MARY BAKER EDDY WROTE a brief but very important chapter in Science and Health titled "Animal Magnetism Unmasked." For those early in their study of Christian Science, the term animal magnetism may sound (as it initially did to me) like some semimysterious jargon, unique to Christian Science. But I've recently studied some of the history of what the term animal magnetism meant from secular perspectives, and the results of that study have been illuminating, not only in removing any sense of mystery about this subject, but also in gaining a greater appreciation for why it was so important for Mrs. Eddy to include this chapter in her textbook—and for Christian Scientists and others to be alert today to what she really "unmasked."
Mary Baker Eddy summarized the history of animal magnetism succinctly in Science and Health, but to the 21st-century reader, the references she used—for example, the initial attention given animal magnetism by Franz Anton Mesmer in Germany in 1775; the debunking of animal magnetism by a French commission in 1784; and an 1837 report adopted by the Royal Academy of Medicine in Paris—may be difficult to place in context today. These references can sound like quaint, obscure, and trivial oddities, leaving one to wonder why she thought it important to include them in her book.
So it was interesting to find that even before Mrs. Eddy made her discovery of Christian Science in 1866, British author Charles MacKay had catalogued in 1841 what he considered a variety of interesting "groupthink" phenomena in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, a book that is still in print. In his summary of "The Magnetisers," MacKay traces the beginning of the concept of animal magnetism to the theory of "mineral magnetism"—a phenomenon springing from people's fascination with the ability of a magnet to move matter by means of an invisible force. People very quickly jumped to the conclusion that if a magnet could move iron from one place to another, maybe a magnet could move disease from one place in the body to someplace out of the body. A variety of disease treatments followed, and, for a time, some mineral magnetism treatments appeared to be successful.
