Charles Poyen
Charles Poyen (died 1844)[1] was a French mesmerist or magnetizer (a practitioner of a practice that would later inspire hypnotism).[2] Mesmerism was named after Franz Anton Mesmer, a German physician who argued in 1779 for the existence of a fluid that fills space and through which bodies could influence each other, a force he called animal magnetism.[3]
Death[edit]
Poyen returned to France and died in Bordeaux in 1844, just as he about to sail back to the United States. "Having sown the seed," the BMSJ wrote, "... a mighty host of animal magnetizers sprung up in a trice; they swarmed throughout the length and breadth of the northern States, like locusts; but having used up the resources of their silly admirers, and devoured the green leaves of vulgar Popularity, they gradually died away, one after another, and have now become, in vulgar parlance, the laughing stock of every commonsense community. After the manner of Lycurgus, when he had fairly imposed his system of laws upon the Spartans, Dr. P. left the Continent; and when on the point of returning to ascertain the workings of the machinery he had set in motion, death dropped the curtain, and his career on earth was closed forever."[1]