Readings:

Darnton, Robert, Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA, 1968), chapter 2: The Mesmerist Movement, pp. 47-81

Riskin, Jessica, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, Introduction and chapter 6: Mesmerism Investigation and the Crisis of Sensibilist Science

Vila, Anne C., Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (1998), part 1: The making of the Sensible Body, chapter 1: Constructing a Vital Property

Further Readings(see also literature under Science and Spectacle):

Baasner, Frank, ‘The Changing Meaning of Sensibilité’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 15 (1986): 77-96

Barker-Benfield, G. F, The Cultures of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992)

Figlio, Karl, ‘Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the Late Eighteenth Century’ History of Science 13 (1975): 177-212

Gillispie, Charles, Science and Polity at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980)

Haigh, Elizabeth L., ‘Vitalism, the Soul, and Sensibility: The Physiology of Théophile de Bordeu’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 31 (1976): 30-41

Midelfort, Eric, Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany (New Haven, 2005)

Mullan, John Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988)

Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London, 1986)

Rousseau, G.S., ‘Discourses on the Nerves’, in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression,ed. by Frederick Amrine (Dordrecht, 1989), pp. 29-60

Ibid., ‘Nerves, Spirtis, and Fibres :Towards Defining the Origin of Sensibility’ Studies in the Eighteenth Century III: Papers Presented at the Third David Nichols Smith Seminar Toronto, 1976)

Ibid., (ed.), The Language of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkely, 1990)

Ibid., ‘Sensibility Reconsidered’, Medical History 39 (1995): 375-77

Sutton, Geoffrey, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, 1995)