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From Pat Deveney's database:
Magnetiseur, Le. As its name indicates, the journal was primarily devoted to magnetism, but it was also one of the forums for the discussions over spiritualism and the postulated causes of its effects. Crabtree 807. Universitat
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| Magnetiseur V1-3 1859-1862 | |
| Magnetiseur V4-6 1863-1865 | |
| Magnetiseur V7-9 1866-1869 | |
| Magnetiseur V10-12 1870-1872 | |
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Le Magnétiseur was the Geneva journal of Charles Lafontaine, one of the most celebrated practising animal magnetisers of the nineteenth century and the man whose public demonstrations at Manchester in 1841 prompted the surgeon James Braid to begin the investigations that produced hypnotism. Published through the 1860s, it is a practitioner's record rather than a theoretical review: the technique of the passes and of fascination, the induction of magnetic sleep, the lucidity attributed to somnambulists, the disputed magnetic fluid, and above all detailed case reports of cures, several vouched for by attending physicians. It also registers the pressure of a rival. The new Spiritism of Allan Kardec was competing for the same phenomena and the same public in exactly these years, and its vocabulary — spirits, sittings, the périsprit — shadows the journal's pages even as Lafontaine holds to magnetic phenomena as natural facts. It is a primary document of mesmerism at the moment the tradition began to give way, on one side to hypnotism and on the other to spirit mediumship. Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description. |
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| Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism | Spiritualism |
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