Franz Mesmer
Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer was a German physician with an interest in astronomy, who theorised that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects that he called animal magnetism, sometimes later referred to as mesmerism. The theory attracted a wide following between about 1780 and 1850, and continued to have some influence until the end of the century. In 1843 the Scottish physician James Braid proposed the term hypnosis for a technique derived from animal magnetism today this is the usual meaning of mesmerism.
Mesmer was born in the village of Iznang, on the shore of Lake Constance in Swabia, Germany, a son of master forester Anton Mesmer and his wife, MariaUrsula . After studying at the Jesuit universities of Dillingen and Ingolstadt, he took up the study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1759. In 1766 he published a doctoral dissertation with the Latin title De planetarum influxu in corpus humanum , which discussed the influence of the Moon and the planets on the human body and on disease. This was not medical astrology. Building largely on Newtons theory of the tides, Mesmer expounded on certain tides in the human body that might be accounted for by the movements of the sun and moon. Evidence assembled by Frank A. Pattie suggests that Mesmer plagiarized his dissertation from a work by Richard Mead, an eminent English physician and Newtons friend. However, in Mesmers day doctoral theses were not expected to be original.
Source: Wikipedia