At the intersection of Enlightenment natural philosophy, medical spectacle, and proto-psychotherapy stands one of the most intriguing devices in the history of science: the baquet. Conceived in late eighteenth-century Paris, this magnetized wooden vat served as the centerpiece for early modern group healing rituals, directly catalyzing the scientific investigations that gave birth to modern clinical hypnosis and psychodynamics. By examining the baquet, scholars uncover the foundational shift from mechanical theories of invisible physical fluids to the empirical recognition of psychological suggestion and collective expectancy.
Mesmer’s Baquet
1. Concise Definition
The baquet was an apparatus designed by German physician Franz Anton Mesmer in the late 1770s to administer collective treatment through what he termed animal magnetism (magnétisme animal). Structurally, it consisted of an oval or circular oak tub filled with water, iron filings, ground glass, and magnetized bottles, from which jointed iron rods projected outward so that multiple patients could contact them simultaneously.
Functioning simultaneously as a medical conduit and an elaborate theatrical centerpiece, the baquet was engineered to store, concentrate, and transmit a universal, invisible magnetic fluid throughout the bodies of afflicted individuals. By gathering dozens of patients around this singular vessel in an atmosphere heightened by soft music, dim lighting, and mutual touch, the device induced dramatic therapeutic crises characterized by convulsions, emotional catharsis, and sudden symptom remissions.
Beyond its immediate historical role as an eighteenth-century therapeutic contraption, the baquet represents a watershed moment in medical epistemology. It provided the empirical battleground upon which scientific inquiry first systematically uncoupled physical mechanics from the transformative potency of expectation, interpersonal rapport, and psychological suggestion.
2. Etymology & Linguistic Origin
The noun baquet originates directly from the French language, where it literally designates a small wooden tub, shallow vat, washbasin, or bucket. Etymologically, the term represents a diminutive of the Old French word bac (meaning an open trough, boat, or water container), which traces its roots to the Late Latin baccus or baccale, an ancient vessel used to hold liquid or wine. Within agricultural and domestic French contexts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a baquet was an ordinary utilitarian vessel employed for laundry, butchery, or winemaking.
Mesmer appropriated this domestic term upon his arrival in Paris in 1778, elevating a common household object into a proprietary technological vessel of high clinical fashion. Through medical treatises, satirical cartoons, and formal royal investigations, the word rapidly entered European intellectual discourse in its untranslated French form. By the 1780s, medical authorities across England, Germany, and Italy referred specifically to “Mesmer’s baquet” to denote not merely the physical tub, but the entire ritualistic paradigm of collective magnetotherapy.
3. Pronunciation & Grammatical Form
In standard English usage, baquet is categorized as a singular, countable loan noun. The accepted Anglicized pronunciation is /bæˈkeɪ/ (sounding like ba-KAY), closely mirroring the standard French phonetic pronunciation /ba.kɛ/. Occasionally, British historical texts render it phonetically as /bɑːˈkeɪ/.
The plural form is rendered as baquets (pronounced /bæˈkeɪz/ in English and /ba.kɛ/ in French). Grammatically, the term is frequently employed as an attributive noun or nominal modifier within historical and psychiatric literature, appearing in compounds such as “baquet session,” “baquet treatment,” or “baquet ritual.” It should not be capitalized unless it appears at the beginning of a sentence or within a formal title.
4. Detailed Conceptual Explanation
To fully grasp the baquet’s conceptual framework, one must understand Mesmer’s overarching cosmological paradigm. Mesmer posited that a superfine, universally diffused physical fluid filled the entire cosmos, establishing a continuous medium between celestial bodies, the earth, and living organisms. Within the human organism, health depended on the balanced, unobstructed circulation of this fluid through the nervous and vascular systems. Disease, conversely, was conceptualized as a localized obstacle or state of disharmony in this fluid dynamic. Mesmer claimed that an individual endowed with strong magnetic potential could correct these blockages, but the limits of human endurance necessitated a physical battery to amplify and distribute this energy to multiple patients simultaneously.
