I've been reading about animal magnetism as one of the pseudo-medicine replacements for phrenology. It sounds as lot like hypnosis? But it also doesn't. Wikipedia mentions that it is now "entirely forgotten" and suggests that it held sway only up until the late 1800s. If so, then it surely is different from hypnosis (which continues to do this day).
What exactly was animal magnetism?
And more specifically, since I cannot find anything describing it online, what was a typical "procedure"?
Mesmer practiced magnetic healing. His technique involved getting people into a relaxed state and causing an emotional release (catharsis). It involved a laying on of hands, as Mesmer convinced people he could pass his animal magnetism into them. Abbe Faria refined these techniques after Mesmer was discredited (done by a commission that included Benjamin Franklin, and led to the understanding of what we now call placebo effects and the power of suggestion) which came to be similar to what we call hypnosis. Later chiropracty was invented by a magnetic healer by laying on of hands technique. Charcot also developed the trance techniques, studying hypnosis and its relation to hysteria. Freud was one of his students and learned hypnosis under him, later using it (and even later abandoning it) as a tool to probe the unconscious mind. Modern hypnosis and chiropracty are the remnants of these placebo-based “therapies”.
You might want to take a look at Hughes's book, which talks about "magnetism"/hypnotism from a cultural perspective, specifically in Victorian Britain, with some consideration of British India.
The idea was something like this: just as magnetism and gravity are unseen forces that allow physical objects to affect each other, there is also "animal magnetism," an unseen force connecting human beings. (Some people spoke of "animal gravity," but the phrase didn't catch on.) Perceptionactionprof has already described how this evolved in therapeutic practice.
In Hughes's book, practitioners generally "magnetize" their subjects by using "passes" -- that is, hand motions that may or may not involved actual contact with the subject. In some cases they magnetized objects (water, pieces of metal) that then touched the subjects; there's also mention of having subjects concentrate their gaze on a fixed point, which we'll recognize from stereotypes of hypnotism ("Concentrate on my watch....you are getting sleepy, very sleepy....").
SOURCE: Hughes, William. That Devil's Trick: Hynotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination. Manchester Univ. Press, 2015.
You’re idea of animal magnetism isn’t totally correct. Animal magnetism was the idea that certain people possessed characteristics that drew other humans to then. What we would call today charisma. People of that era took that era and ran with it, giving it more metaphysical characteristics than a modern day person does when they say someone is “charismatic.”