On a November evening in 1841, a Scottish surgeon took his seat in a Manchester hall to watch a travelling mesmerist. He expected to see a fraud and intended to say so. Within a few weeks he had worked out what was really going on, and within two years he had given it the name we still use.
The surgeon
James Braid was born in Fife in 1795 and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. After practising in Scotland he moved to Manchester, where he spent the rest of his life as a respected surgeon with a particular interest in eye conditions and in correcting deformities such as club foot.
He was practical, curious and not easily impressed.
The demonstration
On 13 November 1841, Braid attended a public demonstration by Charles Lafontaine, a Swiss mesmerist touring Britain. Mesmerism held that an invisible “magnetic” force passed from operator to subject.
Braid went as a sceptic and at first dismissed Lafontaine as a charlatan. But he went back, and on a later visit he noticed something that did not look like trickery: a subject who was unable to open his eyes. That struck him as a real physical effect, and he set out to find its cause.
The experiment
Braid’s surgical interest in eyes gave him an idea. Perhaps the state came from fatigue caused by prolonged staring.
He tested it at home. He asked a friend to gaze steadily at the neck of a wine bottle held slightly above eye level. Within minutes the man’s eyes closed and he passed into a trance-like state. Braid repeated it with his wife and a servant, with the same result.
No magnets, no passes, no mysterious force. Just fixed attention on a single point.
This is the origin of the eye-fixation induction, still taught today, and of the cartoon image of the swinging watch.
A new name
In 1843 Braid published Neurypnology; or, the Rationale of Nervous Sleep. In it he rejected the magnetic theory entirely and introduced a new vocabulary. He first called the state “neuro-hypnotism,” from the Greek for nervous sleep, and shortened it to hypnotism. The words “hypnotize” and “hypnotist” come from the same book.
His method, relaxation with fixed gaze, was sometimes called “Braidism.”
A change of mind
Braid kept investigating, and his thinking moved on.
He came to see that the state was not really sleep. Subjects were not unconscious; their attention was narrowed onto a single idea. He proposed a better term, monoideism: the mind held by one dominant idea. He recognised the role of suggestion, expectation and imagination.
By then, however, “hypnotism” had stuck, and the misleading link with sleep has confused people ever since.
Why Braid mattered
- He removed the supernatural. No fluid, no force. A psychological and physiological process.
- He located the cause in the subject, not in any power of the operator. This is the modern view.
- He identified attention as the key.
- He experimented and revised his views in the light of evidence.
- He made it respectable for doctors to investigate, a few years after John Elliotson had been ruined for promoting mesmerism in London.
He was attacked from both sides: by mesmerists, whose theory he had demolished, and by conservative doctors, who saw no difference. A local clergyman denounced him from the pulpit, and Braid published a vigorous reply.
What he used it for
Braid used hypnotism in his practice for pain, headaches, rheumatism, paralysis and other complaints, and reported surgical procedures carried out with it. He was cautious, by the standards of the day, about what it could do, and warned that it was not a universal remedy.
His legacy
Braid died in Manchester on 25 March 1860. His ideas were taken up more readily in France than at home. They influenced the physicians of the Nancy school, who established that hypnosis was a normal product of suggestion, and through them the whole later history of the subject.
His concept of monoideism also anticipates the way hypnosis is defined today: as focused attention with reduced awareness of everything else.
What he got wrong
Braid was a man of his time. For a period he combined hypnotism with phrenology, the belief that character could be read from the shape of the skull, before growing more cautious about it. And some of his physiological explanations have not survived.
Try Braid’s method
- Hold a small object slightly above eye level, about a foot from your face, so that looking at it strains your eyes a little.
- Fix your gaze on it and keep your attention there.
- Notice your eyelids growing heavy and your eyes wanting to close.
- Let them close, and let your attention rest on your breathing.
It is the simplest induction there is, and it is more than 180 years old.
The bottom line
Braid went to expose a fraud and instead found something real, explained it without magic, and named it. He would have preferred a different name. But the central insight was right: hypnosis is what happens when attention is held on a single idea.
Next in the series: Hypnosis and the Brain: What the Scans Show
This article is for general information and is not medical advice.