Schaffer Astrologicalroots 2010

Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010) 158–168

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological andBiomedical Sciences

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The astrological roots of mesmerism

Simon SchafferDepartment of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK

a r t i c l e i n f o

Keywords:Astrology
MesmerismAstro-meteorologyAnimal magnetismBarometers
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a b s t r a c t

Franz Anton Mesmer’s 1766 thesis on the influence of the planets on the human body, in which he firstpublicly presented his account of the harmonic forces at work in the microcosm, was substantially copiedfrom the London physician Richard Mead’s early eighteenth century tract on solar and lunar effects on thebody. The relation between the two texts poses intriguing problems for the historiography of medicalastrology: Mesmer’s use of Mead has been taken as a sign of the Vienna physician’s enlightened moder-nity while Mead’s use of astro-meteorology has been seen as evidence of the survival of antiquated astralmedicine in the eighteenth century.

Two aspects of this problem are discussed. First, French critics of mesmerism in the 1780s found prece-dents for animal magnetism in the work of Paracelsus, Fludd and other early modern writers; in so doing,they began to develop a sophisticated history for astrology and astro-meteorology.

Second, the close relations between astro-meteorology and Mead’s project illustrate how the environ-mental medical programmes emerged. The making of a history for astrology accompanied the construc-tion of various models of the relation between occult knowledge and its contexts in the enlightenment.

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1. Introduction

The human mind has two epochs: complete ignorance andsemi-science. The first was very long; we are now in almostevery respect in the second. In the age of complete ignorance,people were mistaken in accepting every error, without exami-nation, as truth; and in the age of semi-science, people are mis-taken almost as often, in rejecting many truths as errors.(Antoine-Joseph-Michel Servan, A provincial’s doubts proposedto the physician-commissioners charged by the King with theexamination of animal magnetism, 1784, p. 90)

Before hypnotism, there was mesmerism; before mesmerism,there was animal magnetism; before animal magnetism, therewas animal gravity. This term, ‘animal gravity’, appeared first inan essay by Franz Mesmer presented to the Vienna medical schoolin May 1766, a Physico-medical dissertation on the influence of theplanets (Amadou, 1971, p. 40; Bloch, 1980, p. 14). Its author, a Swa-bian in his early thirties, had already studied theology at the Jesuitcolleges at Dillingen and Ingolstadt and came downriver to Vienna

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to study law in 1759. Mesmer was not always the most reliableinformant about his own deeds and sufferings. The title page ofhis dissertation claimed he held a philosophy doctorate he almostcertainly did not possess. As is now well known and as his gnomicreference to gravity implied, the dissertation was in large part pla-giarised from the work of the eminent London physician RichardMead, whose Latin Discourse concerning the influence of the Sunand Moon on animal bodies, first published in 1704, was thereafterrevised, translated, and released in a host of editions in London,Paris, Frankfurt and elsewhere well into the late eighteenth century.As Frank Pattie first pointed out half a century ago, Mesmer’s sourcewas Mead’s 1746 London edition, De imperio solis ac lunae in corporahumana (Mead, 1746; Pattie, 1956; Amadou, 1971, pp. 29–31).

The aim here is not to rehearse the details of that ingenioustransposition of a Whig physician’s judicious reflexions on aerialtides into a charismatic Viennese therapist’s visionary cosmology.In fact, Mesmer explicitly named Mead as his predecessor in thetext of the dissertation. Rather, by re-examining intriguing aspectsof the status of these texts and the milieux of their compositionand interpretation, it will be argued that some of the debates

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around Mead and Mesmer included unusually important assess-ments of the history of astrology. The medico-astrological condi-tion of the body played a decisive role here. The mesmerismcontroversies represented a salient moment when medical astrol-ogy became a topic for historical inquiry, as well as being a signalepisode in the history of that enterprise.

Histories of past knowledges help make the familiar somewhatstranger and the exotic a little less odd. Historians find Mesmer’suse of Mead a sign of the enlightened culture of the founder of animalmagnetism, yet find Mead’s use of medical astrology a sign of thebackward-looking state of the London physician’s intellectual devel-opment (Porter, 1985; Roos, 2000). This apparent historiographiccontradiction is the concern of the first section of this paper. It thenbecomes important to study how Mesmer’s place in the history ofmedical astrology was understood in the late eighteenth century,whether as splendidly enlightened or appallingly outdated. Anti-mesmerist writers discussed in the paper’s second section devel-oped a complex and sophisticated history of astro-meteorology toput Mesmer where they wanted him. Their histories included somestrikingly positive appraisals of the doctrines of those judged his pre-decessors, such as William Maxwell and Robert Fludd (Kassell,2007). These judgments invite a re-evaluation of the understandingof astro-meteorology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.The balance of the paper, therefore, devotes attention to the waysin which Mead’s astro-meteorology and its contemporary projectswere developed from resources available in Augustan London’smedical, meteorological and commercial enterprises. These casesshow how intricate relations between bodily and atmospheric con-ditions were crucial aspects of the period’s environmental historiesand therapies (Jordanova, 1979; Golinski, 2007, pp. 170–184). Writ-ers of that epoch were sensitive to the intriguing relation betweenthe capacity of atmospheric powers to act remotely on the bodyand the capacity of beliefs about these powers. It was, in the end,not the mesmerists but rather their enemies who explained awayanimal magnetism and animal gravity as effects on the body of theimmense powers of imagination (Azouvi, 1976; Bauer, 1984). Thisis why it is worth exploring the imaginative and material conditionsof the emergence of animal gravity and its cognate principles in themesmerist debates.

2. Mesmer reads Mead

This is what Mesmer found in, then copied from, Mead’s text.The London physician provided much familiar evidence that theposition of the Moon affected the motion of terrestrial airs andwaters. The brilliant analysis by the Royal Society’s then recentlyelected president, Isaac Newton, presented in the 1687 Principiamathematica and made accessible in the summary prepared by Ed-mond Halley for the Catholic king James II and printed in the Philo-sophical Transactions, showed how the combined action of Moonand Sun raised the tides (Mead, 1746, pp. ii–iii; 1748, p. vii). Thesame must be true of winds and the atmosphere: especially so,since the air was rather nearer the celestial bodies than was thesea. Winds blew strongly at the equinoxes, while the great stormof November 1703, which raged across Britain a few months beforeMead completed his first version of the text, coincided preciselywith the Moon in perigee (Mead, 1708, p. 29; 1746, pp. 98–99;1748, pp. 104–107; Golinski, 2007, pp. 43–52). Air had of courselong been taken to be responsible for epidemic constitutions andto catalyse disharmony of the humours, while attention to thepowers of the non-naturals grew following renewed attention tothe Hippocratic tradition. With Mead and his closest medical con-temporaries air, or indeed a range of airs, came to be seen as theprincipal agents in disease, no longer one among many non-natu-rals (Riley, 1987, pp. 9–15; Rusnock, 2002; Golinski, 2007, pp. 140–

144). Effects of solar and lunar position on aerial motion wouldconsequently matter much to health. Weaker beings, the sick, fe-male and the aged, would indeed be even more subject to theseinfluences (Mead, 1746, p. 29; 1748, p. 32). Respiration causedblood circulation through air pressure, thus aerial weight changeswould directly affect the blood (Mead, 1708, p. 12; 1746, p. 25;1748, p. 27). And since the nervous fluids were composed of tinierand springier particles, they would respond even more dramati-cally to these atmospheric tides (Mead, 1746, p. 34; 1748, p. 37).There were some puzzles about evidence for such aerial flows,notably that of the newfangled barometers marketed by ingeniousLondon makers. No obvious barometric falls could be systemati-cally observed at new or full Moon: Mead hazarded that this couldbe explained away by perturbations of gravity and of effluvial mo-tions (Mead, 1708, pp. 10–12; 1746, pp. 15–17; 1748, pp. 17–20).In any case, the consent of ancient authority and long-term medi-cal meteorology confirmed atmospheric tidology. The lunar period-icity of menstruation, epilepsy and the (significantly named)lunacy was well known to Galenists. Indeed, ‘this powerful actionof the Moon is observed not only by philosophers and natural his-torians, but even by the common people who have been fully per-suaded of it time out of mind’ (Mead, 1746, p. 76; 1748, pp. 82–83).