The physical construction of the baquet was directly modeled after contemporary electrical instruments, particularly the Leyden jar, which had captured the eighteenth-century scientific imagination by demonstrating that invisible electrical force could be accumulated within a vessel and discharged upon human subjects. Mesmer’s oak tub was lined with sulfur and pitch, layered with bottles arranged symmetrically with their necks oriented inward or outward, filled with magnetized water, and submerged beneath a dense matrix of iron filings, pounded glass, and river stones. A wooden lid sealed this mixture, perforated around its circumference by small apertures through which bent, movable iron rods protruded. Each patient held one of these rods against their specific anatomical site of pain or disease, while a cord tied around the tub was wrapped around the patients’ waists to maintain an unbroken circuit of magnetic communication.
The psychological boundaries of the baquet transcended the timber and iron of the tub itself. Mesmer recognized that therapeutic transmission required an immersive, highly curated sensory environment. The treatment chamber at his clinic at the Hôtel de Bouillon was hung with thick tapestries and heavy mirrors designed to reflect and intensify the magnetic currents. Operatic airs, celestial melodies from the glass armonica, and soft pianoforte chords reverberated continuously through the dim room, designed to soothe agitated nerves and soften patient resistance. Attendants known as magnetizers, chosen for their youth and vitality, moved among the circle of patients, applying manual passes—rhythmic sweeping hand motions along the patients’ limbs—to stimulate internal fluid currents.
Within this hyper-sensory atmosphere, the boundaries between individual somatic experience and collective emotional contagion collapsed. As patients sat in prolonged physical contact, linked by cords and joined fingers, a palpable tension accumulated. When one susceptible patient succumbed to a violent “crisis”—manifesting as uncontrollable tremors, weeping, shrieking, or hysterical laughter—the behavior cascaded across the circle. Mesmer viewed these violent convulsions not as adverse reactions, but as the critical therapeutic climax: the forceful overcoming of internal blockages, after which harmony was restored and the patient entered a tranquil state of convalescence.
5. Historical Development
The developmental trajectory of the baquet began in Vienna during the early 1770s, where Mesmer initially employed manual magnets, steel plates, and direct physical touch to treat patients suffering from hysterical paralysis and melancholia. Following intense professional conflict with the Viennese medical faculty—most notably surrounding his disputed treatment of the blind pianist Maria Theresa Paradis—Mesmer departed for Paris in February 1778. Recognizing that the bustling French capital offered both an insatiable appetite for scientific novelties and a massive market of affluent, ailing aristocrats, Mesmer established private clinical quarters where individual treatments rapidly proved physically unsustainable due to the sheer volume of patrons.
To overcome this logistical bottleneck, Mesmer constructed the first large-scale baquet in late 1778. It served up to thirty individuals at once and democratized the therapeutic ritual into a shared public spectacle. The venture achieved sensational commercial success. Prominent nobles, including the Marquis de Lafayette, paid astronomical subscriptions to join Mesmer’s society and sit at the communal vat. For the impoverished classes, Mesmer erected an outdoor public variant: a towering linden tree on the Rue de la Verrerie, encircled by cords attached to its branches, which destitute sufferers grasped in hopes of absorbing the overflow of celestial fluid.
The escalating frenzy alarmed both orthodox physicians and King Louis XVI. In March 1784, the crown commissioned two distinguished panels to investigate animal magnetism: a committee from the Royal Academy of Sciences and the Faculty of Medicine—chaired by American polymath Benjamin Franklin and featuring chemist Antoine Lavoisier, astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, and physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin—alongside a separate commission from the Royal Society of Medicine. The Franklin commission carried out pioneering, methodologically rigorous sham experiments. They constructed sham baquets, magnetized unannounced trees, and presented unmagnetized objects to blindfolded patients who were falsely told the objects were magnetized. When blindfolded subjects experienced intense crises only when they believed the magnetic influence was present, and exhibited no reaction before genuinely magnetized objects when misinformed, the commissioners delivered their verdict: Mesmer’s fluid was nonexistent, and all observed phenomena were attributable solely to “imitation, imagination, and touch.”
The 1784 Franklin and Bailly reports dealt an irreparable blow to Mesmer’s scientific credibility, prompting his eventual retreat from Paris. However, the baquet did not vanish entirely. His foremost disciple, the Marquis de Puységur, abandoned the turbulent convulsions of the vat in favor of a calm, sleep-like trance state he observed in a magnetized peasant at his estate in Buzancy. This peaceful condition, termed “artificial somnambulism,” eliminated the need for the physical tub and shifted focus entirely toward psychological rapport. Over the subsequent six decades, French, British, and German practitioners gradually stripped away Mesmer’s occult fluids, laying the groundwork for James Braid in the 1840s to rebrand the phenomenon as hypnosis.
