“ Nervous ladies became hysterical or fainted; some men became convulsed, or were seized with palpitations of the heart or other bodily disturbances. The government appointed a commission of physicians and members of the Academy of Sciences to investigate these phenomena; Franklin and Baillie were members of this commission, and drew up an elaborate report admitting many of the facts, but contesting Mesmer’s theory that there was an agent called animal magnetism, and attributing the effects to physiological causes. Mesmer himself was undoubtedly a mystic ”