Mead’s text accompanied these reflexions on atmospheric tidol-ogy and its bodily consequences with a host of well attested casesof celestial periodicity. Thus in his celebrated Spicilegium anatomi-cum (1670) the north German physician Theodore Kerckring re-ported ‘a young gentlewoman whose beauty depended upon thelunar force, insomuch that at full moon she was plump and veryhandsome, but in the decrease of the planet so wan and ill-fa-voured that she was ashamed to go abroad’. Mead added the fishyargument that ‘if this seems strange, it is indeed no more than aninfluence of the same kind which the Moon has always been ob-served to have upon shellfish’ (Mead, 1746, p. 58; 1748, p. 64). Lu-nar effects on shellfish were well recognised in astrologicaltradition and had been given renewed meaning by writers suchas the royal physician Walter Charleton, who in 1654 explainedthat shellfish grew larger at full moon, perhaps because of the‘Moon’s great Humidity’ developed from the lunar seas, ‘as themost and best of our Modern Astronomer have believed’, or per-haps simply because full moons raised greater tides so encouragedshellfish growth (Charleton, 1654, p. 352; Roos, 2001, p. 191). Epi-sodes closer to home confirmed the doctrine of celestial influence.On the day of Oliver Cromwell’s death, 3 September 1658, therewas a great storm much affected by the Moon. Mead offered theretrospective diagnosis that the Lord Protector ‘died of a feveraccompanied with grief from the unhappy state of his domestic af-fairs, and its very certain that grief disposes the animal spirits to beeasily affected by causes of this nature’ (Mead, 1746, p. 108; 1748,p. 114). Mead knew a Thames-side boatman whose daughter suf-fered periodic fits: the mariner was able to anticipate the rivertides simply by observing the onset of his daughter’s crises (Mead,1746, p. 40; 1748, p. 44). The London medic’s pre-eminent patronand colleague, the great Edinburgh physician Archibald Pitcairne,suffered nosebleeds at the new moon when the barometer wasunusually low (Mead, 1746, p. 49; 1748, p. 54). Anecdotes fromJoshua Childrey’s Britannia Baconica (1661) and from John Goad’sAstro-meteorologia (1686), canonical texts of the Baconian reformsof astro-meteorology much promoted in Restoration Britain, werealso mobilised to good effect (Mead, 1708, p. 31; 1746, p. 4;1748, pp. 4–5; Curry, 1987, pp. 247–248). Medical implicationswere much stressed: the received Galenic attention to critical days,‘now grown into disuse, quite slighted and even ridiculed’, couldwell be revamped by systematic attention to solar and lunar cyclesas they acted through gravity on the atmosphere and thus on thehuman body (Mead, 1746, p. 60; 1748, p. 66).

160 S. Schaffer / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (2010) 158–168

Now consider what the young Vienna medical student made ofthis assemblage of ancient medical meteorology and more recentcorpuscular and gravitational cosmology. While his decision to pla-giarise Mead’s text represents an unusually immediate engage-ment with London doctrine, the Vienna school was in close touchwith such tradition. Mesmer’s professor was the prestigious Neth-erlandish physician Anton de Haen, head of the great Vienna hos-pital since 1754. De Haen’s lectures were stocked with materialsfrom his hero Thomas Sydenham and subsequent London physi-cians, including Mead. From British experimenters he also adoptedthe working principles of modish electrotherapy. De Haen wel-comed the imperial decree issued by Joseph II in 1758 against no-tions of bewitchment or diabolical possession in physic andrejoiced, too, when the Jesuits were suppressed throughout theHabsburg lands in 1773 (Neuberger, 1942, pp. 488–489). A fewyears later the professor composed a book De miraculis, a pugna-cious analysis of the notorious Swabian exorcist Johann Gassner,who as part of his struggles with the Devil claimed many wondrouscures throughout the southern German lands and would soonafter be widely seen as a precedent for Mesmer’s own therapies(Midelfort, 2005, p. 46). For de Haen, as even more spectacularlyfor his student Mesmer, such episodes were best understood aseffects of sympathy and animal spirits, certainly not as miraclesor aspects of crypto-Jesuit priestly war with the dark powers.

To this extent, therefore, Mesmer early found Mead’s text a use-ful account of the role of natural powers in the celestial action ofthe suffering body. He straightforwardly reproduced Mead’s sum-mary of Newtonian tidology, agreed that this implied forms ofatmospheric ebb and flow, then added a few sentences from Plinyon the conjunction of earthquakes with the equinoxes and fromBaglivi on the correlation with planetary conjunctions (Amadou,1971, p. 39; Bloch, 1980, p. 13). All but one of the cases that Mes-mer cited to evidence lunar and solar correlations with periodicdiseases were taken straight from Mead; the sole exception wascopied (but inaccurately cited) from Sydenham’s writings on epi-demic constitutions (Amadou, 1971, p. 43; Bloch, 1980, p. 17).However, as Pattie noted, Mesmer also added a subsequently cru-cial argument of his own. Whereas Mead insisted that gravity actedon the body through the mediation of air and cognate fluids, Mes-mer was prepared to countenance a direct and immediate poweracting between celestial and corporeal agents (Pattie, 1956, p.279). ‘There is in addition another kind of influence which actson the animal body, an influence which does not seem to dependon these common qualities of the atmosphere, but rather dependsimmediately on that force which . . . affects the most internal parti-cles of every material body’. Mesmer in some respects took Newtoneven more seriously than did Mead. He wrote of ‘that force whichis the cause of universal gravitation’ which ‘intensifies, remits andagitates cohesion, elasticity, irritability, magnetism and electricity’.The name of this force, he proposed, was to be ‘animal gravity’(Bloch, 1980, p. 14).

Historians of mesmerism have often stressed the telling vocab-ulary of the doctoral dissertation. They sometimes note the debtsto Mead, the addition of a more direct role for gravity in the animaleconomy and in particular draw attention to the notion of consen-sus and of harmony which Mesmer deployed in this early work(Amadou, 1971, p. 30; Buranelli, 1976, pp. 35–36; Gillispie, 1980,p. 262; Porter, 1985, p. 1; Pattie, 1994; Gauld, 1995, pp. 2–4; Ri-skin, 2002, p. 198). The ‘animal body’ was characterised by a ‘har-mony’ which could well be disturbed by air and gravity (Bloch,1980, p. 19). ‘Harmony’, too, was the dominant theme of the entirecosmos. Compare the closing passages of Mead’s and of Mesmer’sworks. The genteel Augustan virtuoso Richard Mead offered a thenconventional summary of Anglican theodicy: ‘possibly it wasagreeable to the divine wisdom to create the world in such a man-ner that natural causes should now and then produce evils and

inconveniencies on mankind when it was necessary to affrightwith storms, thunder and other extraordinary phenomena, in orderto keep them in a continual sense of their duty’ (Mead, 1746, pp.110–111; 1748, p. 117). Thus in Mead’s cosmos celestial agentswere mediated through a general enlightened providence, care-fully scheduled to the timetables of secular history (Jordanova,2001). The Vienna adept left a different message, one rather moreoriented towards astral medicine. ‘The harmony established be-tween the astral plane and the human plane must be admired asmuch as the ineffable effect of universal gravitation, by whichour bodies are harmonised’. The evidently musical tones of bodilytension dictated that ‘human bodies react to those of the astralbodies with which they find themselves linked by a certain har-mony and determined according to sex, age, temperament andother various characteristics’ (Bloch, 1980, pp. 19–20).

In the somewhat troubled aftermath, Mesmer frequently foundit necessary to recall such passages, which he characteristicallyreinterpreted. His animal magnetic enterprise was first launchedin the Austrian capital in 1773. By 1778 his highly controversialpractice had shifted to the salons of Paris. In mesmeric séances,while aristocratic women gathered round barrels of magnetisedwater, grasped metal rods and had crises induced by the masturba-tory activities of their mesmeric companions, the room would becarefully stocked with thermometers and barometers designed tomonitor the gravitational changes of the harmonic atmosphere(Vinchon, 1971, pp. 66–68). And once this therapeutic programmewas underway, he then told a north German physician that it waslong ago, in the doctoral dissertation of 1766, that he had first pro-claimed ‘universal attraction, animal gravity or animal magnetism’.Soon after, he insisted once again that 1766 was the moment whenthe new doctrine was first proclaimed (Paulet, 1784, p. 50;Amadou, 1971, pp. 49, 61; Bloch, 1980, pp. 25, 46; Pattie, 1956,p. 285). Though his subsequent career was much dominated bythe puzzles of experimental magnetism, natural and animal, at thisstage the link with gravity seemed to Mesmer at least as worth-while. ‘Animal magnetism’, he told his flock, ‘is a reconciliation oftwo known sciences, astronomy and medicine’ (Amadou, 1971, p.93).