6. Theoretical Foundations
The theoretical paradigm underpinning the baquet drew upon early modern physics, cosmology, and iatromechanics, fusing Isaac Newton’s laws of universal gravitation with Richard Mead’s treatises on the influence of celestial bodies on the human body. In his seminal 1779 dissertation, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal, Mesmer outlined twenty-seven formal propositions asserting that living tissue is continually acted upon by an infinitely subtle, universally distributed physical agent that operates in accordance with mechanical laws.
Within this framework, the human nervous system was conceived not as an autonomous organic network, but as a specialized conductor receptive to cosmic flux. Mesmer argued that the human body possessed defined poles, analogous to mineral loadstones, with currents entering through one extremity and exiting through another. When bodily fluids stagnated, the internal magnetic equilibrium broke down. The baquet functioned as a macroscopic condenser designed to introduce an overwhelming current of external vitality into these stagnant systems. The iron filings, magnetized bottles, and water served as a reservoir that stored this fluid, while the iron rods acted as directional conductors that penetrated the physical resistance of the patient’s organic tissues.
Crucially, Mesmer posited that this physical fluid was directly modulated by the human will and physical touch. The operator acted as an organic regulator whose presence directed the reservoir’s energy toward therapeutic targets. The circular arrangement of human participants completed an unbroken, self-reinforcing energetic loop. While Mesmer adamantly insisted that his paradigm was purely physical and rooted in mechanistic materialism, subsequent psychological theorists—beginning with the Franklin Commission and later systematized by Jean-Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud, and Pierre Janet—demonstrated that the actual theoretical engine driving the baquet was not an external cosmic fluid, but the internal dynamics of psychological expectancy, demand characteristics, and dissociation.
7. Key Components, Types & Dimensions
The baquet ritual integrated precise mechanical components, structural variations, and physiological responses:
- Physical Anatomy of the Apparatus: A circular or oval tub constructed from polished oak, typically measuring four to five feet in diameter and approximately one to one-and-a-half feet in depth. The internal chamber contained layers of crushed glass, sulfur, iron shavings, and river stones submerged beneath water, interspersed with dozens of symmetrical glass flasks filled with magnetized water.
- External Conductors: A heavy wooden lid fitted securely over the tub, punctured around its rim with brass or iron-ringed holes through which emerged curved, jointed iron rods. Patients held these rods against afflicted areas (such as the abdomen, liver, or throat), adjusting the joints to maintain contact without breaking posture.
- Apparatus Variants:
- The High-Society Interior Baquet: The standard luxurious salon vat designed for wealthy paying patrons, accommodating between twelve and thirty seated participants at a time.
- The Poor Man’s Tree Baquet: An open-air, low-cost adaptation consisting of large urban or rural trees (such as the linden tree on Paris’s Rue de la Verrerie or Puységur’s elm at Buzancy), strung with cords that crowds grasped to receive therapeutic benefit.
- The Portable or Bedside Baquet: Miniaturized wooden boxes containing magnetized iron rods, crafted for wealthy, bedridden individuals unable to attend communal salons.
- Sensory and Spatial Architecture: The treatment room featured darkened windows, mirrors to theoretically reflect magnetic rays, thick floor rugs to deaden footsteps, and acoustic resonance provided by hidden instruments playing sustained, harmonic tones.
- The Crisis Chamber (Salle des Crises): A specialized adjacent room lined with thick mattresses and padded walls. Patients who succumbed to violent emotional, motor, or respiratory convulsions were swiftly escorted into this chamber by assistants so their unrestrained thrashing would not disrupt the collective session.
- Somatic Symptom Spectrum: Observed reactions ranged across a distinct spectrum, including localized tingling, muscular fasciculations, flushed cheeks, uncontrollable laughing or weeping, generalized epileptic-like motor seizures, profound syncope, and catatonic-like somnolence.
8. Examples & Illustrative Cases
Historical archives from late eighteenth-century Paris provide vivid accounts of individual experiences at Mesmer’s baquet. One representative case documented in contemporary diaries involves a young Parisian noblewoman who had suffered for months from chronic melancholia, respiratory tightness, and recurring hysterical limb paralysis following a sudden bereavement. Classical bloodletting, purgatives, and mineral waters had yielded no improvement. Entering Mesmer’s salon in late 1780, she was seated at the edge of the large oak vat, her right hand holding an iron rod pressed firmly to her chest, while her left hand held the thumb of an adjacent patient.
