but was unable to because of a speech impediment. He was able to overcome this however and a number of years later he was ordained in 1685. He became a very revered and influential minister at the time. In addition, he was also considered to be quite progressive in the field of medicine. He also was a renowned writer and published at least 350 written documents. One of these passages was the “The Wonders of the Invisible

For physicians practicing in the 19th century, there was a deep connection between mind and body. In the eyes

He believed mesmerism to be a “nervous sleep” and coined the word hypnosis, from Greek word Hypnos, meaning sleep. He discovered that getting a patient to fixate upon something was one of the most important components of putting them into a trance.

When staff did attempt to cure the patients, they followed the practices typical of the time period—purging and bloodletting, the most common. Other treatments included dousing the patient in either hot or ice-cold water to shock their minds back into a normal state. The belief that patients needed to choose rationality over insanity led to techniques aiming to intimidate (Butcher 37). Blistering, physical restraints, threats, and straitjackets were employed to achieve this end. Powerful drugs were also administered, for example, to a hysterical patient in order to exhaust them (Butcher 37, Alexander 109). Around the mid-1700s, the Dutch Dr. Boerhaave invented the “gyrating chair” that became a popular tool in Europe and the United States. This instrument was intended to shake up the blood and tissues of the body to restore equilibrium, but instead resulted in rendering the patient unconscious without any recorded successes (Alexander 109).

Daniel Oxenbridge, an English physician, treated a young mentally ill woman by giving her laxatives, bleeding her arms, legs and feet. He also shaved her head and applied clothes with different oils on them to her head (Dreher 2). Thomas Willis, another English physician, drilled holes in a patients head to release foul vapors and excessive humors. Thomas Willis also treated another young lady by throwing her into a river naked, for a quarter of an hour. These patients not only survived these treatments, they also returned to their normal selves (Dreher

The animal magnetism that Vonnegut describes is thought to be an invisible force that is exerted by animals that had powers such as healing. This is similar to how many people perceive God today, a strong power that cannot really

This experiment was conducted to teach the effects of natural selection on a population. My hypothesis was that the furless rabbit population will decrease over time. My hypothesis was proven true because the graph showed that the furless bunny population was

Although Franz Mesmer was labeled as a fraud, he provided a basis for later psychoanalytic techniques such as hypnotism. As research of mental illness developed, mental disorders were classified as psychological illnesses instead of physiological illnesses. In light of this, physicians created ways to test the brain for mental illness: cranial capacity research and phrenology.

Another conspicuity, besides the circles function as “inspirer”, was that “By the turn of the 19th century, it was common knowledge among the educated classes that scientists were trying to fathom the

Looking into the topic of famous scientists who discovered electricity or magnetism, I found that there was not one specific person who had done that. It was a chain of amazing scientists, all following one another’s work to invent or discover something else. Some of them

* Unlike electric charges, magnetic poles always occur in North-South pairs; there are nomagnetic monopoles.