The connection here proposed with astronomy and with medi-cine spoke directly to the local institutional politics of Vienna. Thethen head of the Vienna Observatory, Maximilian Hell, was a Hun-garian Jesuit of great influence at the Habsburg court. Well beforeMesmer composed his Physico-medical dissertation, Hell had al-ready started work on magnetism and astronomy. In Lapland dur-ing the chilly winter of 1769 to observe the transit of Venus, theJesuit astronomer also paid considerable attention to magnetic var-iation and dip, urged that temporal shifts in variation must be dueto lunar influence, and questioned a magnetic cause for the aurora(Hell, 1776; Fara, 1996, pp. 43–44; Hansen & Aspaas, 2005, pp. 25,37). Back in Vienna, where Hell experienced anti-Jesuit critiques atfirst-hand, he also supplied Mesmer with his first experimentalmagnets, then publicly and spectacularly broke with the physician.Hell reckoned therapies worked because of physical magnetism,Mesmer that this was a new kind of cosmic harmony (Sarton,1944, pp. 98–99; Hansmann, 1985, pp. 54–56; Buranelli, 1976,pp. 62–72). What was at stake here was the precise character ofenlightened natural philosophy in observatories and clinics alike.It is telling that in tracing the animal magnetism of 1775 backthrough the animal gravity of 1766 to the atmospheric tidologyof 1704, historians have also thus been preoccupied by the enlight-ened, thus somewhat forward-looking, condition of this mesmericproject. For Frank Pattie, as chief example, Mesmer’s reading ofMead made the Vienna physician ‘a true child of the Enlighten-ment’ (Pattie, 1956, p. 286). He damned those scholars who, with-out ever consulting either Mesmer’s dissertation or Mead’s tract,assumed an occult astrological root for animal magnetism. On


the contrary, it was asserted, the extreme debt to the London New-tonian showed just how close was the link between up-to-date ra-tionalist physic and mesmeric techniques. According to Roy Porter,in his analysis of English mesmerists and the debt to Mead, ‘thiscannot be stressed too strongly: Mesmer was at heart an orthodoxsomatic physician who regarded animal magnetism as a materialforce . . . according to the criteria of the Newtonian laws of nature.Vocal as a man of the Enlightenment, he consistently denied thatthe science of animal magnetism had any affinities to the primitivethought worlds of astrology, occultism or mysticism’ (Porter, 1985,pp. 4–5). Mesmer himself, of course, took rather the same line. Inhis doctoral dissertation he freely acknowledged that he was‘undertaking after so many efforts by the distinguished Mead to in-sist on the stars’ influence’ while simultaneously condemning ‘thetheory regarding the influence of the stars which was formerly de-fended by astrologers who boast powers to predict events to comeand to know the destiny of humans and at the same time swindlethem of the contents of their purses thanks to a skill filled with de-ceit’ (Bloch, 1980, p. 3).

Yet when this consequential distinction between quasi-Newto-nian astral influence and atavistic judicial astrology has been ap-plied to readings of Mead’s work, the effect has been entirely theopposite. Mesmer’s reading of Mead somehow helps make Mesmermodern. But Mead’s reading of astro-meteorology somehow makesMead antique. Michael Macdonald singles him out as one of ‘fewintellectuals’ who still ‘continued to think that the heavens hadsome kind of influence on illnesses’ (Macdonald, 1996, p. 80). The-odore Brown, historian of the Royal College of Physicians’ shiftfrom iatromechanism to Newtonian physic in the epoch of Pit-cairne and Mead, judges Mead’s texts of the period 1702–1704‘ludicrous’ and ‘silly in retrospect’ (Brown, 1981, pp. 265–267).Anna Marie Roos, author of the best study of Mead’s doctrine of as-tral influence and aerial tides, notes the Hippocratic and Galenicthemes in his work. The resuscitation of the doctrine of criticaldays, the salience of Hippocratic notions of astronodia, throughwhich the lunar place in the zodiac would affect the humours,and the utterly banal claims about the periodicity of the sacred dis-ease, make Mead’s work completely conservative whatever thepragmatic Newtonian gloss added to its conventional prescriptions(Roos, 2000, pp. 437–447). In an acute analysis of Mead’s claimsand their development in colonial medical milieux, Mark Harrisonhas argued that ‘many of the ideas constitutive of astrological med-icine persisted well into the nineteenth century’ and that any no-tion of a shift from medical astrology to medical astronomy‘masks strong continuities with the past’ (Harrison, 2000, pp. 26–27). Bernard Capp claims that ‘the application of astrology to med-icine was rooted in tradition and humoural pathology’ and addsthat ‘the idea of some kind of astral influence proved tenacious’:Mead is one of his best examples of this unwonted tenacity (Capp,1979, pp. 207, 277). Keith Thomas’ comparable survey of astrol-ogy’s rather puzzling decline in Augustan Britain reaches the sameconclusion: ‘the survival of such beliefs in such a quarter’ as that ofMead ‘makes one chary about putting a firm date to the end ofastrological medicine in its wider sense’ (Thomas, 1972, pp. 421–22). And in his story of decline, transformation and survival ofastrological doctrine and practice in the period, Patrick Currymakes telling use of Mead’s writings. ‘Mead, the contemporaryexemplar of learned medicine, was clearly willing to go further to-wards explicitly acknowledging astrology when drawing on itsexplanatory resources than were astronomers’ (Curry, 1986, p.207; 1989, p. 151).

So Mesmer is seen as prudently enlightened in using Mead’sbook. Yet Mead is judged surprisingly traditional in writing it. Ittherefore seems appropriate once again to reflect on the historiesof occult doctrine’s genealogy produced at the time in the immedi-ate context of these works. It has been claimed by Jacques Hal-

bronn and by other scholars that the modern history of astrologywas, in some sense, invented in Paris in the later eighteenth cen-tury (Halbronn, 1987, pp. 213–214). That invention coincided withthe decisions of the Académie Royale des Sciences in the 1770s toban debate on perpetual motion and on circle squaring, withoutthe possession, nevertheless, of principled demonstrations of theimpossibility of either. In the programmes of the prolific astrono-mer-savants Lalande, Bailly, Delambre and Montucla disciplinaryself-consciousness accompanied the production of intellectualgenealogies that treated past errors as regrettable but indispens-able aspects of the emergence of enlightened reason. ‘Adepts gath-ered round Mesmer at precisely the time when scientists werebeing influenced by the sober astronomical mechanics of Laplace’,writes Jean Starobinski. ‘Such is the difficulty experienced by cer-tain minds in giving up the idea of a supernaturally animated uni-verse’ (Starobinski, 1987, p. 189; Darnton, 1968, pp. 15–17). Theproject matched, too, the decisive withdrawal of elite culture fromthat of the plebeians. It generated the intellectual and social spacesin which a science of folklore and the history of popular culturemight at last be composed (Revel, 1984).

3. Anti-mesmerists historicise mesmerism

Certain forms of high Enlightenment literary sociability allowedthe possibility of historical reflexion upon the development of doc-trines till then viewed as too dangerous to be tolerated as mere false-hoods. Instead of a learned search for great and lost truths, priscahidden since the time of the ancients, the project of these historiansalso sought historical and moral understanding of the emergence ofviews they might also judge errors. One promoter of the newlyminted histories of astrology, the eminent academician and astron-omer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, was also a leading member of the officialParis commissions appointed in 1784 to investigate and subvertmesmerism’s claims. Bailly combined a detailed, if over-scrupulous,record of the most erotic aspects of the magnetic séances withlearned speculations on Greek and Indian astrology and on the real-ity behind Plato’s stories of Atlantis (Smith, 1954, pp. 455–460, 484–491; Gillispie, 1980, pp. 279–281). The mix of mesmeric and astro-logic genealogies was common. Mesmer’s own doctoral dissertationalready signalled a remarkable self-consciousness about his views’history. The young medic adapted Horace to prophesy that ‘manythings will be reborn which have fallen and many will fall whichare now honoured’ (Amadou, 1971, p. 32). In the debates aroundmesmerism some important historiographic claims were madeabout the relation between doctrinal change, enlightenment andthe career of error.

