Daemoniaca: Curación mágica, posesión y profecía en el marco del magnetismo animal romántico (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPThis book explores how animal magnetism was received in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, through the voices of doctors and patients who took part in a form of treatment of nervous illnesses that reached its apogee in that era: magnetic therapy. This therapy, also known as "mesmerism," was a technique in which the physician through "magnetic passes" (smooth movements of the hands over the patient's body) produced a "crisis" from which the patient recovered, apparently cured. Luis Montiel is a lecturer in the history of medicine at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, and his interests lie predominantly in this period of German medicine and particularly in animal magnetism, a subject he has covered in previous publications.
The book is split into three parts. The introduction features a biographical outline of Franz Anton Mesmer, and also reflects on the difficulties his ideas encountered in becoming established in German medicine. The author analyzes the role played by the political changes affecting the Prussian throne in the way this therapy was received. He also points out the importance of Friedrich Schilling's Naturphilosophie, a philosophical framework that influenced a whole new generation of German doctors who were ready to put this new therapeutic approach into practice, such as Carl Christian Wolfart, David Ferdinand Koreff, Justinus Kerner, and Dietrich Georg Kieser.
In the second part, after a short biography of Justinus Kerner, Montiel provides a detailed analysis of three clinical cases treated by this German doctor and poet: the case of Friederike Hauffe, better known as the "Seeress of Prevorst." Frau Hauffe fell into trance states during which she showed visionary and clairvoyant powers as well as the ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead. Two other cases are presented in this part, that of a young woman from Orlach and that of Anna Maria U.
Finally, in the third part of the book the author provides us with a biographical introduction to Dietrich Georg Kieser, and then reviews different stories that Kieser published in his journal Archiv für den thierischen Magnetismus (Archive for Animal Magnetism) under the common heading of Daemoniaca, because they refer to alleged cases of the supposed manifestation of supernatural beings. Unlike Kerner's cases, those described in Daemoniaca are not cases treated directly by Kieser, but stories from the past. In other words, they are older texts whose origins are mainly religious or medical and that refer to religious visionaries ("Angels or Devils?" "The Satan of the Faroes," "The Wonderful Young Lady from Johanngeorgenstadt"), to prophecies ("God's Justice," "Of War and Death,"), to phenomena of "second sightings" ("The Island of Mists," "Magnetic Macbeth," "Far from the Hebrides"). To conclude this part of the book, Montiel presents two additional cases of "daemonomania," that is, obsessive ideas about possession by evil spirits ("A Woman Possessed from Times Past," "New Persecution"). [End Page 869]
Although this book does not introduce great novelties in the general interpretive framework of animal magnetism in relation to previous publications—for example, Henri F. Ellenberger's classic The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970), or the more recent History of Hypnotism (1992) by Alan Gauld and From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (1993) by Adam Crabtree—it is the first time that many of the clinical cases narrated here have been made accessible to Spanish readers. Together they contribute to the fascinating history of the attempts by German romantic medicine in the nineteenth century to understand "the languages of the body, and . . . illness as a language...
