Franz Mesmer (1734) was a German physician. He was mainly interested in the energy transfer between animate and inanimate objects referring to it as “animal magnetism”. His first interaction with what we now know as hypnotism begin with Francisca Österlin where he used magnets to produce a reaction in her. She reported feeling liquids streaming through her and she was cured of her hysteria for several hours afterwards. After this, Mesmer began doing the same thing (without magnets though) for groups and individuals. Eventually, his medical career crumbled after a scandal where he only partially cured a blind woman and he died in 1815.

One of the questions we continuously asked in class was, “Why so sexual?” and there were a lot of good ideas thrown out such as the inherent perversion that comes with exploiting the “Otherness” of the Egyptian culture. However, I think in addition to colonial exploitation we should look at the techniques utilized in mesmerization. As you can see in the clip, the process of mesmerization is inherently sexual incorporating touching and awfully sexual sounding exasperations. I feel that the whole ordeal has been made sexual because of how clandestine sexual acts were during the Victorian era therefore adding to the feeling of “should I be doing this?” by mixing the Other with perverse acts.