Mesmer’s theory of history of knowledge, first adumbrated inhis adaptation of Mead, was straightforward. It was much toutedin his wealth of pamphlets and apologia. In the long ages of igno-rance nature’s powers were hidden from humanity. Enlightenmentwas necessary to undermine the tyranny of systems and strip awaythe covers of error. Here the term ‘superstition’ underwent a char-acteristic elision from reference to a potent and dangerous error tothe name of a trivial mistake (Burke, 1978, pp. 270–281). The prob-lem, according to Mesmer, was clear: denunciatory critique couldeasily overstep its legitimate limits and could unwontedly rejectnew truths by mistaking them for old errors (Azouvi, 1985, p.148). ‘Philosophy has occasionally made efforts to free itself of er-rors and prejudices’, Mesmer noted, ‘but by destroying these edi-fices with too much vigour, it has covered the ruins withcontempt without fixing its attention on the precious things con-tained there’ (Amadou, 1971, p. 60; Bloch, 1980, p. 45). He reck-oned animal gravity was a portion of past treasure in danger ofbeing mistaken for ancient dross. His closest allies agreed. TheLyons mesmerist Jean-Baptiste Bonnefoy answered the 1784 Paris


commissioners by appealing directly to Mead and to Pitcairne.Enlightened medical meteorology, he claimed, provided stout evi-dence of cosmic harmony (Bonnefoy, 1784, pp. 18–23). So mesmer-ists found it helpful to make a genealogy for their programme.

Significantly, therefore, Mesmer’s major critics decided to con-struct an ancestry for mesmerism that they reckoned would betterplace his practice and doctrine within medical astrology’s history.Established critics linked the idiosyncrasies of the suffering bodywith the hard task of denunciation in such cases. This was, for sure,the view of Bailly’s colleague Antoine Lavoisier. The chemist ar-gued in 1784 that ‘the success of charlatans, sorcerers and alchem-ists’ was due in the main to the difficulty of telling probableoutcomes. ‘It is above all in medicine that the difficulty of evaluat-ing probabilities is the greatest,’ because ‘in animate beings theprinciple of life is a constantly acting force which tends continu-ously to defeat any obstacle’ (Lavoisier, 1865, p. 509).

But such critics complemented this view of the tough task ofdivining remedies’ efficacy with the need to trace such strategies’past. As preliminary example, consider the remarks of the eminentphilosophic radical William Godwin, the London journalist who in1785 was charged with translating the denunciatory report againstMesmer by Bailly, Lavoisier, Benjamin Franklin and their col-leagues (Fara, 1995, p. 134). Godwin was entirely convinced bythe Paris commissioners that mesmerism was false, in the specificsense that nothing magnetic was happening in the séances. But, headded, ‘there is another reason which gives the error of animalmagnetism a particular claim to our attention. The same errorwas started . . . two centuries ago. It is therefore worth our curios-ity to enquire, what different instruments were necessary to de-ceive mankind in an ignorant and in an enlightened age, in thecommencement of the seventeenth and the close of the eighteenthcentury’ (Godwin, 1785, pp. xviii–xix). We see, therefore, how thehistory of astro-meteorology was of necessity produced as part ofthe debate about mesmerism’s roots and rights.

Mesmer claimed that resistance to his views was due to theover-development of enlightenment. His enemies claimed thatacceptance of his views was due to the weakening of enlighten-ment. Mesmer claimed that he was a radical innovator whoseviews departed from ancient astro-meteorology. His enemiesclaimed that Mesmer was an unoriginal plagiarist of ancient as-tro-meteorology whose earlier practitioners were in some respectsmore adept. Prominent among such critics were the fashionableParisian physicians Michel-Augustin Thouret and Jean-JacquesPaulet (Azouvi, 1985, p. 145). They both had some expertise inmedical magnetism and more with the history of popular beliefsabout epidemics and crises (Hannaway, 1972). Eminent memberof the Société Royale de Médecine and editor of the influential Gaz-ette de santé, Paulet was peculiarly well placed. He and his col-leagues insisted that the spirit of enlightenment was weakeningand that Mesmer’s success showed this. They also held that itwas crucial to construct a reliable and lengthy history of astro-meteorology in order to understand where mesmerism came fromand how enlightenment had ended up thus. First, they diagnosedthe current ills of public belief, which had been duped into theview

that in nature there are powers, invisible spirits, sylphs, whichcan be put at humans’ disposal, that most of nature’s phenom-ena, all our actions, depend on hidden springs, on an order ofunknown beings, that we have not placed enough faith in talis-mans, judicial astrology, magical sciences, that fate and destinyare determined by particular spirits which guide us to our endswithout us seeing the strings that hold us, that ultimately in thislower world we are really like puppets, ignorant and utterlyblinded slaves. It is strongly impressed on everyone that it istime to enlighten oneself, that humanity must enjoy its rights

and feel the tug of invisible forces or at least recognise the handthat governs them. (Paulet, 1784, pp. 3–4; Starobinski, 1979, p.169)

The key phrase here was the reference to self-enlightenment. Therewas good enlightenment, a programme that would see through theillusions of occult fatalism; and there was bad enlightenment, aprogramme that would encourage orderly subjects to becomeself-willed citizens. The balance was hard to strike and needed bet-ter history. Paulet described how ‘wonders have been worked with-out any application to the body of the sick’, how ‘love philtres;sympathies; magnetic, hermetic and spagyric medicine; mystical,cabbalistic, magic and vampiric science’ had overtaken modernminds and bodies (Paulet, 1784b, p. 2). He laughed at the recipefor a fashionable amulet concocted from gold dissolved in aqua re-gia, mixed with borax and iron and reduced to a fine powder in ablack silk bag, ‘to be electrified in a flask’ (ibid., p. 2 n.). Parisiansof 1784 could buy what was touted as a version of Kenelm Digby’ssympathetic powder, alongside a host of other marvels and nos-trums (Darnton, 1968, p. 33). Mesmer might also sneer at suchsuperstition, but his strategies were allegedly no better. It wasthe genealogy of astro-meteorology that showed this was so. ThusThouret:

it is enough to give at least a general idea of what this doctrinewas in the seventeenth century and to make better understoodthat which must follow. It is easily seen that there are in oneand the other system the same views, the same general princi-ples, the same pretensions to a purely external and universalmedicine. (Thouret, 1784, p. 12)

Critics were very clear about the particular components of mes-merism’s ancestry. It was necessary, so William Godwin wrote, ‘torun a parallel between the borrowed system of Mesmer and theoriginal one of Paracelsus, Maxwell and Sir Kenelm Digby’(Godwin, 1785, p. xix). Paracelsus, another Swabian, was thus thetap-root of this tradition. ‘No-one has ever uttered so many extrav-agancies and raved with so much genius as Paracelsus’ (Paulet,1784a, p. 8; Azouvi, 1985). The cosmic harmony, planetary and lu-nar influences and astro-meteorological strategies of the Paracel-sians were evident precedents for, and in several ways morecompelling versions of, late eighteenth century séances. Paracelsuswas ‘the father of old-style magnetism’ (Thouret, 1784, p. 24). Herewere the origins of the cosmology that imagined a power that‘pulls the stars towards the body and thence feeds itself, whencewisdom, sense, thought’ (Paulet, 1784a, p. 8). The history of med-ical astrology was then to be pursued into the arcana of the weap-on-salve controversies, the early seventeenth century exchangesbetween Robert Fludd and his orthodox enemies. None of theanti-mesmerists made the mistake of reading Fludd as a straight-forward Galenist. Indeed, he was treated with considerable admi-ration. ‘He admits but one principle or primitive element whenceflow all the others, which are only its modifications or metamor-phoses. This idea, of great beauty, is developed in its entire extent’(ibid., p. 24).

