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Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
Author(s): Robert Darnton (Author)
- Publisher: Harvard University Press
- Publication Date: 1 Jan. 1986
- Edition: Revised ed.
- Language: English
- Print length: 232 pages
- ISBN-10: 0674569512
- ISBN-13: 9780674569515
Book Description
“[An] excellent and exemplary study in the history of ideas…Provides a commendable model for those interested in the way ‘true’ and ‘false’ ideas interact and broadly influence behavior.” ―Science
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
[An] excellent and exemplary study in the history of ideas. Based on a thorough study of manuscripts, pamphlets, and journals, learned in its broad setting and persuasive in its internal logic, supported by richly relevant quotations and reproductions of contemporary engravings,
Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France provides a commendable model for those interested in the way ‘true’ and ‘false’ ideas interact and broadly influence behavior.– “Science”This is an excellent book and one of singular interest both to the historian of science and to the French historian.– “Isis”
