author
France. Commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal
This work comes from the royal commission appointed in 1784 to investigate animal magnetism, the controversial healing practice associated with Franz Mesmer. Its report became one of the best-known early official tests of extraordinary scientific claims.
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Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and other commissioners, charged by the King of France, with the examination of the animal magnetism, as now practised at Paris
by France. Commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal
About the author
Written in the name of a French royal commission rather than a single author, this report was produced after Louis XVI ordered an inquiry into animal magnetism in 1784. Catalog records for the book name the commission itself as the corporate author and also associate leading members including Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Benjamin Franklin, and Antoine Lavoisier.
The commission brought together physicians from the Paris Faculty of Medicine and members of the Royal Academy of Sciences. Their investigation examined whether the effects attributed to mesmerism came from a real physical force or from imagination, imitation, and expectation.
Today, the report is remembered as a landmark in the history of scientific skepticism and experimental inquiry. Even though it was created for a very specific controversy in late eighteenth-century France, it still reads as an early attempt to separate striking personal testimony from controlled observation.