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Phineas Parkhurst Quimby |
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CHARLES POYEN ST. SAUVEUR( - 1844)Charles Poyen Saint
Sauveur was a
disciple of Puységur
and
self-proclaimed professor of Animal
Magnetism
who
arrived in America from France in 1836. Nothing of his early life seems
to be known.
What is known of his career in America comes almost entirely from his Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England, published in 1837. Upon his arrival in America, Poyen began to tour New England, lecturing and giving demonstrations of animal magnetism. Bringing volunteers from the audience to the stage, Poyen frequently succeeded in inducing trance and eliciting the usually associated phenomena. While the circus-like atmosphere of these mesmeric entertainments was hardly calculated to add to the scientific credibility of mesmerism, Poyen's lecture-demonstrations, as Fuller (1982) has suggested, did effectively stimulate "the public's imagination with novel 'facts' about human nature" (p 19). As stage mesmerism
spread, it became part
of a much broader American cultural movement away from established
religion and toward an esthetic religiosity that stressed the
achievement of inner harmony through self development, exploration of
the heretofore hidden powers of the human mind, and transcendental
contact with higher spiritual planes and powers (God, the ether,
magnetic fluid, cosmic vibrations). Swedenborgianism,
Universalism,
and Spiritualism,
which from its 1848 beginnings in Hydesville,
New
York
had gathered over eleven million adherents by the 1870s, found in
mesmerism a congenial and presumably scientific construal of mind in
relation to a higher sphere. Mental healing (Christian
Science, New
Thought), which had its origins in the work of Phineas
Parkhurst Quimby
(see Fuller, 1982, for an excellent account of these developments),
also derived indirectly from Poyen, since it was Poyen's stage
demonstration in Belfast, Maine
that first interested Quimby in
mesmerism. By the late 1870s, psychical phenomena, spiritualistic séances, hypnotic trance states, and mental healing were familiar phenomena to most educated Americans. Progress
of
Animal Magnetism in New England. Being a Collection of Experiments,
Reports and Certificates, from the Most Respectable Sources. Preceded
by a Dissertation on the Proofs of Animal Magnetism. By
Charles
Poyen, St. Sauveur ... Boston: Weeks, Jordan & co. 1837.
Citation: Wozniak, Robert H. "Mind and Body: Rene Déscartes to William James" http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/Mind/; Bryn Mawr College, Serendip 1995 Originally published in 1992 at Bethesda, MD & Washington, DC by the National Library of Medicine and the American Psychological Association. |
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