James Braid, Surgeon and Father of Hypnotism

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hellol, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm tracy Ne Wilson. Listen. I'm in a
phase where I just want to follow various threads and
paths down where they take me on different episode researches,

(00:25):
and then I find something else in there and it
kind of relates to it, and I want to come
back to it, and often I try to space those out,
but not right now I'm doing it. Also, this is
another instance where we're talking about a person who is
interesting and important in the development of a thing, and
not a jerk, which I just need right now. Apparently
this is sort of a prequel to our recent episode

(00:48):
on Emil Kua and Kuaism, because we are going to
talk about hypnosis and how that actually became a thing
separate from Mesmeri's. In eighteen ninety nine, one of James
Braid's most significant texts was reprinted. That's fifty six years

(01:10):
after its original publication, and it includes a somewhat depending
on your point of view, insulting note in the introduction,
which is written by Arthur Edward Waite. It reads quote,
the materials for the biography of James Braid are so
meager that a paragraph of modest dimensions will be found
to exhaust them. Nor is the reason far to seek.

(01:33):
His life would seem to have been of an uncheckered
and even character. It was free from early struggles, for
it was entered under favorable circumstances, and it was moderately
successful throughout, but with no approach to brilliance, being lifted
out of the groove of the ordinary competent practitioner in
the north of England by a single great event. By

(01:54):
this event, also it was ruled, and all details of
a domestic and private kind disappear beneath the shadow cast
by the discovery of hypnotism. Listen, James Braid did study
and advance hypnotism, and we're going to talk about that today.
But he was also a surgeon with a reputation for

(02:14):
pioneering new treatments, some of which helped a lot of
people before he became fascinated with the scientific aspects that
he felt underpinned mesmerism. And his life certainly merits more
than one paragraph. And in fact, the author of that quote,
Arthur Edward, Waite, who edited the new edition of his book,
wrote a whole lot more pages on Braid. It wasn't

(02:37):
just a paragraph, so he kind of proved himself wrong
in that opener anyway. But we're going to talk about
James Braid today. So James Braid was born on June nineteenth,
seventeen ninety five at his family's home that was rylaw
House in the parish of Portmouk in the County of Kinross, Scotland.

(02:59):
You may all see his place of birth listed as
County Fife, and that is because the county lines have
shifted over the years. His parents were James and Anne
Suttie Braid, and there's really not a lot of information
about his childhood other than that he worked on the
family farm. His story really picks up with his higher
education in eighteen twelve, when he enrolled at Edinburgh University.

(03:24):
On November seventeenth, eighteen thirteen, James married a woman named
Margaret Mason. He and his wife would go on to
have two children, a son named James and a daughter
named Anne. They had two other children as well, who
unfortunately died as infants. During the early years of their marriage,
James was in a surgeon's apprenticeship at a practice in

(03:46):
Leith owned by a father and son surgeon team, both
of whom were named Charles Anderson. I will say I
did find a contrary account that gave one of their
names as Thomas, but the ones I deemed more credible
said they were both named Charles. Historian Lindsay Bertram Yates,
who has written a whole lot about James Braid, noted

(04:06):
in his doctoral thesis about Braid that it was unclear
if James and Margaret lived with the Andersons during this
time or not. Although it would have been customary for
an apprentice to do so, the marriage part is usually
not in the equation for an apprentice. Though. During the
time that Braid was apprenticed with the Andersons, he was
also attending school from eighteen fourteen to eighteen fifteen that

(04:30):
included lectures at the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. In November of
eighteen fifteen he also became a member of the Edinburgh
Royal College of Surgeons. Then he moved to Lead Hills, Scotland,
where he served as a surgeon to a community that
was made up largely of mine workers. He was an
employee of the Scotch Mining Company, which ran the lead

(04:51):
and silver mines in the area. During his time that
he was there, he treated all kinds of ailments, from
severed fingers to suffocate in the minds. His write ups
about some of these cases were published. From his early
years in medicine and surgery, Braid often treated impoverished patients
at no charge, and that was something that continued through

(05:14):
his career. After working in led Hills for about eight years,
he moved on to practice in Dumfries, where he took
over a practice that had been established by another surgeon.
He made this move in eighteen twenty five, and after
he moved there, he met another surgeon named William Maxwell,
and these two men became close colleagues. And while this

(05:35):
is sometimes described as a partnership, it does not appear
to have been any sort of formal business arrangement. They
weren't actual business partners so much as the two men
kind of sharing expertise and consulting on one another's cases. Maxwell,
who was older than Braid, was also something of a mentor,
and he significantly expanded the younger surgeon's knowledge in the field.

