[Little histories of magnetic cures]

Rev Hist Pharm (Paris). 2009 Feb; 56(360): 469-82Pinet PMen were very early fascinated by magnetism because of its manifest and particular working at distance, which looked different of gravity. It was tryed to be explained by mecanism, for exemple Descartes and Boyle. Paracelse valued the therapeutics with magnets and conceived medicines as working by a magnetic virtue. Gilbert limited the medicinal properties of magnet but helded it to be animated. Many authors praised remedies that work at distance of the evil as Bacon, Van Helmont, Croll, Porta, Goclenius, Digby. Such a belief related to magic ideas of this time. In the Bacon's way Boyle collected facts of magnetic cures, and his actual testing of the divisibility of bodies led him to conceive imponderable corpuscles. Newton supposed a subtil and universel fluid going through every solid body. Mesmer misappropriated this idea by founding the animal magnetism of which physical working was only proceeding from the inside of the patient by an effect of suggestion (psychosomatic). Homeopathy took again the notion of remedies having an infinite or a magnetic virtue, which partly issued from Paracelse's and Mesmer's doctrines, which were extolled in Germany at the time of Hahnemann. The latter decided in favour of a spiritualist and not corpuscular interpretation of the working of his homeopathic medicines.