Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France ISBN: 9780674030190 Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press Digital rights:Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter Subjects: Economics ; Philosophy;
Early in 1788, Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, arrived in Paris and began to promulgate a somewhat exotic theory of healing that almost immediately seized the imagination of the general populace. Robert Darnton, in his lively study of mesmerism and its relation to eighteenth-century radical political thought and popular scientific notions, provides a useful contribution to the study of popular culture and the manner in which ideas are diffused down through various social levels.