Drawing room scene with many people sitting and standing around a large table; a man on a crutch has an iron band wrapped around his ankle; others in the group are holding bands similarly; to the left, a man has hypnotized a woman. By 1780 Mesmer had more patients than he could treat individually and he established a collective treatment known as the "baquet". Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer (May 23, 1734 - March 5, 1815) was a German physician with an interest in astronomy, who theorized that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects that he called animal magnetism, sometimes later referred to as mesmerism. There were those who thought he was a charlatan and those who believed he had made a great discovery. In 1779, he wrote an 88-page book entitled: M矇moire sur la d矇couverte du magn矇tisme animal, to which he appended his famous 27 Propositions that outlined his theory. In 1784 King Louis XVI appointed commissioners to investigate animal magnetism. They concluded that there was no evidence for such a fluid. Whatever benefit the treatment produced was attributed to "imagination". Mesmer lived to be 80 years.