Suggestion is the name given to the psychological process by which one person may guide the thoughts, feelings or behaviour of another.
...What is to be is not out of our hands. Moment by moment we make our own lives. How else but in the very next minute are we to be free. It is in the cauldron of the very next minute, not yesterday, not some tomorrow, but always and forever now! How else but in the very next minute are we to be free...
Franz Anton Mesmer, M.D.
Where there is Love of Humankind there is also Love of the Art of Medicine
In 1777 an 18 year old, blind, female pianist, singer, and composer Maria-Theresa von Paradies, was brought to Mesmer. Her father had close relations to the court of the empress dowager, Maria Theresa of Austria-Hungary, with whom the girl was a favourite. The girl had been blind since birth, but no physician had been able to find anything wrong with her eyes.
Under the hands of Mesmer mademoiselle Paradies gradually regained what she supposedly never had had. She recovered her sight after treatment by Mesmer despite the fact that she had been under the care of Europe's leading eye specialist for ten years without improvement.
From the medical world of Vienna people flocked to witness this "miracle", and Mesmer enjoyed a period of interst in and respect for his epoch-making methods. But then the patient, who had received an artists scholarship from the empress, during the therapy lost her ability to play the piano, possibly due to the inundation of visual stimuli ruining her nerves. Influenced by jealous doctors, the child's mother took her away from Mesmer's care before the cure was complete. In an emotional scene, the mother struck her child across the face because she resisted leaving Dr. Mesmer's clinic and the hysterical blindness reasserted itself.