who fit the title.
Franz Anton Mesmer
(1734 - 1815)
Dr. Mesmer has been called the "Columbus of modern psychology." While borrowing freely from physicians and thinkers before him, like Paracelsus and Descartes, he developed the idea of animal magnetism and used it to treat a wide variety of patients between Vienna and Paris. He endeavored to apply cosmological (planetary) forces to human physiology. It might be said that Mesmer was an early researcher in the field of etheric energies.
Dr. Mesmer was known for his airs of mystery and wizardry and convincing healing powers as well as large doses of pride, grandiosity, and despotic benevolence. Mesmer’s whole life became fixed on the idea of a universal fluid which carries the powers of animal magnetism and of which he touted himself as the original and chief hierophant. Jupiter as the Sole Dispositor of his natal (astrological) horoscope helps to explain his intensity, grand passions, exaggerations, and arrogance.
Despite his excesses, Mesmer brought forward, successfully utilized and publicized his expansive theories and practices. His work had far-reaching and long-lasting effects through a line of “students” like Charcot, Bernheim, Janet, Freud, and Erickson. It seems likely that his theories and demonstrations have yet to be fully understood two hundred years after his death.
(1915 – 1990)
Dr. Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician called the “saviour of mothers.” He discovered, by 1847, that the incidence of childbed fever could be drastically cut by use of hand washing standards in obstetrical clinics.
While employed as assistant to the professor of the maternity clinic at the Vienna General Hospital in Austria, Semmelweis introduced hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions for interns who had performed autopsies. This immediately reduced the incidence of fatal puerperal fever dramatically.
Semmelweis hypothesized that the cause was cleanliness. His thinking was thought extreme at the time. So, he was largely ignored, rejected or ridiculed. Semmelweis was dismissed from the hospital and harassed by the medical community in Vienna, which eventually forced him to move to Budapest.
Dr. Semmelweis was outraged by the indifference of his profession and wrote open and angry letters to prominent European obstetricians, at times calling them irresponsible murderers. His contemporaries decided he was losing his mind and committed him to a mental asylum. He died there 14 days later in 1865 at the age of 47.
Semmelweis’s practice only earned widespread acceptance years after his death, when Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease which offered a theoretical explanation for Semmelweis’s findings. Semmelweis is considered a pioneer of antiseptic procedures - simple cleanliness.