After forty minutes of rhythmic breathing to the notes of the glass armonica, the young woman reported an escalating heat radiating from the iron rod into her sternum. As Mesmer approached—dressed in his trademark lilac silk robe and carrying a slender magnetized iron wand—he made slow, deliberate sweeping gestures along her spine without touching her directly. Within moments, her breathing grew rapid and shallow, culminating in an acute convulsive crisis characterized by violent sobbing and whole-body arching. She was immediately moved to the padded salle des crises. Following an hour of exhaustion and peaceful sleep, she emerged entirely free of thoracic pain, demonstrating immediate, restored motor function in her previously paralyzed limbs.
A contrasting case is provided in the meticulous observational logs kept by the 1784 Royal Commissioners. The commissioners observed a middle-aged merchant who was skeptical of animal magnetism. When seated at the baquet with his eyes open, fully aware that the iron rod was connected to the tub, he gradually manifested pronounced facial flushing, tremors in his fingers, and deep anxiety. Days later, under controlled experimental conditions, the commissioners placed the same merchant before an identical wooden tub containing ordinary water and scrap metal, concealing its unmagnetized nature. The subject, convinced he was exposed to Mesmer’s genuine apparatus, experienced a violent convulsive crisis within twelve minutes. Conversely, when exposed to a genuine, fully prepared baquet while blindfolded and told it was merely an empty wooden bench, he sat quietly for thirty minutes exhibiting neither somatic fluctuations nor crisis symptoms.
9. Measurement & Assessment
Because animal magnetism was advanced as a physical science, Mesmer and his contemporaries sought empirical metrics to evaluate the baquet’s efficacy. The primary clinical metric was the speed, intensity, and resolution of the “magnetic crisis.” Practitioners did not employ standardized quantitative scales; instead, they relied on observational rubrics assessing physiological shifts: changes in radial pulse rate, skin temperature, dilation of pupils, the severity of motor tremors, and the eventual restoration of normal physiological rhythms.
The pivotal turning point in assessing the baquet emerged with the methodological framework devised by the 1784 Royal Commission. Faced with conflicting qualitative anecdotes, Antoine Lavoisier and his fellow commissioners established an empirical paradigm that pioneered modern clinical research methodology: the single-blind sham design.
The commission established rigorous assessment protocols to systematically isolate variables:
- Sensory Deprivation and Blindfolding: Subjects across various social strata and clinical conditions were blindfolded before being brought into proximity with active baquets, magnetized trees, or magnetized practitioners.
- Deceptive Sham Manipulation: Patients were presented with unmagnetized, inert physical objects (such as ordinary cups, wooden blocks, and sham iron tubs) while being told they were charged with powerful animal magnetic fluid.
- Concealed True Exposure: Genuinely magnetized objects and active magnetizers were placed directly behind screens or thin wooden partitions behind unsuspecting subjects to observe whether any biological effect occurred in the absence of conscious awareness.
The quantitative results gathered by the commissioners demonstrated that physical symptoms occurred exclusively when subjects were aware of the supposed presence of magnetism. Somatic reactions tracked subjective belief rather than the objective physical state of the baquet, establishing that the apparatus possessed no measurable independent physical agency.
10. Applications & Practical Significance
Although the baquet’s physical premises were disproven, its operational architecture laid the foundation for numerous practices in psychotherapy, medicine, and social psychology. In clinical history, the baquet stands as the earliest recorded prototype of collective psychotherapy. By convening individuals suffering from functional, psychosomatic, and mood disorders in an egalitarian circle, Mesmer inadvertently mobilized social validation, shared vulnerability, and group cohesion to relieve psychological distress.
In the field of psychiatry, the convulsive crises induced by the baquet served as a precursor to early psychodynamic theories of catharsis and abreaction. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s early conceptualization of the “talking cure”—wherein the emotional release of repressed psychic energy alleviates hysterical symptoms—shares clear structural parallels with the magnetic crisis, albeit shifted from physical convulsions to linguistic and emotional expression.
Furthermore, the baquet played an indispensable role in the development of modern medical methodology. The rigorous sham experiments designed to investigate the apparatus served as the historical blueprint for the placebo effect and the modern randomized, sham-controlled clinical trial. Whenever modern pharmacological researchers administer an inert sugar pill or modern surgeons perform a sham procedure to evaluate the true efficacy of an intervention against patient expectancy, they are utilizing the methodological legacy established by the Franklin Commission at Mesmer’s baquet.
