erves to be rated as a signal
benefit to humanity. Nor is it to be lost sight of, that the invention
is quite in its infancy; and that any sound objections which may, at
present, be raised against it, are not unlikely to be obviated through
the modifications and improvements of which it is no doubt susceptible.
The amount of success already obtained, may further be deemed sufficient
to make us secure that the object of extinguishing the sufferings of
surgery will never _again_ be lost sight of by the medical profession
and the public. One item, partial indeed, but a tolerably severe one, in
the catalogue of the physical ills to which flesh is heir, is thus so
far in a fair way of being got rid of.

The method of Mesmer was an attempt to cure bodily disease by making a
forcible impression on the nerves. And no doubt can be entertained that
many of his patients were the better for the violent succussion of the
system which his developed practice put them through.

But mesmerism contained two things,--a bold empirical practice and a
mystical theory. Mesmer strove, by the latter, to explain the effects
which his practice produced. An odd fate his method and his theory will
have had. His method was considered, by many of his contemporaries, as
of solid importance; his theory was for the most part ridiculed as that
of a half-crazed enthusiast and impostor. Now, no reasonable person can
regard his practice in any other light than as a rough and hazardous
experiment. But his theory, in the mean time, is ceasing to be absurd;
for it admits of being represented as a very respectable anticipation of
Von Reichenbach's recent discoveries.

Mesmer, a native of Switzerland, was born in 1734. He became a student
at Vienna, where his turn for the mystical led him to the studies of
alchemy and astrology. In the year 1766, he published a treatise on the
influence of the planets upon the human frame. It contains the idea that
a force extends throughout space through which the stars can affect the
body. In attempting to identify this force, Mesmer first supposed it to
be electricity. Afterwards, about the year 1773, he adopted the belief
that it must be ordinary magnetism. So at Vienna, from 1773 to 1775, he
employed the practice of stroking diseased parts of the body with
magnets. But, in 1776, making a tour in Bavaria and Switzerland, he fell
in with the notorious Father Gassner, who had at that time undertaken
the cure of the blind pri