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A review by amynbell
Mesmerized: How Ben Franklin Solved a Mystery That Baffled All of France by Mara Rockliff
5.0
Our newly-renovated Central Library is so well-curated that I can't leave without an armload full of wonderful gems like this book. Mesmerized has won 7 awards and been nominated for 3 others, so it keeps on popping up on lists of great children's books here and there. And now that I've read it, I am in agreement that it deserves every award it has received. I found it beautiful, informative, and daring. Ben Franklin has long been one of my favorite characters of history, but I somehow missed this story which definitely needed telling.
Dr. Mesmer seems as if he would be a fictional character. Between 1780 and 1850, his magic wand filled people with strange sensations, healed the sick, and entranced those who fell under its spell. In fact, it is from Dr. Mesmer's performance of "animal magnetism" that English received the word "mesmerized" (from the French mesmérisme). The king and queen of France wanted to know: who was this man and was he a charlatan or savior? So when Benjamin Franklin was visiting France as an ambassador, the French king put him to the task of discovering the secret behind Dr. Mesmer's mesmerizations. And it's from these experiments that we get the idea of the placebo effect for blind testing drugs. Dr. Mesmer seemed to have been using the power of suggestion to convince people of his powers, and it took a sceptic not willing to believe in his abilities to expose him as the fraud he was.
As a person who has always been on the skeptic's side, I appreciate Franklin's experiments greatly. I grew up with the religious version of mesmerization as the norm and was always the one person in the crowd unaffected by the laying on of hands, group laughter, warm fuzzy feelings, etc. It certainly wasn't for lack of trying, but I was always honest with myself that I didn't feel these things that those around me swore to feeling. So either they were lying about what they were feeling and there wasn't really anything happening to anyone, they were more receptive to suggestion than I was, or I was the only person that wasn't getting anything from The Spirit. It seems that the whole faith healing movement really rode in on the coattails of Dr. Mesmer as it inspired Phineas Quimby's road show in which Mary Baker Eddy was healed. Even though she decried mesmerism, her experience led to her creation of Christian Science. The rest of the faith healing movement came thereafter with many famous faith healers cropping up later in protestantism in the US in the 1930s and '40s and extending to today.
Can the power of suggestion be a real and powerful force? Yes. Can people be affected in body by believing in mind? Yes. Was Dr. Mesmer a fraud? Yes and no. There's no denying that he had an affect on people, but skeptics like me need not apply for benefit.
This is a good book for creating a very interesting dialogue and teaching children healthy skepticism and the importance of the scientific method in explaining things that don't seem to follow normal laws of cause and effect. The pictures in this book are gorgeous, often using a font and style I'd call "circus flyer" or "magic show", so the book is as aesthetically pleasing as it is interesting to read.
Dr. Mesmer seems as if he would be a fictional character. Between 1780 and 1850, his magic wand filled people with strange sensations, healed the sick, and entranced those who fell under its spell. In fact, it is from Dr. Mesmer's performance of "animal magnetism" that English received the word "mesmerized" (from the French mesmérisme). The king and queen of France wanted to know: who was this man and was he a charlatan or savior? So when Benjamin Franklin was visiting France as an ambassador, the French king put him to the task of discovering the secret behind Dr. Mesmer's mesmerizations. And it's from these experiments that we get the idea of the placebo effect for blind testing drugs. Dr. Mesmer seemed to have been using the power of suggestion to convince people of his powers, and it took a sceptic not willing to believe in his abilities to expose him as the fraud he was.
As a person who has always been on the skeptic's side, I appreciate Franklin's experiments greatly. I grew up with the religious version of mesmerization as the norm and was always the one person in the crowd unaffected by the laying on of hands, group laughter, warm fuzzy feelings, etc. It certainly wasn't for lack of trying, but I was always honest with myself that I didn't feel these things that those around me swore to feeling. So either they were lying about what they were feeling and there wasn't really anything happening to anyone, they were more receptive to suggestion than I was, or I was the only person that wasn't getting anything from The Spirit. It seems that the whole faith healing movement really rode in on the coattails of Dr. Mesmer as it inspired Phineas Quimby's road show in which Mary Baker Eddy was healed. Even though she decried mesmerism, her experience led to her creation of Christian Science. The rest of the faith healing movement came thereafter with many famous faith healers cropping up later in protestantism in the US in the 1930s and '40s and extending to today.
Can the power of suggestion be a real and powerful force? Yes. Can people be affected in body by believing in mind? Yes. Was Dr. Mesmer a fraud? Yes and no. There's no denying that he had an affect on people, but skeptics like me need not apply for benefit.
This is a good book for creating a very interesting dialogue and teaching children healthy skepticism and the importance of the scientific method in explaining things that don't seem to follow normal laws of cause and effect. The pictures in this book are gorgeous, often using a font and style I'd call "circus flyer" or "magic show", so the book is as aesthetically pleasing as it is interesting to read.