Justinus Kerner and mesmerism

Abstract

Introduction

The German physician and poet Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), Swabian public health officer in Weinsberg, is well known as an allround, even an epoch-making personality in his time and a natural scientist typical for late romanticism. His greatest merit is not due to his poetic scripts, but to his scientific work. This begins with his medical dissertation “Observata de functione singularum partium auris”, a mine of experimental behaviourism.

Objectives

The aim of this study is to evaluate the influence of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) on Kerner's way of treating patients.

Methods

A literature research was done on Kerner and mesmerism.

Results

Kerner's first contact with animal magnetism was in 1797, when he was magnetized and healed by Dr. Eberhard Gmelin, one of the first mesmerian doctors in Germany, because of his nervous stomach. With the “Seeress of Prevorst” the author ventured to advance into deep layers of the soul unknown so far. During the years 1826–1829 Justinus Kerner treated Friederike Hauffe (1801–1829), the “Seeress of Prevorst”, at his Weinsberg domicile. In the year 1829 he published the description of her life and disease with the title “The Seeress of Prevorst, being revelations concerning the inner-life of man, and the interdiffusion of a world of spirits in the one we inhabit”.

Conclusions

Kerner was very much influenced by Mesmer and left volumes of psycho-pathological case histories that helped to prepare a way for a medicine more psychotherapeutically founded.

Disclosure of interest

The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.