"Mesmerizing"

       Just ran across the word again and realize how nice it is, I guess, to have a word coined out of your name.  Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th century medical doctor, was a visionary and began believing magnets could cure or help patients in some way.

       Then he thought he had some of those powers himself, and got people to do things through what he hardly recognized as hypnotism; hence mesmerism is broadly understood as the equivalent of hypnotism.  American Heritage Dictionary's Word History continues:


One of [Mesmer's] pupils, named Puyse´gur, then used the term mesmerism (first recorded in English in 1802) for Mesmer's practices.  The related word mesmerize (first recorded in English in 1829), having shed its reference to the hypnotic doctor, lives on in the sense "to enthrall."