Report of the Commissioners on Animal Magnetism

They experienced nothing of a nature that could be attributed to the action of Magnetism. Some of the Commissioners are of a robust constitution; others have a less hardy constitution and are subject to various ailments. One of the latter experienced a slight pain in the pit of the stomach following the heavy pressure that had been applied there The "magnetizers" often used physical touch or "passes" involving firm contact with the patient's body to direct the supposed fluid.. This pain lasted throughout the day and the following day; it was accompanied by a feeling of fatigue and unease. A second Commissioner felt a slight nervous irritation on the afternoon of one of the days he was treated, a condition to which he is frequently subject. A third, endowed with greater sensitivity and, above all, an extreme mobility of the nerves, experienced more pain and more marked irritations; but these minor incidents are merely the result of the perpetual and ordinary variations in one's state of health, and are consequently foreign to Magnetism, or else result from the physical pressure exerted on the region of the stomach. The Commissioners only make mention of these slight details out of scrupulous fidelity; they report them because they have made it a law for themselves to always tell the truth in all matters.

The Commissioners could not help but be struck by the difference between the public treatment and their private treatment at the baquet: a wooden tub filled with water and iron rods, intended to concentrate "magnetic fluid". There was calm and silence in the one, but movement and agitation in the other; in the public sessions, there were manifold effects and violent crises: intense physical reactions, such as convulsions or fainting, which were considered the climax of the magnetic cure, where the habitual state of the body and mind was interrupted and troubled, and Nature was pushed to extremes; here, in private, the body was without pain, the mind without trouble, and Nature maintained both its equilibrium and its ordinary course—in a word, the absence