As reported by René Fϋlöp-Miller in his book – Triumph Over Pain, 1938

Submitted by Ron Eslinger, CRNA, BCH, CMI

This transformation of mesmerism into a science was effected by James Braid (1795-1860), an able Scottish physician who practiced in Manchester.

In a Manchester lying-in hospital, Lafontaine was trying to allay the pangs of labor by the use of “animal magnetism” in accordance with the recipes of Mesmer, the eighteenth-century wonder-worker.  James Braid was one of those doctors who regard the fight against pain as their chief mission.  Everything which might contribute to this task seemed to him worthy of attention.  Though a convinced rationalist, he did not despise mesmerism, being sure that unprejudiced observation was the first duty of the enlightened man of science.  Why should he not watch Lafontaine trying this mesmeric hocus-pocus?  There might be something in it which would be of use to scientific medicine.  For many weeks he studied Lafontaine at work on the attempt to make delivery painless by means of “animal magnetism.”  The rationalist could not be easy until he had discovered the nature of the physiological processes which led to insensibility under the influence of “mesmeric passes.”  He perceived that Lafontaine’s patients had a spasm of the eyelids which made it impossible for them to open their eyes.

Thus there occurred what so often happens as a prelude to an important discovery.  Braid noticed a phenomenon of frequent occurrence which had previously been ignored.  He drew inferences from it, tested these inferences by renewed experiments, found them confirmed—and thus made his discovery.

James Braid, the physician, inferred from his observation of the spasmodically closed eyes that the mesmeric sleep must be due to an act of concentration, the outcome of a restriction of consciousness involving the entire nervous system and the optic nerve.  Then, following the enigmatic laws of a discoverer’s brain, Braid came to the conclusion that this restriction of consciousness could be induced by a concentration of vision.  But, if that were so, the concentration could be brought about at will, sensations, feelings and thoughts being deliberately extruded from the narrowed consciousness.  Thus Braid became enabled, by ordering the patient to concentrate, to induce a condition which he called neurohypnotism (the term being subsequently shortened to hypnotism), in which pain could be annulled voluntarily.

Braid’s first experiments were performed upon his own wife.  He took a shining tin box, held it before her eyes and told her to fix her gaze on it.  She looked firmly at the object, and suddenly went to sleep.  Then Braid ordered her to do this, that and the other—many of them the most unreasonable things.   She obeyed every command without protest, as if under stress of an irresistible inner impulse.  Picking her arm with a pin, he said commandingly: “You feel no pain”—“I feel no pain,” answered his wife from the depths of her trance.  In her narrowed consciousness, every word uttered to her became a reality.

“Now you are awake once more,” he said, to conclude; and promptly his wife awoke.

That evening a friend called on Braid.  The doctor told him to be seated and said authoritatively: “Look firmly at my eyes.”  His friend obeyed and, after looking for a second or two, was unable to turn away his eyes.  Then he fell asleep and, at the word of command, did whatever Braid told him, until awakened—once more by order.

The experiment made upon his wife and upon his friend were repeated by Braid on numerous patients.  Hypnotism had been discovered.  A year later, in 1843, Braid published his book Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep.  In this work he freed the phenomena of mesmeric sleep from their mystery, disclosing the physiological substratum and giving a precise account of the technique of hypnotism.  He said that the hypnotist used no transcendental or supernatural powers, and that the method was applicable by every intelligent practitioner.

This discovery of the hypnotic method of allaying or preventing pain was made in that wonderful fifth decade of the nineteenth century when all the fundamental methods of modern anesthesia were reveled.  James Braid discovered hypnotism in 1842, the very year in which Long, at Athens, Georgia, performed a painless operation on Venable who had been put to sleep by the inhalation of ether.

But James Braid was less fortunate with his mental or spiritual anesthesia than were the discoverers of chemical anesthesia.  His neurohypnotism was not taken seriously by his professional colleagues, the medical faculty being outraged that a qualified physician should fool about with what they stigmatized as “quackery.”  Moreover, the pious of England, who insisted that nothing must be done to free woman from the “primal curse,” frowned upon the idea of spiritual anesthesia even as, a few years later, the Scotch frowned upon the “chloroform doctor” in Edinburgh.

It was outrageous, they declared, both for the operator and for the patient, that anyone should, for a time, surrender his will to another and allow the other to order him about.  It was greatly to be deplored that any such thing should occur in a Christian land.  God’s displeasure would undoubtedly be visited on the offenders.  The law and the Church should promptly take order about the matter.

At length Braid, though himself a religious man, was believed to be in a league with the Devil, and it was really all the better for him that ere long hypnotism and its discoverer were forgotten, for thus only did this notable pioneer escape contumely.  It was not until about forty years later that the method was rescued from oblivion by a French doctor, A. A. Liébeault of Nancy.