11. Research & Empirical Evidence
The empirical evaluation of Mesmer’s baquet began with the 1784 reports authored by Jean Sylvain Bailly and Antoine Lavoisier on behalf of the King’s Commission. Their report, Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal, concluded with definitive clarity: “The commissioners have recognized that this animal magnetic fluid cannot be perceived by any of our senses, that it had no effect on themselves, nor on the patients submitted to them… they have unanimously concluded… that the fluid without imagination is nothing, while imagination without the fluid can produce all the effects attributed to it.”
In modern psychological literature, the baquet has been subjected to extensive retrospective analysis by historians of science and neuroscientists. Jerome Frank, in his classic 1961 work Persuasion and Healing, identified the baquet as a prime historical example of the non-specific therapeutic factors common to all forms of healing: a culturally sanctioned healing setting, an authoritative and confident practitioner, an emotionally charged ritual, and a plausible conceptual framework that explains distress. Frank argued that the dramatic symptom remissions observed around the baquet were genuine neurobiological responses driven by high expectancy, anxiety reduction, and the release of endogenous opioids and dopamine triggered by profound hope.
Cognitive and social psychologists, including John Kihlstrom and Irving Kirsch, have examined the baquet through the lens of response expectancy theory and socio-cognitive hypnotic paradigms. Kirsch demonstrated that when individuals possess strong, culturally reinforced expectancies regarding an upcoming physiological reaction (such as a magnetic crisis), their subjective experiences and involuntary motor systems align with those expectations. Modern research confirms that the convulsions around the baquet were essentially non-epileptic psychogenic seizures, induced and shaped by observational learning and the heightened suggestibility inherent in group contexts.
12. Cultural & Cross-Cultural Considerations
The emergence and immense popularity of the baquet cannot be separated from the peculiar cultural atmosphere of late eighteenth-century pre-revolutionary France. Paris in the 1780s was gripped by fascination with newly revealed, invisible physical forces. The recent discovery of oxygen, the harnessing of electricity via lightning rods and Leyden jars, and the Montgolfier brothers’ pioneering hot-air balloon flights created a cultural milieu where unseen wonders were expected to revolutionize human life. Mesmer’s baquet appeared thoroughly modern and progressive, couched in the rhetoric of natural philosophy rather than medieval mysticism or religious miracle-working.
From a cross-cultural perspective, however, the baquet ritual mirrors communal healing and possession ceremonies documented across anthropological literature. The collective, rhythmic atmosphere of the baquet salon—complete with auditory stimulation, physical contact, synchronized respiration, and shared emotional surrender—shares clear parallels with the zar cults of North Africa and the Middle East, the communal healing dances of the Kalahari San, and the ecstatic trance rituals of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. In all these contexts, collective ritual and social communion provide a structured cultural container within which individuals can manifest functional distress, discharge psychological tension, and return to their communities with renewed psychological and physical equilibrium.
13. Criticisms, Debates & Limitations
From its inception, the baquet was the focus of intense institutional controversy and moral anxiety. The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris viewed Mesmer as an arrogant foreign charlatan who bypassed medical orthodoxy to enrich himself on the gullibility of wealthy hypochondriacs. Orthodox physicians attacked the physical premise of animal magnetism, pointing out that despite extensive physical testing, no instrument, galvanometer, or chemical reagent could register the presence of the supposed fluid.
Simultaneously, serious moral and ethical concerns arose regarding the nature of the baquet sessions. Jean Sylvain Bailly submitted an additional, classified report directly to King Louis XVI, known to historians as the Secret Report on the Morality of Animal Magnetism. Bailly warned the king of the grave moral hazards inherent in the treatment, noting that the magnetizers—invariably vigorous men—maintained prolonged physical contact with vulnerable female patients, touching their breasts, thighs, and lower abdomens during manual passes. Bailly observed that the convulsive crises frequently bore unmistakable resemblances to sexual climaxes, warning that the physical proximity, heightened emotional state, and surrender of conscious control rendered female patients uniquely susceptible to seduction and psychological exploitation.
