Johann Joseph Gassner

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Born in Austria, Gassner (1727-79) had a Jesuit education and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. He was the victim of illnesses such as headaches, gastric complaints and chest pains, illnesses that he would feel intensify as he gave Mass. He concluded that this was indeed none other than the devil trying to take possession of him.

His answer to this was to style a form of self-exorcism by which he found he could successfully alleviate these aches and pains. From the success of his self-diagnosis and treatment he began to shape the idea that a large proportion of human illness-with some exceptions-was due to diabolic influence.

When Gassner was nearing fifty he started to experiment, using his techniques on others who were suffering mental disturbance. This was so successful that as many as two thousand people a month were administered to at one of Gassner's mass healing ceremonies.

Gassner employed a truncated form of exorcism, which departed from the standard ritual of bell, book and candle, a methodology that was to scandalize the church of the day. He had a powerful patron in the Bishop of Regensburg, yet this did not prevent the church's usual perfunctory dismissal of the Austrian healer. With Gassner's growing success, the demand for a convincing rebuttal of his practices from the established church became great.

The church was also disgruntled by his eclectic approach to the healing ceremony. At one mass meeting at Ellwangen, Gassner amalgamated Roman Catholic ritual with evangelical showmanship and a personal idiosyncratic lingo of possession. It was witnessed that he would give a command in Latin to a patient to fall to the ground, and this would be followed, even though the patient knew no Latin. His patients would be seen to weep, become belligerent, and fall into trances.

Although his ability to achieve a form of mass hysteria is well documented, his ability to cure permanently was not so solid. The only certain cures he could convincingly claim were cures of rheumatic complaints. Eventually the end of Gassner's ministry came when the church forbade him to practise.

Maximillian Hehl was professor of astronomy at Vienna University and assigned himself the task of attempting to explain the cures and hysteria that Gassner had brought about. In doing so he came into contact and influenced the next key figure in healing-Friedrich Anton Mesmer.