Paulet, for one, contrasted Mesmer and Fludd on the flow ofcelestial currents much to the former’s disadvantage. ‘In RobertFludd the view is not extravagant, in that it supposes two fluid cur-rents opposed by nature, which correct each other. It is heat andcold that meet and moderate each other’. Mesmer’s fluid mechan-ics were simply inept: ‘to allow two currents of the same naturethat continually meet each other without being destroyed by theshock, that is the opposite of good sense, reason and every otherphysical principle’ (ibid., p. 65). It was urged that here Fludd wascloser to Newtonian truth than was Mesmer. Furthermore, doc-trinal development allowed a sympathetic reading of Fludd and ru-led out tolerance of mesmerism. ‘At least Robert Fludd made


himself understood. Ignorant of the true laws of fluid circulationand their pathways, and to complete his system of compositebodies’ uniformity, it is allowable that Fludd supposed poles andan equator like those in the Earth. Since the macrocosm, he said,has its poles and its equator, man or the microcosm must haveits own’ (ibid., p. 79). But, so Paulet reckoned, the history of astron-omy between 1630 and 1780 meant none could now legitimatelyspeak thus. ‘It is no longer allowed to suppose poles or equatorsin the human body; these are conventional terms accepted byastronomers and physicists to designate the limits of a body whichhas rotational motion and the centre of this body or current’ (ibid.,p. 80). In a somewhat novel manner, such histories explained awaypast errors as understandable, thus forgivable, aspects of the past’slevel of knowledge. Contemporaries such as Mesmer could not,however, be treated with such tolerance.

Once Fludd’s repute had been re-established, it was a rathersimple matter to trace his works’ fortuna. Writers of the 1780s thusread the seventeenth-century works of the Rostock physicianSebastian Wirdig, especially his Nova medicina spirituum (1673)dedicated to the Royal Society, with its magnificent allegory ofthe lunar fire stolen from heaven by Prometheus and thence ap-plied to the tasks of healing and fertility (Paulet, 1784a, pp. 39–46; Thouret, 1784, pp. 4–5). They also tried to make sense of thework of William Maxwell, a somewhat shadowy Scottish physicianwhose text on magnetic medicine, published by the Heidelbergmedical dean Georg Franck in 1679, seemed an obvious and indic-ative precedent for the astro-meteorology of Mesmer (Thorndike,1958, pp. 418–421). In 1677 Franck was told by the Royal Society’ssecretary, Henry Oldenburg, that Maxwell and Fludd had both pro-duced ‘things of greater worth’ (Oldenburg, 1986, p. 340). Indeed,Maxwell’s principles of the workings of vital beams streamingfrom the astral powers and to be captured in the excrementalscourings of the body summarised views already printed in Londonand in Edinburgh in 1656. Lauren Kassell plausibly conjectures thatthe original was composed in the later 1630s in close contact withFludd himself (Kassell, 2007). Thouret remained somewhatimpressed by Maxwell: the Scotsman’s Medicina magnetica wassurely

the most complete and copious treatise upon the subject, inwhich he endeavoured to support its declining credit by callingon the assistance of that theory of the universal spirit that hederived from the earliest philosophers and in which we are pre-sented with the exact counterpart of the system of M. Mesmer.(Godwin, 1785, p. 7; Azouvi, 1985, p. 147)

Mesmer immediately countered Thouret and his eminent medicalsupporters that he had known nothing of Maxwell’s work. Rather,the ambitious therapist urged his programme’s good enlightenmentgenealogy. ‘Perhaps it will be discovered’, Mesmer wearily joked,

whether it follows from Maxwell’s propositions that thereexists a mutual action or a magnetism between all bodies mov-ing in space, and that this action is not unrelated to their con-servation (a truth equally suspected by Newton, Descartes andall the men of learning who concerned themselves with generalphysics). (Amadou, 1971, p. 245)

Mesmer’s critics agreed that there had been a striking hiatus be-tween the period of Maxwell and Wirdig and that of Gassner andMesmer himself. Astronomy’s dramatic transformation in theepoch of Newton, they claimed, had halted the enterprise of as-tro-meteorology and absorbed it within a new cosmology. Thisgave Richard Mead’s tract on planetary influence a peculiar statusin their history. None of Mesmer’s enemies had read the Swabian’sdoctoral dissertation of 1766. Yet many read Mead (Pattie, 1956, p.286). So Thouret summarised the claim about aerial tides and their

effects on the human body, which he attributed to the older Lon-don physician (Thouret, 1784, p. 22). Paulet went much further:he gave Mead’s text a full summary and denounced Mesmer forignoring it. Mesmer was thus condemned for ignoring a work hehad in fact plagiarised (Paulet, 1784a, p. 50). It therefore becomesappropriate to extend the analysis of the construction of an ances-try for astro-meteorology to the milieu of Mead’s own text. This isespecially so because, as we have noted, while Mesmer’s exploita-tion of Mead has been taken as a sign of his enlightenment, Mead’swork has been more obscurely seen as a sign of the continuedvitality of an older set of medical and astrological traditions.

4. Mead reads astro-meteorology

Mead’s tract was composed soon after his election into the Roy-al Society and appointment as physician at St Thomas’s Hospital.He was well on the way to gaining status as the leading virtuosoand eminent physician in Augustan London, the rich contents ofhis private cabinets matching his public sense of his profession’shistorical fame (Roos, 2000, p. 438). In his celebrated collectionof scholars’ portraits, each accompanied by Mead’s own laudatorybiographical Latin couplets, the figure of Paracelsus significantlyoccupied a central place alongside images of heroes such as JohnRay and Isaac Newton (Jenkins, 2003, p. 130; Jordanova, 2003,pp. 304–305). The essay on solar and lunar influence on the bodywas clearly the work of a learned physician fully committed tothe application of the Society’s president’s principles to the work-ings of the human body. It coincided, too, with the aftermath of theRose case, the most serious assault to date on the powers of theCollege of Physicians over unlicensed practitioners and onthe authority of the learned traditions of physic (Brown, 1981, p.267; Cook, 1986, pp. 247–251).

A couple of years earlier, in his Mechanical account of poisons,Mead had already cited the Principia’s notion of universal gravita-tion to unfold the workings of forces between corporeal particles(Guerrini, 1996, p. 297). It was very common among Newton’simmediate milieu much to stress that the programme of the Prin-cipia was not new, but a resuscitation of ancient wisdom in a newguise. The ancients, so Newton held, had known the truths of helio-centrism, of action at a distance, of the inverse square law and ofthe emptiness of interplanetary space. Old temples, such as Stone-henge, symbolised this true world-system. Corrupt priests and theadvocates of royal divine right had subverted the truth, fillingspace with matter and making planets the playthings of the soulsof dead monarchs (Iliffe, 1999, pp. 103–105). ‘I did not discoverthis’, wrote Newton in his history of the true cosmology, ‘but I triedto bring it back to light by the force of demonstration’ (Newton,1981, p. 459).

While these views were but rarely discussed outwith thecharmed circle of Newton’s immediate disciples, they were ratherwidely publicised in the period of Mead’s early writings. In hisAstronomiae physicae et geometriae elementa (1702) the Oxfordastronomy professor David Gregory, Mead’s close acquaintance,spelt out the claim, drawn from Newton himself and from the textsof Pliny and Macrobius, that the inverse square law of gravity ‘wasnot unknown at least to Pythagoras. This indeed seems to be thatwhich he and his followers would signify to us by the Harmonyof the Spheres’ (Gregory, 1702, sig. b3; 1715, Vol. 1, p. ix). The Ox-ford group around Gregory soon discussed the viability of a New-tonian model of atmospheric tides (Guerrini, 1986, pp. 308–309).In summer 1704, for example, John Keill, Gregory and Halley chat-ted about the proposal by the Scottish physician George Cheynethat there were ‘tides in the air’. In the event, they sneered at Chey-ne’s model, much preferring that of Mead which was published la-ter in the year (Hiscock, 1937, p. 19; Brown, 1981, p. 265 n. 72).


