Special Guest Blogger: Franz Mesmer

As the human body is approximately 65% water, it seems to make sense that as the Moon and Planets have an effect on our oceans tides, it can also mess with us in some way and that was my theory in my dissertation 'On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body' which built on Issac Newton's theory of tides so in order to prove it i produced an artificial tide in a patient by having her swallow a preparation containing iron and then attaching magnets to various parts of her body and it was a success, she said she felt better almost immediately.
I stated that by using the magnets to maneuver the iron around her body, it cured her of whatever ailed her and i called it animal magnetism, a life force that every animal has but if these internal fluids are somehow unbalanced, then the patient would get sick but with the correct placement of my metal rods which were a conductor of animal magnetism, the fluids could be realigned.
I was invited to the Munich Academy of Sciences to look at the exorcisms carried out by Priest Johann Joseph Gassner and concluded that it was nothing religious or Holy, he just possessed a high degree of animal magnetism and Gassner's exorcism career stuttered to an end.
I moved to Paris and established a medical practice and soon attracted such luminaries as Mozart and announced that life flowed through thousands of channels in our bodies and blockages of the free flow caused illness and to restore health the flow had to be restored and i was the owner of just such metal rods to do it.
My reputation grew and soon i had more patients than i could treat individually and i established a collective treatment where metal rods were placed in a vessel in the middle of a room at different heights and upon touching them, the animal magnetism flowed out to cure them.
King Louis XVI was interested in my medical discovery and hired five scientists to test it out and they concluded that the cure only seemed to work when the subject was aware of it, they called it 'imagination' or as it would become known, the placebo effect.
That killed my career in France, nobody wanted to pay for a cure which consisted of me holding a metal rod over a patient's body to realign their juju before declaring them well and getting handsomely paid but they did in Switzerland so i moved there and continued to practise my animal magnetism cure until i died.