Franz Anton Mesmer treated fashionable Paris with "animal magnetism," inducing trances and convulsive crises around magnetized tubs. A 1784 French royal commission that included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier found no magnetic fluid whatsoever — one of history's first placebo-controlled investigations — yet mesmerism thrived for decades more. Scottish surgeon James Braid stripped away the theatrics and renamed the residue "hypnotism" in 1843, handing it on to Charcot, and through him to Freud.
Mesmerist no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
What else was happening then
1879
Wundt opens the Leipzig laboratory
Wilhelm Wundt founds the first laboratory dedicated to experimental psychology at the University of Leipzig, measuring reaction times and sensory judgments with brass instruments. Over his career he supervises more than 180 doctorates, and his students — G. Stanley Hall, James McKeen Cattell, Edward Titchener among them — seed psychology departments across three continents.
1890
James publishes The Principles of Psychology
William James delivers his two-volume, nearly 1,400-page textbook to publisher Henry Holt twelve years after promising it in two, calling it proof that psychology was not yet a science. The book — on habit, attention, emotion and the "stream of consciousness" — becomes the founding text of American psychology and is still quoted today.
Where that work lives now
The scientist of mind and behavior, from Wundt's 1879 Leipzig laboratory to the therapy room — trained to hear what a person cannot yet say themselves.
🧩 Psychologist →