Page - 359 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

359Coping with Enlightenments failure of this much-publicized venture that discredited Mesmer in Vienna and compelled him to leave for Paris in January 1778. Hell’s point of entry in this story is that—just like he had received the first magnets he used in his experiments in Cluj in the 1750s from a counterpart of his at the Calvinist college—he supplied the magnets that Mesmer used in the attempted treatment of Miss Österlin. We have seen that, on the side of his chief preoccupations, magnetic healing was a lasting interest of Hell, and even in June 1774 he apparently alleviated the suffering of a baroness from severe abdominal pain by lending her magnets. This is related by Hell in a small pam- phlet published at the very beginning of 1775, in which he also clarifies that from the patient’s account of her feelings he had concluded that the magnets exerted their effect through the nervous system.50 At the same time, he stressed—at this point, seemingly out of sheer modesty—that while he trig- gered Mesmer’s as yet apparently successful work with Miss Österlin by sup- plying him with magnets, he himself did not participate in the treatment in either this case or in similar others. Just one day later, on January 5, 1775, Mes- mer published his letter to the Altona physician Johann Christoph Unzer (1747–1809), in which he introduced the notion of “animal magnetism,” attrib- uting the healing effect not to the steel magnets used but to the magnetism in the physician’s body, capable of channeling the invisible magnetic fluids that pervade the universe into the organism of the patient in order to restore its balance. Mesmer also projected this idea back into the 1766 dissertation.51 “Just as the Sun and the moon, in their various positions vis-à-vis one another and the Earth and its distance, determine the periods of ebb and flow in the sea and the whole atmosphere, I demonstrated that a similar ebb and flow arises from the ordinary causes in the human body.”52 It was on the basis of such parallels that Mesmer even claimed that “ani- mal  magnetism is a reconciliation of two known sciences, astronomy and 50 Maximilian Hell, Unparteyisher Bericht der in Wien gemachten Entdeckungen der son­ derbaren Wirkungen der künstlichen Stahlmagneten in verschiedenen Nervenkrankheiten ( Vienna: n.p., 1775), republished in Sammlung der gedruckten und geschriebenen Nach­ richten von Magnet­ Curen, vorzüglich der Mesmerischen (Leipzig: Hilschern, 1778), 11–12. The same collection begins with a brief, anonymous account of similar healings by Hell (see 1–3). 51 Franz Anton Mesmer, Schreiben [über die Magnetkur von Herrn A. Mesmer, Doktor der Arz­ neygelahrtheit], an einen auswärtigen Arzt (Vienna: Kurzböck, 1775), republished in Samm lung der gedruckten und geschriebenen Nachrichten, 16–25, published in English in Bloch, Mesmerism, 23–30. 52 Mesmer, Schreiben, 17.