Magnetic Medicine? A Benjamin Franklin Story.
Do coronavirus vaccines cause people to become magnetized? No, and this is not the first foray of magnetic bamboozlement in science.
In the spring of 2021 as the world embarked on a unprecedented vaccination campaign to eliminate and eradicate the coronavirus pandemic, there were dubious and often hilarious claims of COVID-19 vaccines causing people to become human magnets. Individuals would try to bamboozle the public by asserting on various social media platforms and even in court rooms across the United States that the vaccine had magnetized their body. They often buttressed their assertions with demonstrations involving keys. Pressing a household key firmly against moist skin until it stuck to their sweat coated epidermis was seen as ipso facto, incontrovertible evidence, that indeed the COVID-19 vaccine had turned them into human magnets.
The problem is of course, that it is not scientifically possible for an individual to become magnetized following vaccination. And, by the way… Keys are not magnetic. The quest to understand why individuals would engage and perpetuate such a hoax continues.
Nevertheless, there is actually a long history of faux claims linking magnets to both cure and disease that span the arc of centuries. In the early 1500’s as humanity was awakening from the Middle Ages the lines between the natural and supernatural world were still often blurred or mistaken for each other. Spells could be seen as science. Magic could be confused for medicine. Paracelsus, a Swiss physician, used magnets as a way to suck out disease from his patients and then place the ailment safety back into the Earth.
Hundreds of years later, Benjamin Franklin’s work on electricity welcomed a new scientific revolution in the same way that Newton and Galileo demystified gravity from a now bygone era. Franz Mesmer, a healer from Vienna got caught up in all the new excitement surrounding electricity and magnetism as it permeated the ethos from New World. Mesmer formed ideas that the location of the planets in outer space influenced the health of people and that disease could be cured by subjecting the sick, often desperate for help, to magnets.
In the dusk of the night, the evening before the French Revolution would dawn, Franz Mesmer mesmerized (this is where the word comes from) the French nobility with a grand demonstration. As a crowd gathered, the always flamboyant and overzealous Mesmer who was dressed in a bright gold robe decorated with flowers waved a wand made of pure ivory. He placed sick young woman around a oak tub of acid, and had them hold on to iron rods that were grounded in the liquid. As they held the iron bars, Mesmer rubbed their bodies, bent their joints, and looked deeply into their eyes. In what seemed like a magical spell, the young women emerged cured. And, Mesmer soon became wildly famous in Paris for his ‘animal magnetism’!
Other physicians remained skeptical and thought Mesmer might be nothing more than a charlatan, bamboozling the sick. A commission was created in 1784 by the French Academy of Sciences that called upon the American hero, scientist and foremost expert on electricity, Benjamin Franklin to settle the matter.
Franklin devised a placebo-control experiment where the patients were to be blindfolded so as not to know if they were getting the treatments from Mesmer’s doctors or a placebo. In the name of science, Franklin even subjected himself to the experimental magnetic treatments. When the sick were magnetized without their knowledge, no cures were seen. The commission determined that a placebo effect had taken place. The effects Mesmer proclaimed to be occurring were in reality only in the subjects imagination. They concluded that Mesmer was a fraud.
Irregardless to Benjamin Franklin’s assessment, Franz Mesmer and his followers continued to profit from the sick by performing magic magnetisms. However, they included updated instructions for patients so they could get the best results:
Forget all your knowledge of physics and remove any objections in your mind to magnesium. Abstain from engaging in logic and reason for at least six weeks. Do not listen to reason. Become more gullible and persist in this credulousness irregardless of the perceived outcome. Forget all past experiences.
And a final word of advice from Mesmer to his fellow magnet practitioners: “Never magnetize before inquisitive persons.”
References:
Sagan, Carl. “The Demon-Haunted World.”
Isaacson, Walter. “Benjamin Franklin.”