Mesmerism, or System of Interactions

at that time. Thus, I certainly looked around early on for writings on Magnetismus magnetism, but despite all my efforts, I acquired only a little. And yet—even though, as I suspected even then and as later became certain to me, the subject had not been presented in its fundamental essence either theoretically or practically—this little bit was already a great deal, for I found in it the perfect confirmation of my own careful observations. In my various, not insignificant circles of activity, magnetism was always present to me. The experiences gained through it, especially regarding the constancy of critical processes and evacuations physiological discharges associated with the healing crisis, preserved me from straying from nature, despite all the zeal with which I participated in various upheavals in medical opinions, and allowed me to view the blinding will-o'-the-wisps of different theories more critically than to follow them into the abyss. Thus, I never lost myself. The essentially true, which was present in all the theories that came to the fore one after another, from Humoral-Pathologie humoral pathology and Nerven-Pathologie nervous pathology to Brownianismus Brownianism (John Brown's theory of excitability) and