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With Sinead McDonald, Mark Pilkington and Nick Davies.

Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer who developed the “Universal Fluid” idea in the 18th Century. He was famous for using steel rods to cure patients, coining the term “Animal Magnetism”. A 1784 debunking panel said the cures were due to the imagination not to magnetism, but as Charles d’Eslon, a pupil of Mesmer said: “If the medicine of imagination is best, why should we not practice the medicine of imagination”.

Multimedia artist Sinead McDonald, hypnotherapist Nick Davies and editor/author Mark Pilkington come together for this vibrant evening of combined talks, performances and workshops. This event will be an interactive exploration of the potential of the unconscious mind, and we will look to the past to see how popular science has always gone hand-in-hand with belief. Does hypnosis work? How much have we really moved on from the historic ‘medicines of the imagination’?

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