This weekend Thomas Jefferson's personal retreat, Poplar Forest, hosted a "conversation between Thomas Jefferson and His Majesty King George III" for the first of many of the annual Conversations with Jefferson programs.
What is not generally known about our third President is his disdain for a new idea then sweeping Paris, mesmerism, named for it's originator, Franz Anton Mesmer.
Mesmer, who has the term "mesmerism" named after him, was putting the people of Paris in a trance state with passes of his hands. He believed he was manipulating a "magnetic fluid" in his patients. Modern hypnotism derives from his ideas.
Rumors of Mesmer reached Thomas Jefferson, who was living in Paris at that time. He considered Mesmerism "an imputation of so grave a nature as would bear an action at law in America."
The King of France was growing increasingly concerned about the antics of Mesmer and his followers because the Queen was falling under the spell of this master hypnotist. He appointed Benjamin Franklin to head a committee of scientists to investigate the claims of special powers of those mesmerized, which included clairvoyance and telepathy. Franklin found no "magnetic fluid" flowing between Mesmer and his subjects and also debunked the psychic abilities of the cult by use of scientific experiments.
Virginia Jefferson scholar Martin Clagett has suggested that Benjamin Franklin didn't care for the way Mesmer was "stealing his thunder" by using the term "magnetism" in the service of an occult philosophy.
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