As a scholar, I work to improve our world through the creation of knowledge. The historical knowledge that I pursue is useful for a range of reasons: it promotes understanding of the many ways our shared past illumines the present and it reveals the origins of our current beliefs and values. It also helps us come to know who our forebears were, what activated their lives, and what we should avoid doing again.
To date, much of my research involves investigating how ideas about the human person changed during a period of intense modernization from the late 18th to the late 19th century. That brought me to the study of mesmerism and the array of psychological, medical, religious, and scientific ideas that coursed through the practice.
-David Schmit
Research Highlights:
- The Emancipation of Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America
- Re-visioning Antebellum American Psychology: The Dissemination of Mesmerism, 1836-1854
- The Mesmerists Inquire About Oriental Mind Powers; West Meets East in the Search for the Universal Trance
- Warren Felt Evans; Nineteenth-Century Mystic, Wounded Healer and Seminal Theorist-Practitioner of Mind Cure