The story could not have been successful (either as fiction or hoax) had the general public not been highly intrigued with the idea of “animal magnetism”, nor widely convinced of its power.

The Island the characters are trapped has large deposits of electromagnetism, which has miraculously cured many people from ailments such as cancer, spinal injury, gunshot wounds, and many other injuries.

I’m aware it’s a work of fiction, and I don’t know if the role it plays in the show is for entertainment purposes exclusively or to server as a subtle promotion.

For those interested.

http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Electromagnetism

I disagree. Mesmer was not taking medical science in a useful direction. Essentially he was treating psychosomatic illnesses with a placebo effect, and constructed an elaborate theory around that as an explanation. That theory was fanciful and not evidence-based or rigorous, and was rightly rejected.

The fact that there was a kernel of utility in the hypnosis component of his interventions is a minor consideration, in my opinion, and does not rescue him from being a crank. It’s like saying blood letting was not a bad idea because it is useful for polycythemia.

This is a core problem in medical science – separating specific effects that reflect underlying biology from non-specific therapeutic effects that do not. Mesmer was just another crank who confused non-specific for specific effects, which provided confirmation bias for his fanciful theories.

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/161/1/93

Okay, no firm conclusions can be drawn from this study.

Firstly, as the small numbers suggest, this was a pilot study.
Secondly it was not double-blinded.
Thirdly, it used existing study groups, which explains why there were unequal numbers in the three groups and confiming my suspicion that the there was not random allocation.

However the effect was rather large indicating that a controlled clinical trial would be worthwhile.

Mesmer was not a charlatan and the rejection of his techniques by conventional medicine (but not his theory) was an error, especially given the poverty of effective treatments in medicines of the day, especially before the discovery of effective chemical anesthetics.

To say that Mesmer was “only” using hypnosis is to ignore the fact that hypnosis is only a new name given by Braid for Mesmerism without Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” theory. But Braid’s own name for hypnosis was based on an also incorrect idea that Mesmerism/hypnosis was a form a sleep, an error that Braid eventually recognized.

I think that the rejection of Mesmer and Mesmerism was a failure, not a triumph, of skepticism.

Try here for the full version: http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/161/1/93

According to the authors, the change in group size was due to losing access to the facility’s MRI system.

Of more concern to me is that while the subjects were sorta-kinda blinded, the rater wasn’t blinded at all.

It’s an interesting idea, at least.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14702256

This study is immediately suspicious. They have 45 subjects and 3 test groups. Instead of putting 15 in each group, they distribute them in groups of 30, 15, and 10. This suggests that the patients were not randomly allocated to each group. Otherwise I can’t see why tehy made the group sizes different.

(Unfortunately, although there is a tag “free article” I can’t seem to access the article, only the abstract)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14702256