Biopics of 2004 and 2015

Mesmer was born and raised in the Swabian village of Iznang near the Lake of Constance. His father was a forester employed by the archbishop of Constance; his mother, the daughter of a locksmith; and his family, large Franz Anton was the third of nine children , Catholic, and not particularly prosperous.

Biographical film meaning

By the time he began to propound his theory of animal magnetism or mesmerism, Mesmer had risen through the educational systems of Bavaria and Austria and had advanced to a position of some prominence in Viennese society through his marriage to a wealthy widow, Maria Anna von Posch, on 16 January Mesmerism therefore may have been the product of an ambitious arriviste but not of a mountebank.

After preliminary studies in a local monastic school, Mesmer spent four years at the Jesuit University of Dillingen Bavaria , presumably as a scholarship student preparing for the priesthood. He then attended the University of Ingolstadt for a brief period and in entered the University of Vienna as a law student. Having changed to medicine and completed the standard course of studies, he received his doctorate in Mesmer later traced his theory of animal magnetism to his doctoral thesis, Dissertatio physico-medica de planetarum influxu.

At the time of its defense, however, the thesis did not strike the Viennese authorities as a revolutionary new theory of medicine. The proposition took on new life for Mesmer when he began treating his own patients. Unlike Hell, Mesmer did not attribute his cures to any power in the magnets themselves. Instead, he argued that the bodv was analogous to a magnet and that the fluid ebbed and flowed according to the laws of magnetic attraction.

By this time Mesmer had moved into a comfortable town house in Vienna, which he used as a clinic. His marriage brought him enough wealth to pursue his experiments at his leisure and enough leisure to indulge his passion for music. Mesmer knew Gluck, seems to have been acquainted with Haydn, and saw a great deal of the Mozarts. He built up a repertoire of techniques and cures; he gave lectures and demonstrations; and he traveled through Hungary, Switzerland, and Bavaria, where he was made a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences at Munich in Mesmer also developed a taste for publicity.