The Midwest pioneer, his ills, cures, & doctors - University Library ...

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travels, Notes on the United States of North America
During a Phrenological Visit, is better known for its
description of the country than for its phrenological data.
For twenty years phrenology flourished. Serious followers
expanded its possibilities to the control of personality
—even crime might be eliminated when the science was
mastered—but the general populace was not entirely
convinced. In 1849 "A Skeptic" was advising, ''Go everyone
and get your heads examined."® Many did.
The story of mesmerism, or animal magnetism, is somewhat
more exciting as well as complicated. Anton Mesmer
had been banned from Vienna earlier than Spurzheim, had
found refuge in Germany, and had then gone to Paris,
where his seances and researches in high circles aroused
considerable interest. Benjamin Franklin concurred with
French scientists when they reported that mesmerism was
a fraud. This did not bring about the demise of the new
art, however, for many famous Frenchmen, including
Lafayette and Charles X, kept in active touch with it.
Mesmerism came to the United States in installments.
Charles Poyen, a Martinique Frenchman, cooperating with
John Greenleaf Whittier in New England in the mid- 183 O's,
found that he had something in his system more exciting
than an essay against slavery. He claimed to have been
cured of a lung affliction by magnetic treatment when a
medical student in Paris. After a few years of hobnobbing
with New England prominents, he became both a "Marquis"
and a "Doctor"; numbered among his friends,
patrons, and supporters were John Neal, Silas Wright, and
President Francis Wayland of Brown University. Even
Col. William L. Stone, of the New York Commercial
Advertiser, whose crusade against mesmerism had supplanted
his expose of monastic derelictions in Montreal,
became a convert. His brother-in-law. President Wayland,
and the faculty of Brown pronounced mesmerism a more
important science than phrenology. When Mrs. Cora
Ogden Mowatt, "Nineteenth Century Glamour Girl,"
began converting hundreds by her beauty and demonstra-