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The doctor and poet Justinus Kerner (1786-1862) was a prominent advocate of “mystical magnetism” (incidentally, as a child of 12 years he was cured of a nervous disorder by the magnetist Gmelin). Before Kerner’s time, the patients of Boeckmann and Wienholt succeeded in personally determining their own treatment and the moment of their recovery. But it was Kerner’s mystical magnetism that shifted interest from the medical achievements of Mesmerism to the spectacular reports of patients who had contacted dead people or spiritual beings, had reported travels to heaven, or had predicted future events, or even described letters they had not seen. Kerner was a doctor from Weinsberg (Württemberg) who certainly tended towards highly rational and scientific thought (he discovered botulism during an experimental investigation of food poisoning in animals). Nevertheless he was better known for his spectacular treatment of a patient named Friederike Hauffe, better known as “the Seeress from Prevost” 1).
Friederike Hauffe, the “Seeress from Prevost”
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Justinus Kerner (1786-1862
“Friederike Hauffe, the daughter of a game warden, was brought into the world in Prevost, Württemberg. She was an uneducated woman, who had read only the Bible and one songbook. Already as a child she experienced visions and presentiments. When she was 19, she was engaged by her parents to a man she didn’t love. On the same day, a preacher who she had greatly admired was buried. During the burial service, “she died before the tangible world” and her “inner life” began. Shortly after her wedding, she became ill; she imagined that she lay in bed with the corpse of the preacher. She became involved with a succession of different “magnetism circles”, during which time her physical illness became worse and worse. She suffered from spasms, catalepsy, bleeding, and fever, for which neither doctors nor alternative healers could find a cure. Eventually she was brought to Kerner, emaciated, deathly pale, with glazed eyes, her head wrapped in white cloth like a nun. Kerner tried at first to treat her with conventional medical methods, but noticed that each medicament, in the weakest possible dose, produced exactly the opposite of the intended effect. He next resorted to his “magnetic refuge”, and the condition of the patient improved remarkably” (Ellenberger, 1973, p.128f) 2).
Friedericke Hauffe impressed the local world with her various abilities. She received messages from ghosts, saw into the future, could move objects without contacting them, could speak strange languages fluently, etc. The publication of her case study by Kerner provoked an exceptionally strong interest in Germany. Many people visited Weinsberg, among them such prominent philosophers as Görres, Schelling, and Eschenmayer, and were deeply impressed by the patient.
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