the.com/mesmerism

means The practice of putting someone into a trance-like, suggestible state, originally believed to work through an invisible magnetic force flowing between bodies.

from Named after Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century German physician who claimed to heal patients by channeling 'animal magnetism' — an invisible fluid he believed filled the universe and could be directed through gestures, gazes, and magnetized objects to cure illness. His Paris clinics were theatrical, full of swooning patients and dim rooms, and though a royal commission (featuring Benjamin Franklin) debunked the magnetic fluid itself, the trance states Mesmer induced were real enough to seed what later became hypnotism — the word outliving the theory that spawned it.