Mead told a very similar story about astro-meteorology andplanetary influence on the human body (Roos, 2000, pp. 442–443; Harrison, 2000, pp. 30–31). This ancient truth had beenwidely known and accepted, by the Hippocratics and their allies.It was a disaster for medicine that physicians had stopped workingas astronomers. ‘But when in later times’, he claimed,

medicine came to be accommodated to the reasonings of phi-losophers, no body being able to account for the manner of thiscelestial action, it was allowed no farther share in affecting ourhealth than what might be imputed to the changes in the man-ifest constitution of the air, excepting perhaps something oftruth which still remains disguised and blended with the jargonof judiciary astrology. (Mead, 1708, pp. 3–4)

Critical days were dictated by lunar motions, not the obscurenumerology of subsequently deluded physic (Roos, 2000, p. 446;Mead, 1708, pp. 26–27). Mead extended his analysis of such epi-sodes in his remarkable 1749 text on the medical cases describedin Scripture. It was obvious, held the aged Mead, that the lunatic de-scribed in Matthew’s gospel was an epileptic, as the physician–evangelist must have known. The evident relation between atmo-spheric tides and the sacred disease was clear to the evangelist asto Mead (Mead, 1749, pp. 82–83; 1755, pp. 93–94). This did not,however, warrant more ‘superstitious’ beliefs about planetary ther-apy. Consider the popular faith in mistletoe,

entirely indebted to the religion of the Druids for its great char-acter. Wherefore it is to be ranked with those other frivolousthings which superstition has introduced into physic, unless aperson can work himself up into a belief that the golden sickle,with which it was cut down, the priest’s snow white garment,the sacrifice of white bulls and other such trifling circumstancesare conducive towards a cure. (Mead, 1749, pp. 89–90; 1755, p.101)

Mead’s Newtonian admirer, the antiquarian and virtuoso WilliamStukeley, was much more convinced of the Druids’ virtues (Hutton,2009, pp. 99–100). His Vegetable Sermons, one on the spiritualproperties of mistletoe, delivered in Shoreditch in the 1760s, ex-plained with immense scholarly authority that ‘the Druids held itfor the symbol of Messiah’ and that mistletoe’s corporeal link withplanetary influence made it ‘a divine plant’ (Stukeley, 1763, pp. 11–12; Piggott, 1985, pp. 147–149). It is also significant that Stukeleyfound in his teacher Mead’s writings on solar and lunar powers overthe body good evidence that astrological providences were based inreal causes in nature (Piggott, 1985, pp. 33–34; Curry, 1989, p. 123).So while Mead himself may never quite have used judicial astrolog-ical precedent, his publications certainly chimed well with the rela-tion worked out in medical astronomy and aerial chemistrybetween London Newtonianism and the prisca (Jordanova, 2001).

It is thus interesting to examine the commonalty of concern inMead’s programme of celestial medical meteorology and severalinitiatives in the astrological projects of the later seventeenthcentury. The vibrant medical marketplace of Augustan Londonprovided a febrile audience for any programmes that dealt inlong-range influences—newfangled Newtonian stories about grav-itational and aerial effects on the human body could easily beassimilated to notions of sympathetic medicine or become the top-ics of major public ribaldry (Stewart, 1992, pp. 111–130). It waseasy, and effective, for some satirists to link the Newtonian exper-imenters and physicians directly with the claims of astrology(Twombly, 2005, pp. 256–257). A notorious example was thelarge-scale advertising industry which flourished around the so-called ‘anodyne necklace’, a preservative for children supposedlytouted on behalf of the elderly physician Paul Chamberlen andhis colleagues, notably through the agency of the printer Henry

Parker, son of the well known Tory astrologer and almanac makerGeorge Parker. Alongside astro-meteorological almanacs, HenryParker printed texts announcing this wittily marketed anodynenecklace. In 1715 one appeared from his shop in Salisbury Courtwith the telling title A philosophical essay upon actions on distantsubjects (Doherty, 1990, pp. 272–274). Significantly, too, IsaacNewton carefully copied out the somewhat overblown and satiri-cally lengthy title page of this book, immodestly dedicated as itwas to the Royal Society and to Newton’s principles of motionand light (Newton, 1715). Here stories of sympathetic medicine,from such older authorities as Paracelsus, Kenelm Digby, andRobert Boyle, were all cunningly assimilated to ‘the principles ofSir Isaac Newton’ in a manner that resembled the tone of voiceadopted by Mead (A philosophical essay upon actions on distant sub-jects, 1715, pp. 2, 4). ‘Persons against change of weather feel painseither in their corns or old bruises, because the air before thosechanges of weather being heavier than ordinary, press more thanusually the atoms in the pores of those parts’, a truth vouchsafed,so the copy-writers alleged, by ‘universal laws of Nature’ demon-strated by Newton himself (ibid., pp. 3, 8). Indeed, in early 1723Parker’s allies appealed to Mead’s authority to vouchsafe the effi-cacy of their anodyne necklace and its ability to act, through aNewtonian effluvium, on the suffering human body (Doherty,1990, p. 284).

Some neat boundary work was needed before Mead’s atmo-spheric tides could thus somehow make their way as securelyorthodox collegiate medicine. Compare these two contemporaryBritish responses. In 1707 the Yorkshire physician Jeremiah Waine-wright published a Mechanical account of the non-naturals. The Ley-den graduate dutifully reproduced what was rapidly becomingNewtonian orthodoxy. Planetary influence, varying as the inversesquare law, was undeniably a force on the human body.

Those who think the Planets have no influence at all, need butto read Dr Mead’s book to be convinced of their error, for hehas from Sir Isaac Newton’s principles demonstrated the neces-sity of their influence upon human bodies, so that what washeretofore only conjecture is now a demonstrated truth.(Wainewright, 1707, p. 81)

Within a few decades, Mead’s claims had somehow become bothself-evident and also risible. In 1748 the ghastly William Douglas,satirist, man-midwife and royal physician, thus debunked Mead’sachievements:

These learned lucubrations of the Don’s met with so good areception from the literati of that age that he fancy’d himselfan Oracle, and presently set up for a conjuror under the pomp-ous Title of Astrologer-General . . . He became principal Secretaryto all the Planets and Prime Minister to the Sun and Moon, ofwhose powers and faculties he wrote a learned and elaborateTreatise . . . He discover’d such depth of science and profounderudition in this and all his other works that if Solomon hadbeen alive he had burnt his Proverbs as not be put in competi-tion with the shrewd observations of this Prince of Physicians.He wrote them all in Latin, disdaining to permit his learnedLabours to be defiled with the vulgar Dialect. (Douglas, 1748,p. 20; Day, 1979; Roos, 2000, p. 439)

A text such as that of Richard Mead suggests something of thecomplex course of this history of astro-meteorological erudition.Its originality or its banality, its radicalism or its atavism, are fasci-nating puzzles for historians just as they were for Mead’s contem-poraries and immediate successors. Late eighteenth centuryradicals could find a role for such celestial causation alongsideinterests in mesmerism and in climate (Harrison, 2000, p. 41;Fara, 1996; Fulford, 2004). Mead’s text could take its place in the


development of a general environmental medicine, much con-cerned with the aerial powers in disease and the animal economy.In 1767 the London parson and oriental scholar George Costardgave a thorough account of the environmental and medical conse-quences of Mead’s doctrine of atmospheric tides in his history ofastronomy (Costard, 1767, pp. 274–276). To mark the significantJupiter–Saturn conjunction of 1782, a more catchpenny cartogra-pher and almanac maker, Thomas Harrington, released an accountof astro-meteorology which used Mead’s ‘excellent treatise’ to in-sist that the planets affected climate and epidemics, ‘violent andoccult diseases with which whole nations are seized’. But the tractsimultaneously claimed that ‘we do not mean to blend our ideaswith the jargon of judicial astrology, which pretends to foretellmoral events . . . The influences of the planets upon the earth, air,and human bodies may be accounted for on just and rational prin-ciples’ (Harrington, 1782, pp. 39, 47).

It is a nice puzzle to assign this form of celestial environmental-ism to advanced enlightened physic or to received astrologicalmedicine. Historians of enlightenment environmental doctrinesnote a subtle shift after the period of Sydenham in the status ofaerial causation of bodily indisposition. The Scriblerian pamphle-teer Arbuthnot is a salient case. Fierce against judicial astrologyand witty participant in the efforts to demolish the repute of thehapless John Partridge during the Bickerstaff controversy, Arbuth-not also composed a major tract on aerial medicine in 1733 whichdrew on Mead, Halley and the Newtonian natural philosophers tourge the role of the air in establishing character, disease and epi-demics (Arbuthnot, 1733, p. 42; Riley, 1987, pp. 17–18; Rusnock,2002). The distinctive shift in views of air’s powers and their celes-tial sources was certainly linked to the manufacture and marketingof weather glasses and barometers, the cultivation of large-scaleweather diaries and atmospheric vigilance. The sources for thisproject, as Jan Golinski has demonstrated for us, lie in the astro-meteorology and the pneumatic experimentalism of the Restora-tion (Golinski, 2007, pp. 140–144).

