Had M- been a fairground quack, and his patients credulous peasants crowded into some rank booth, as eager to be relieved of their savings as of their pain, society would have paid no attention. But M- was a man of science, of wide curiosity, and not obvious immodesty, who made no claims beyond what he could account for.
‘It works,’ Professor Bauer had commented, as his breath came more easily and he was able to raise his arms beyond the horizontal. ‘But how does it work?’
‘I do not yet understand it,’ M- had replied. ‘When magnets were employed in past ages, it was explained that they drew illness to them just as they attracted iron filings. But we cannot sustain such an argument nowadays. We are not living in the age of Paracelsus. Reason guides our thinking, and reason must be applied, the more so when we are dealing with phenomena which lurk beneath the skin of things.’
‘As long as you do not propose to dissect me in order to find out,’ replied Professor Bauer.
In those early months, the magnetic cure was as much a matter of scientific enquiry as of medical practice. M- experimented with the positioning of the magnets and the number applied to the patient. He himself often wore a magnet in a leather bag around his neck to increase his influence, and used a stick, or wand, to indicate the course of realignment he was seeking in the nerves, the blood, the organs. He magnetised pools of water and had patients place their hands, their feet, and sometimes their whole bodies in the liquid. He magnetised the cups and glasses they drank from. He magnetised their clothes, their bedsheets, their looking glasses. He magnetised musical instruments so that a double harmony might result from their playing. He magnetised cats, dogs and trees. He constructed a baquet, an oaken tub containing two rows of bottles filled with magnetised water. Steel rods emerging from holes in the lid were placed against afflicted parts of the body. Patients were sometimes encouraged to join hands and form a circle round the baquet, since M- surmised that the magnetic stream might augment in force as it passed through several bodies simultaneously.
‘Of course I remember the gnädige Fräulein from my days as a medical student, when I was sometimes permitted to accompany Professor Stoerk.’ Now M-was himself a member of the Faculty, and the girl was almost a woman: plump, with a mouth that turned down and a nose that turned up. ‘And though I can recall the description of her condition then, I would nonetheless like to ask questions which I fear you have answered many times already.’
‘Of course.’
‘There is no possibility that the Fräulein was blind from birth?’
M- noticed the mother impatient to reply, but restraining herself.
‘None,’ her husband said. ‘She saw as clearly as her brothers and sisters.’
‘And she was not ill before becoming blind?’
‘No, she was always healthy.’
‘And did she receive any kind of shock at the time of her misfortune, or shortly before?’
‘No. That is to say, none that we or anyone else observed.’
‘And afterwards?’
This time the mother did answer. ‘Her life has always been as protected against shock as we are able to make it. I would tear out my own eyes if I thought it would give Maria Theresia back her sight.’
M- was looking at the girl, who did not react. It was probable that she had heard this unlikely solution before.
‘So her condition has been constant?’
‘Her blindness has been constant’ – the father again – ‘but there are periods when her eyes twitch convulsively and without cease. And her eyeballs, as you may see, are extruded, as if trying to escape their sockets.’
‘You are aware of such periods, Fräulein?’
‘Of course. It feels as if water is slowly rushing in to fill my head, as if I shall faint.’
‘And she suffers in the liver and the spleen afterwards. They become disorderly.’
M- nodded. He would need to be present at such an attack in order to guess its causes and observe its progress. He wondered how that might best be effected.
‘May I ask the doctor a question?’ Maria Theresia had lifted her head slightly towards her parents.
‘Of course, my child.’
‘Does your procedure cause pain?’
‘None that I inflict myself. Though it is often the case that patients need to be brought to a certain… pitch before harmony can be restored.’
‘I mean, do your magnets cause electric shocks?’
‘No, that I may promise you.’
‘But if you do not cause pain, then how can you cure? Everyone knows that you cannot remove a tooth without pain, you cannot set a limb without pain, you cannot cure insanity without pain. A doctor causes pain, that the world knows. And that I know too.’
Since she had been a small child the finest doctors had employed the most respected methods. There had been blistering and cauterising and the application of leeches. For two months her head had been encased in a plaster designed to provoke suppuration and draw the poison from her eyes. She had been given countless purges and diuretics. Most recently, electricity had been resorted to, and over the twelvemonth some three thousand electric shocks had been administered to her eyes, sometimes as many as a hundred in a single treatment.
‘You are quite sure that magnetism will not cause me pain?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Then how can it possibly cure me?’
M- was pleased to glimpse the brain behind the unseeing eyes. A passive patient, merely waiting to be acted upon by an omnipotent physician, was a tedious thing; he preferred those like this young woman, who displayed forcefulness beneath her good manners.
‘Let me put it this way. Since you went blind, you have endured much pain at the hands of the best doctors in the city?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet you are not cured?’
‘No.’
‘Then perhaps pain is not the only gateway to cure.’
In the two years he had practised magnetic healing, M- had constantly pondered the question of how and why it might work. A decade previously, in his doctoral thesis De planetarum influxu, he had proposed that the planets influenced human actions and the human body through the medium of some invisible gas or liquid, in which all bodies were immersed, and which for want of a better term he called ‘gravitas universalis’. Occasionally, man might glimpse the overarching connection, and feel able to grasp the universal harmony that lay beyond all local discordance. In the present instance, magnetic iron arrived on earth in the form and body of a meteor fallen from the heavens. Once here, it displayed its singular property, the power to realign. Might one not surmise, therefore, that magnetism was the great universal force which bound together stellar harmony? And if so, was it not reasonable to expect that in the sublunary world it had the power to placate certain corporeal disharmonies?
It was evident, of course, that magnetism could not cure every bodily failing. It had proved most successful in cases of stomach ache, gout, insomnia, ear trouble, liver and menstrual disorder, spasm, and even paralysis. It could not heal a broken bone, cure imbecility or syphilis. But in matters of nervous complaint, it might often effect startling improvement. Again, it could not overcome a patient mired in scepticism and disbelief, or one whose pessimism or melancholy undermined the possibility of a return to health. There must be a willingness to admit and welcome the effects of the procedure.