Trattato teorico e pratico del magnetismo animale. Riproduzione facsimile dell’edizione Rimini, presso Giacomo Marsoner, 1785

Published in French in Turin in 1784, in the midst of the Parisian polemic on animal magnetism, and translated the following year in the Pontifical State, the treatise of the Savoyard doctor François-Amedée Doppet was the first manual dedicated to instructing the public non only about Franz Anton Mesmer’s doctrine but also about the practices he developed. As is well known, the latter derived from a cosmology based on the existence of a fluid that pervaded the universe and united its various parts and, departing from this foundation, took the form of a therapy based on re-establishing the proper circulation of the fluid, whose disruption was considered to be the fundamental cause of all disorders. The particular intellectual career of Doppet (traced by V. Ferrone, Medicina naturale e mentalità rivluzionaria. Il caso di François Amedée Doppet, medico e giacobino savoiardo, now in Id., Una scienza per l’uomo. Illuminismo e Rivoluzione scientifica nell’Europa del Settecento, Torino, Utet, 2007), soon led him to repudiate Mesmerism, which he had encountered in the eclectic and moderate version promoted by Mesmer’s student-rival, Charles Deslon. The 1784 text, in fact, already deliberately violates the secret in which Mesmer had enveloped his discoveries. It thus represents a significant moment in the history of the mesmeristic movement, whose historiography is progressively unveiling its multiple facets and revealing the intense circulation, between France and Italy, of the debates to which it was subject: a circulation whose dimensions are still to be investigated and to which this journal has already dedicated attention (D. Armando, Il magnetismo animale tra scienza, politica e religione. Nuove fonti e ipotesi di ricerca, in «Laboratorio dell’ISPF», II, 2005, 2).