Page - 357 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

357Coping with Enlightenments and sauerkraut.43 The essay was reissued in 1779, along with a devastating refu- tation based on the components of sugar set against the (presumed) causes of scurvy, by a certain Dr. von Albertiz.44 By far more intriguing and important than Hell’s speculation on sugar as an antidote to scurvy was Hell’s other foray into the life sciences: his engagement with magnetic healing in general, and specifically the individual primarily associated with this practice during the Enlightenment, Franz Anton Mesmer. Before becoming a celebrity in Paris after his arrival there in 1778,45 Mesmer had spent nearly two decades of his life in Vienna where, in turn, he had come to study medicine in 1759 after disillusioning experiences at the Jesuit universi- ties of Dillingen and Ingolstadt. Mesmer, a student of the Dutch director of the Viennese general hospital, Anton de Haen (1704–76), who inoculated him with an enthusiasm about British experimental medicine, defended and published his dissertation entitled De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum (On the influence of the planets on the human body) in 1766. In substantial parts pla- giarized from a 1704 work by the London physician Richard Mead (1673–1754), Mesmer’s essay still put forward a new theory: instead of an influence of grav- ity acting on the body through the mediation of air and cognate fluids as provi- dential agents, it posited an immediate force named “animal gravity,” which “intensifies, remits, and agitates cohesion, elasticity, irritability, magnetism, and electricity.” While the cosmos, as well as the animal body, is normally 43 Hell demonstrated no awareness of the widespread preoccupation with combating scur- vy in his age, including the work of the Edinburgh naval surgeon James Lind (1716–94) a generation earlier, or the highly successful “regiment of cleanliness, fresh air, and diet” implemented on his voyages by James Cook, for which he was awarded a medal of the Royal Society the year before Hell wrote his short essay. Cf. Stephen R. Bown, Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press, 2003). 44 Der Zucker, ein neues Präservativmittel wider den Scorbut (Scharbock) von Herrn Abt Kai­ serl. Königl. Hofastronom in Wien, Nebst einer Zuschrift, darinn des Scharbocks Ursachen etc. und auch des Zuckers eigenschaften gründlicher erwogen und widerlegt werden von Herrn von Albertiz, der Arzneygelartheit Doktor (Vienna: Johann Friedrich Jahn, 1779). See also Aspaas, “Hell og Sajnovics,” 65. 45 Most of the literature on Mesmer is focused on his Parisian years where “mesmerism” blossomed, discussing the “early years” in Vienna from the perspective of the “denoue- ment.” The most compelling treatment from a historical perspective is still Robert Darn- ton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). More recently, see (despite the error of believing Mesmer to have been a native of Vienna, 199) Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimen­ tal Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 189–226. On Mesmer in the context of the “invention of celebrity,” see Antoine Lilti, Fi­ gures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité 1750–1850 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), 86, 89.