Il magnetismo animale in Italia al cambio di secolo. Tracce della trasformazione di una disciplina.

In 1784, the Marquis de Puységur (1751-1825) secretly published his first Mémoires illumi- nating about the discovery of magnetic somnambulism and leading the discipline to a new clinical horizon. The therapy introduced by Puységur, in contrast with his master Franz An- ton Mesmer (1734-1815), was characterised by the dialogue between magnetiser and patient through magnetic somnambulism. The strong crises that punctuated the course in the Mes- meric cure were replaced by sleep and dialogue, the centrality of body was replaced by speech. This method of therapy became conventional within a few decades, and already in 1815, the year of what has been called the rebirth of animal magnetism, magnetizers were tenaciously pursuing somnambulism in their patients. However, the path that led to the establishment of somnambulism was shaped by the coexistence of different techniques and influences, al- though historiography has often reduced this narration to an evolutionary transition between Mesmer and Puységur. Through the study of the Italian works on animal magnetism between the late 18th and early 19th century, it is possible to reconstruct this evolution, on which in recent decades more and more authors have dwelt, driven by the need to investigate a path of- ten reduced to the linear succession between first mesmerism and somnambulism. Thanks to the digitization of sources, one has access to several articles and books that were forgotten until recently. These manuscripts have made it possible to retrace a history of the dissemination of animal magnetism in Italy between 1784 and 1815 and to discover some of the dynamics of the circulation of the discipline hitherto unknown. The Italian case provides a better insight into the patterns of the discipline’s development at the turn of the century.