A secondary theoretical debate emerged among Mesmer’s own disciples. Figures like the Marquis de Puységur and the Chevalier de Barbarin argued that the noisy, violent crises induced by the baquet were not only unnecessary, but clinically detrimental. They argued that the physical vat was a distracting, mechanical illusion, and that genuine healing occurred through quiet mental concentration, rapport, and pastoral serenity. This schism permanently split the mesmerist movement, paving the way for the internal psychological models that later eclipsed the baquet’s mechanical paradigm.
14. Related Terms & Distinctions
The following terms occupy the conceptual space surrounding the baquet and require clear differentiation:
- Animal Magnetism (Magnétisme Animal): The theoretical, universal physical fluid posited by Franz Anton Mesmer to explain life, health, and disease. The baquet was simply an instrument engineered to store and transmit this fluid; the fluid was the theoretical substance, whereas the baquet was the clinical hardware.
- Leyden Jar: An early physical electrical condenser invented in the 1740s, consisting of a glass jar lined with metal foil that stored static electricity. Mesmer explicitly patterned the internal layers of the baquet after the Leyden jar, claiming his vat stored animal magnetism just as the jar stored electrical charge.
- Hypnosis: A state of focused attention, heightened suggestibility, and vivid imagery, formalized by Scottish surgeon James Braid in 1843. Hypnosis represents the psychological and neurophysiological successor to mesmerism, completely discarding the baquet’s physical fluid in favor of cognitive and physiological processes.
- Artificial Somnambulism: A calm, sleep-like, hyper-suggestible trance state discovered by the Marquis de Puységur in 1784. It directly replaced the violent, convulsive crises of the baquet, serving as the historical bridge between mesmerism and modern hypnotherapy.
- Placebo Effect: A measurable, beneficial neurobiological and psychological change resulting from an inert or inactive intervention, driven by patient expectancy and meaning. The baquet is historically recognized as the primary catalyst that forced the scientific invention of sham-controlled trials to isolate the placebo response.
- Group Psychotherapy: A contemporary psychiatric and psychological modality where individuals meet under professional guidance to foster personal change through interpersonal dynamics. While Mesmer utilized group dynamics unconsciously, modern group therapy consciously leverages peer support, universality, and feedback without mystical or mechanical apparatuses.
15. Summary / Key Takeaways
The baquet remains a towering monument in the archaeology of modern psychology and medical science. As an apparatus, it represented an ingenious synthesis of late eighteenth-century mechanical materialism, incorporating oak, iron, and magnetized water into an early physical condenser of healing energy. As a clinical ritual, it gathered dozens of sufferers around jointed rods, orchestrating music, dim light, and group contagion to catalyze intense emotional and motor crises that frequently relieved debilitating functional symptoms.
The lasting legacy of the baquet, however, lies in its decisive scientific dismantling. The rigorous, controlled investigations conducted by the 1784 Royal Commission led by Franklin and Lavoisier systematically demonstrated that the apparatus had no physical magnetic fluid, proving that its therapeutic power stemmed entirely from the psychological potency of human expectation, rapport, and imagination. In doing so, Mesmer’s curious wooden tub inadvertently catalyzed the emergence of clinical hypnosis, accelerated the discovery of the placebo effect, and paved the way for modern psychosomatic medicine.
In conclusion, the baquet illustrates how human psychology can transform an inert collection of wood and metal into an engine of profound clinical transformation. It remains an enduring reminder that the therapeutic alliance, social context, and the power of belief are among the most potent forces in medicine and psychotherapy.
References
- Bailly, J. S. (1784). Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi de l’examen du magnétisme animal. Imprimerie Royale.
- Bailly, J. S. (1784). Rapport secret présenté au Roi par la commission de la Faculté de Médecine et de l’Académie des Sciences sur le magnétisme animal. Manuscript document.
- Braid, J. (1843). Neurypnology; or, The rationale of nervous sleep considered in relation with animal magnetism. John Churchill.
- Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Basic Books.
- Frank, J. D., & Frank, J. B. (1993). Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy (3rd ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Kihlstrom, J. F. (2002). Mesmer, the Franklin Commission, and hypnosis: A case study in the history of science and the philosophy of medicine. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 50(4), 407–419.
- Kirsch, I. (1997). Suggestibility or hypnosis: What do our scales really measure? International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 45(3), 212–225.
- Mesmer, F. A. (1779). Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal. P.-Fr. Didot le jeune.
- Pattie, F. A. (1994). Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter in the History of Medicine. Edmonston Publishing.