A complex set of practical relations was established betweenthe glass-works of Boyle and Robert Hooke and the astro-meteorol-ogy of Goad and Childrey. In Britannia Baconica the Tory cleric Chil-drey urged the planetary causes of epidemics (Childrey, 1662, pp.122–127; Curry, 1987, p. 247). He followed this with a major con-tribution to tide theory, much debated at the Royal Society in thelate 1660s (Reidy, 2008, pp. 20–29; Porter, 1981). Here Childreyused the testimony of coastal watermen to establish the role ofthe Moon in fixing tidal heights (Childrey, 1670; Deacon, 1971,pp. 102–108). While Mead dropped any reference to Childrey fromhis astro-medical writings after his tract of 1708, he always kepthis discussion of Goad (Mead, 1708, p. 31; 1748, p. 4). The metro-politan Goad had taken a characteristically more robust position onthese matters. The head of Merchant Taylors’ School insisted thathis very lengthy weather diary and his ingenious manipulation ofbarometric data taught how ‘the alteration of the air comes hometo our doors and the causes sometimes shine in at our windows’(Goad, 1686, sig. ar). For this highly conservative natural philoso-pher, astro-meteorology was a weapon against materialism andatheism, especially its Cartesian versions. ‘Is it not pity that a for-eign mode of philosophy, though transient with the age, should de-bauch the present generations and unhinge us from the knowledgeof the creator’ (Goad, 1686, sig av; Curry, 1989, pp. 67–71; Golinski,2007, p. 100). This was the interest, too, that lay behind Newton’sexactly contemporary if politically very different programme. Thebest way of assaulting both materialist atheism and papist idolatry,so the Royal Society’s president held, was to show the active prin-ciples placed by providence in the cosmos to direct the affairs ofthe animal economy on Earth (Iliffe, 1999, pp. 101–103).

The decisive link between these various enterprises in astro-meteorology and aerial tidology was the growth in the barometer

market from trials with weather glasses in the earlier seventeenthcentury. Cosmological experiments became domestic instruments:trials on the atmospheric effects on water and mercury became de-vices that indexed pressure change. Such work with weatherglasses and cognate devices was much encouraged in Baconianprogrammes, inspired by texts such as Historia ventorum (1622)and Sylva sylvarum (1627), which proposed the study of effects ofSun, Moon and planetary conjunctions on winds and of moonlighton standing waters. Fludd’s fascination with winds and weatherglasses matched this project and linked it with the complementarypowers of medical magnetism (Debus, 1982; Huffmann, 1988, pp.121–125; Kassell, 2007; Golinski, 2007, p. 112). Similar initiativeswere set forth by the Parliamentary administrator Benjamin Wors-ley in the late 1650s. A key source for Worsley’s memoir was theEnchiridion physicae restitutae (circa 1608) of Jean d’Espagnet, aphilosophical work which also played a major role in Newton’searly alchemical thought (Clericuzio, 1994, p. 241). Worsley thencomposed an extensive memorandum on ‘undeniable experiments,not only from things inanimate and vegetate, but from the un-doubted observations of physicians, as well in several chronicalas acute distempers, and more eminently in all lunatic, epileptic,paralitic or lethargic persons’ (Hunter & Davis, 2000, p. 49). Thesetrials demonstrated, so Worsley reckoned, that the stars and plan-ets were not ‘bare candles to us, but bodies full of proper motion, ofpeculiar operation and of life’ (ibid., p. 51). Astronomy would be oflittle interest were there no ‘mutual influences’ between the starsand the animal economy. The immediate need was a general Baco-nian programme involving ‘those rare instruments they call ther-mometers or weather glasses’ (ibid., p. 53; Clericuzio, 1994, pp.244–245). An associated text by Worsley pointed out that ‘marketgardeners, farmers, sailors and indeed the greatest mass of doctors’all knew well of the lunar influence on the Earth and on its inhab-itants (Curry, 1986, p. 259).

Worsley sent his memorandum to his colleagues Samuel Hartliband Elias Ashmole, discussed it with the astronomers and almanacmakers Thomas Streete and Nicholas Mercator, and had it con-demned by the Oxford professoriate. Thence the work came intothe hands of Robert Boyle, who certainly shared many of Worsley’sviews on cosmic agents and the aerial economy and has often beenmistaken as the author of Worsley’s essay (Roos, 2000, p. 440;2001, pp. 192–197; Harrison, 2000, p. 28; Clericuzio, 1994, p.244; Hunter & Davis, 2000, p. xiv). In Boyle’s posthumous work,General history of the air (1692), edited by John Locke, Worsley’sletter was printed anonymously with a brief addition by Boyle. Thisaddition summarised a report Boyle had from a Java physician thatlong exposure to moonlight caused dramatic bodily contractionscurable only with aromatic medicines (Hunter & Davis, 2000, p.56). Thus the programme for pneumatic surveillance and planetarymeteorology appeared with authoritative Boylean imprimatur atthe same time as did the new Newtonian theory of the tides andof astral gravity (Golinski, 2007, pp. 204–205; Harrison, 2000, pp.27–29).

The widespread significance of these projects is evidenced by alarge number of London publications in the later seventeenth cen-tury that made much of celestial influence on aerial and bodilyconditions. Lancelot Coelson, Paracelsian physician and almanacmaker, issued his 1687 almanac with the insistence that the new-fangled lunar theory of the tides was fresh evidence for celestialinfluence. This was a ‘mysterious unaccountable energy’, accordingto Coelson, not attributable to lunar light nor heat, but ‘some invis-ible wyres which is not hard to imagine tho’ very hard to be exactlycomprehended’. This was a good case of a popular astrologer in di-rect dialogue with new natural philosophies of planetary power(Coelson, 1687, sigs. C3v–C4r; Capp, 1979, p. 209). To illustratethe complexity of the relation between astrology and aerial tidolo-gy, Golinski helpfully directs us to the response to the work of the


St Albans physician Gustavus Parker, who between 1699 and 1702produced a series of pamphlets touting a novel portable barometerthat allegedly allowed long-range weather prediction (Golinski,2007, p. 131). Parker directly assaulted the astro-meteorology ofplanetary aspects. It was not the angles between the planets but‘the beams of the other planets and stars’ which ‘pass directlydown upon us’ and so had real effects on the animal economyand the atmosphere (Parker, 1699, pp. 64–65). To bolster his claimsabout barometric divination and the direct effects of lunar actionon the human body, Parker simply plagiarised the passage on Java-nese lunar cramps that Boyle had added to Worsley’s astrologicalletter in General history of the air (Parker, 1699, pp. 61–62). Thoughhis critics missed this literary theft, Parker’s views in any case wentdown very badly in London. They were attacked by the aged astrol-oger John Gadbury, who in 1701 published an angry answerentitled Stars and planets the best barometers. This defence of as-tro-meteorology might have been expected (Golinski, 2007,p. 131). But Parker was also attacked by London’s leading barome-ter-maker, the ‘Torricellian operator’ John Patrick, who unfavour-ably compared Parker’s predictions for autumn 1700 with hisown weather diary. Patrick added a telling passage in which theclaims of this seemingly naturalistic barometry were damned incomparison with those of Gadbury’s astrological successor GeorgeParker, colleague of Halley and of Flamsteed:

Whereas [Gustavus Parker] confidently asserts that the planetsor their aspects have no influence on the weather (as I am astranger to that science) I shall not debate the subject nordiscuss any thing, but leave him and the astrologians [sic] todispute that point. However, I will recommend him to theperusal of his namesake [George] Parker’s double ephemerisfor the present year [1700] wherein September’s observationshe predicts before the month’s end turbulent thunder and light-ning as it really happen. (Patrick, 1700; Curry, 1989, p. 77)

Golinski convincingly proposes that barometers such as those mar-keted by Patrick and Parker welded the success of new experimen-tal philosophy to the vigour of astrological expectation (Golinski,2007, p. 133). It is certainly telling that representative texts suchas the entry on ‘astrology’ in Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia(1717) proffered as authorities Goad’s astro-meteorology, Worsley’sanonymous astrological letter on the weather glass and Mead’s tracton planetary influence in the animal economy (Roos, 2000, pp. 440–441; Curry, 1989, pp. 148–149).

