One hundred and fifty five years ago this month, James Braid died at his home in Chorlton on Medlock.

You may not not the name but the Scottish born doctor who plied his trade in Manchester in the middle of the nineteenth century, is often regarded as the father of hypnosis, a phrase that he accidentally coined.

Braid was born in 1796 in Kinross, Scotland, and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, but it was in Manchester in 1841 when the Swiss magnetiser, Charles Lafontaine, performed his abilities that would change his views on medicine.

Hypnosis had come to the fore in pre revolutionary France, it’s exponent the German born Franz Anton Mesmer believing that an invisible fluid running through the body and controlled by the planets could be distorted and controlled by magnetism. Eventually he would use his own , what he termed, ‘animal magnetism’ in a series of  public exhibitions, would demonstrate how people could be ……

Unfortunately a public enquiry by Louise XVI concluded that the practice had not basis in scientific fact and Mesmer would retire into obscurity.

Braid was not convinced by Lafontaine’s experiments in magnetism, but he began his own experiments in an attempt to find a scientific reason for the trance. 

He believed that the sleep that Lafontaine had demonstrated, resulted from fatigue of the eyes, and began to experiment with his wife, and a servant, who were instructed to gaze steadily at an object. He discovered that by doing this, he too could produce a trance-like state. 

Soon he found that he could produce the effect by suggestion alone and in 1842 he published “Neurypnology or The Rationale of Nervous Sleep Considered In Relation With Animal Magnetism.” which concluded that the phenomena he had discovered was a form of sleep.

He named the phenomena after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep and master of dreams, 

But by 1847 he discovered that all the major phenomena of hypnotism such as catalepsy, anaesthesia and amnesia, could be induced without sleep. Realising his choice of the term hypnosis had been a mistake; he tried to rename it to monoideism. It was too late.

Braid Went on to use his new phenonoma to successfully treat a wide variety of conditions. A forty five year old who had suffered four years of limited mobility in his upper body following a spinal injury was given hypnosis to alleviate pain in the spinal cord and arms, and after two months of daily treatment, the man was able to return to work. 

Braid also worked with stroke victims, cases of paralysis and chronic rheumatoid conditions, as well as headaches, skin complaints and sensory impairment.

He also identified many key features of the trance state itself, such as the greater sensory awareness that subjects display.

He estimated that hearing in the trance state is about twelve times more acute than in everyday consciousness, since the ticking of a watch that could not be heard more than three feet away was audible from thirty-five feet when the subject was in trance.

 This became an important finding for it distinguished hypnotic trance from ordinary sleep. He also observed that autonomic bodily processes, such as heart rate and blood circulation, can be controlled to a remarkable degree whilst in trance.

His ideas on the “nervous sleep”, as he termed the state of hypnosis, were developed in a series of pamphlets and articles most of them published in Manchester

He died at 212 Oxford Street, Chorlton upon Medlock on 25 March 1860, and was buried at Neston, Cheshire. 


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