Tag: Franz Anton Mesmer
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Freud, Mesmer, and Charcot in modern literature
Stephen McWilliamsDublin, Ireland In modern literature, historical psychiatrists and neurologists sometimes appear as fictional characters. A case in point is found in Jed Rubenfeld’s novel The Interpretation of Murder, which opens with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Sándor Ferenczi arriving in New York in 1909 to deliver a series of lectures on the controversial subject…
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Albanian lovers and magnetism in Così fan tutte
In Così fan tutte, Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte have the two male protagonists, Ferrando and Guglielmo, return in disguise to test, by wager, the fidelity of their fiancées. The choice of the disguise as Albanians, at first sight exotic and comic, resonates deeply with late 18th-century memories of the 1683 Siege of Vienna, in which the Albanians served…
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The brief and strange history of mesmerism and surgery
Tyler RouseStratford, Ontario, Canada The modern era of surgery is often thought to have begun with the introduction of ether, allowing surgeons to operate on insensible patients, and do more than ever before. However, before that day in October, 1846 in Boston where ether was used publicly for the first time, surgeons did attempt to…