Significant, too, was the common eighteenth-century shift be-tween the barometer as an instrument potentially indicative ofbodily states and the body as what Terry Castle calls ‘a feminizedweatherglass’, akin to the barometer in its unstable and tremulousvulnerability to atmospheric change (Castle, 1995, pp. 25–35;Golinski, 2007, pp. 150–152). No doubt, indeed, these potent linksbetween cosmos, air, instrument and body were decisive resourcesin making sense of mesmerism. Historians have rightly argued thatnatural histories of the weather and natural philosophy of activeprinciples made the late eighteenth century therapies of animalelectricity and animal magnetism especially plausible (Sutton,1981, p. 377). It is suggestive how many of the protagonists ofthe mesmerism fights were also involved in programmes of pneu-matic medicine: Lavoisier, Paulet and Thouret in Paris, and the pre-eminent advocate of medical eudiometry and Mesmer’s principalenemy in Vienna, Jan Ingenhousz, were all involved in these de-bates. They devised glass instruments of water and mercury thatcould estimate the virtues of the air, thence deduce major conse-quences for the welfare of the animal economy. They conductedtours of Europe, visiting beaches and markets, graveyards and hos-pitals, assaying air quality and phlogiston content and proposingmajor initiatives in the reformist management of the social body

(Schaffer, 1990; Levere, 2000). The key critic of mesmerism’s his-torical ancestry, Thouret, was simultaneously the principal Parisianmedical official who applied eudiometric measures to the clear-ance of dangerous miasmas from sewers and cemeteries (Corbin,1986, pp. 31–32, 102; Hannaway & Hannaway, 1977). As agentof medical police, Thouret used instrumental measures of aerialepidemics that seemed to be able to act on groups of human bodiessimultaneously and at a distance: his pneumatics then revealed thereal fluids working their devastating effects on the suffering body.‘In general, public health in some ways follows the vicissitudes ofthe commonwealth. Morals’ empire over our bodies is the meansof real influence and which above all deserves to be observed’(Thouret, 1784, p. 184). Just as pneumatic instruments such asbarometers and eudiometers were especially sensitive to changesof milieu, so, it was claimed, the feminine bodies on whom mes-merists worked were especially responsive to such influence.Hence the attention paid to the barometers and thermometers thatstood alongside the mesmerists’ rods, buckets and aromatic cen-sers (Castle, 1995, pp. 33–35).

In the mesmeric case, the instruments wielded by Touret, Lavoi-sier, Bailly and Franklin revealed the epidemic power of imagina-tion, a moral influence that worked on the vulnerable andtremulous body: ‘There’s nothing less needful here than to appealto magnetism, because acting at a distance defines the truly mag-netic character, and here there is immediate contact. It is more par-ticularly by speaking to the imagination that one can be made tobelieve that M Mesmer works wonders’ (Thouret, 1784, pp. 205–206). The key move, then, in the anti-mesmeric campaign was toidentify an epidemiology of imagination with an epidemiology ofaerial influence, then to find historical ancestry for this connexionin the works of the astrologers and iatrochemists (Azouvi, 1976,pp. 132–136; Riskin, 2002, pp. 216–218).

5. Conclusion

Those enterprises focused on the atmospheric milieu, its linkswith the suffering body and the planetary system, produced anunusually active attention among the enlightened to the long his-tory of astro-meteorology and the animal economy, including there-excavation of texts such as those of Fludd, Maxwell and theirilk. Historians have been pre-occupied by the lengthy processthrough which a doctrine of astral influence and humoral physicwas transformed into a programme of environmental determinismand the enlightened climatology of character and nation. This storytypically starts with the high Renaissance views of writers such asthe humanist lawyer Jean Bodin, expressed in his Methodus ad faci-lem historiarum cognitionem (1566), which used astrology and cli-mate to produce a determinist natural history of national typeand character: there could be a geography of character because‘the elements are disturbed by the power of the celestial bodies,while the human body is encompassed in the elements, the bloodin the body, the spirit in the blood, the soul in the spirit, the mindin the soul’ (Bodin, 1945, p. 100; Glacken, 1967, p. 439). Laterauthorities, contemporaries and readers of Mead such as Arbuth-not, Montesquieu and Hume, somehow secularised such doctrines,charting the atmospherics and climatics of human character andbody type. Montesquieu’s notorious microscopic examination offrozen sheep tongues, which convinced him that as the tempera-ture fell the nerves shrank, so that ‘in cold countries they have verylittle sensibility for pleasure’, fitted well into an environmentalproject which sought to associate atmospherics with characterand national habit (Glacken, 1967, p. 569; Jordanova, 1979).Resources for such typically enlightened attempts to materialisecivility in body type and aerial order were certainly found inthe long history of humoral astrology and astro-meteorology.


Variations of body type, and of disease, across terrestrial spacecould thus be mapped and analysed. David Hume, in common withmany enlightened literati, reckoned that philosophers and men oftaste possessed finer nerves and more responsive bodies thanthose of the common sort. Body type varied across social as wellas physical space (Lawrence, 1979).

In the links between Mead and Mesmer, bodily difference andits atmospherics were used to explain social and geographical var-iation: this is why, as Harrison correctly argues, celestial causationfor disease and its epidemiology flourished as a view among colo-nial medics in the eighteenth century (Harrison, 2000, pp. 32–33).But they were also at least as significantly used to explain away var-iation in therapeutic and experimental outcomes. So in his defenceof the significance of the lunar cycle of critical days, Mead claimedthat such techniques had been wrongly judged false by past physi-cians who had not fully analysed the differences between easternmaladies, for which the critical schedules had first been developed,and the diseases of the north, to which they must now be revisedthen applied. Variation in bodies could salvage troubled medicaltechnique (Mead, 1708, p. 23). In 1714 Mead’s witty medical col-league John Arbuthnot even turned the claim into a telling joke.‘Though it shall be demonstrated that modern blood circulates’,Arbuthnot had one of his mock sages opine,

yet I will still believe with Hippocrates that the blood of theAncients had a flux and reflux from the heart, like a Tide . . . Canwe be so vain as to imagine that the Microcosm of the humanbody alone is exempted from the fate of all things? I questionnot but plausible conjectures may be made even as to the timewhen the blood first began to circulate. (Kerby-Miller, 1988, pp.125–126)

Human bodies themselves had histories, which could be used to de-fend medical doctrine against critique, explain away therapeuticoutcomes, and map the temporal as well as the spatial variationof anatomy and disease.

The course of the mesmerism controversies owed much to theseclaims. It was not Mesmer but his enemies who insisted that thesuccesses of animal gravity and animal magnetism were due tothe astonishing variations in the capacities and qualities of differ-ent kinds of bodies. Differences of sex and class, of time and space,thus became crucial features of the historical body. The commis-sioners of 1784 reported that they found

magnetism then, or rather the operations of the imagination,are equally discoverable at the theatre, in the camp, and in allnumerous assemblies . . . The ideas are re-excited, the sensa-tions are reproduced, the imagination, employing its accus-tomed instruments and resuming its former routes, givesbirth to the same phenomenon . . . compression, imagination,imitation are therefore the true causes of the effects attributedto this new agent, known by the appelation of animal magne-tism, this fluid, which is said to circulate through the humanbody and to be communicated from individual to individual.(Godwin, 1785, pp. 95–97; Azouvi, 1976, p. 136; Riskin, 2002,pp. 216–221)

In this project, an acute inquiry into the material powers ofcelestial fluids acting remotely on the body turned into an histor-ical, social and moral examination of the remote propagation of be-liefs about the capacities of the human body. An entire history ofmedical astrology began to be made. Differences in the quality ofbodies soon became evident, in ceremonies of the Revolution andthe Terror, in innovative medical and social strategies that rangedfrom physiognomy to alienism (Outram, 1989; Baecque, 1993).Enlightened savants gathered around the mesmeric tubs and por-ing over astrological texts began to identify seductive phenomena

of bodily responses and tremulous corporeal passions whose spiri-tual cause stayed obscure. This is an important lesson of the com-plex process through which astro-meteorology became animalgravity.

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