(06:00):
One note on the status of surgeons, which has come
up on the show before is. At this point in
the UK, surgeons were not on the same level as physicians.
Being a surgeon didn't require a Doctor of Medicine or
an MD degree, although surgeons did often have a university
education in surgery, as Braid did. A surgeon could also

(06:22):
practice if they had learned through an apprenticeship, as Braid
had also done, and their focus was really not on
internal medicine and diagnosis. A lot of surgeons were doing
things more like setting fractures and performing amputations. Braid was
practicing as a surgeon at a time when this was shifting.
The Royal College of Surgeons in London was founded in

(06:45):
eighteen hundred and a lot of surgeons like Braid could
become members of the Royal College of Surgeons, as he
had done in Edinburgh, but they could not become fellows,
so he and Maxwell were not addressed as doctor. They
would have instead been called mister. Somewhat confusing situation, especially

(07:05):
if you don't live in the UK where it is
still This way has continued into modern medicine. There's an
article from the year two thousand that was published in
the British Medical Journal which said quote medical qualifications in
the United Kingdom have been in an unholy muddle ever
since the Medical Act of eighteen fifty eight, when no
less than eighteen independent medical institutions offered a range of bachelorships, licenses, diplomas, memberships,

(07:33):
fellowships and doctorates, all officially recognized by the General Medical Council.
This cannot be altered. So basically today set in Stone, yeah,
and so still today the surgeons are are our mister
and mss and missus and miss and not doctor. Yeah,

(07:55):
which some would argue now that is more of an
honorific because of the associated skill you need with it.
I will say I did find a lovely h I
didn't include it in the notes here, but I found
a lovely obituary of James Braid that kind of said, like,
we know he's a mister, but we call him doctor
in the community because he takes care of everybody, which

(08:17):
was very sweet. There was another meeting in Dumfries that
would also influence Braid's life, and that is with a patient.
He treated a man named Alexander Petty who had hurt
his ankle in a stagecoach accident while he was visiting
Scotland on business. Petty was from Manchester, England, and during
the time he was under Braid's care while his ankle healed,

(08:39):
which took some time, he and Braid became pretty good friends,
and in eighteen twenty eight Braid moved to Manchester and
opened a practice there. That decision is usually attributed to
his friendship with Petty, although there were also likely some
other factors involved, including a lot of economic struggle that
was going on in Ski Outland at the time. While

(09:02):
in Manchester, Braid established himself as a reliable and knowledgeable surgeon.
He kept learning from and sharing knowledge with his colleagues.
He also trained several young surgeons through apprenticeships with him.
He served the Manchester community with a strong sense of duty,
advocating for things like improved city sanitation after helping to

(09:23):
usher the city through a cholera epidemic in eighteen thirty two.
He also took up causes that he believed would improve
people's overall well being, including concepts we are still working
on today, like better work life balance through reduction and
expected working hours. Yeah. He specifically thought like young people

(09:45):
that were working in jobs should not be working long
hours because they in some cases. Remember, child labor not uncommon.
They were still growing and he was like, they need
rest and nutrition. They don't need to be working all
the time. One of the most significant ways that Braid
distinguished himself as a surgeon was through his study and
work focusing on the condition known as Talipe's equinavius, or

(10:09):
more commonly clubfoot. So just in case you don't know,
clubfoot is a condition where the foot is turned inward
to a sharp degree, often with the bottom of the
foot facing sideways or in extreme cases, the bottom of
the foot can even be turned to be facing up.
It often appears in infancy, that's normally when you would

(10:29):
see it, and for years, clubfoot was believed to be
a skeletal deformity, but during Braid's time, the medical establishment
was starting to understand that it is actually a tendon
issue and more a matter of the connective tissues from
muscle to bone. At a time when the only surgery
most practitioners were doing on clubfoot was amputation, Braid, who

(10:52):
kept up with the latest literature, was an early adopter
of instead operating on that connective tissue instead with the
intent to save the leg, and he developed his own
technique to do so that was less invasive and more
nuanced in terms of how it handled the tendons involved,
even more so than other surgeons that were considered to

(11:13):
be like on the cutting edge of this technique. He
stated in his writing that he was performing this surgery
almost daily in that he was able to reverse a
state of paralysis in his patients. His nuanced approach to
tendon surgery was one that he did not only confine
to clubfoot, but also started using when people had issues
with other parts of their bodies, kind of applying the

(11:35):
same concepts and understandings of this connective tissue. He was
widely recognized for his skill in this area, and it
became common for both patients and medical professionals to travel
long distances to seek his care or get his opinion
on the matter. Braid became an expert on connective tissues

(11:56):
and was always intent on streamlining his surgical process as
much as possible for the benefit of the patient. This
is like before the development of modern anesthesia and antibiotics,
so there are many reasons to want to do that.
This was incredibly beneficial when he turned his scalpel to
a very different type of surgery, and that was dealing

(12:18):
with the eyes. This started with patients who had an
issue of chronic squinting, where the connective tissue around their
eyes made them unable to relax the muscles in that area.
It led him to eventually correcting issues with eye alignment.
He was not the first surgeon to note the similarities
of the way the tendons affected the limbs and the

(12:41):
way connective tissues could cause problems like crossed eyes or wallleyes.
Building on the work of other professionals in his field,
he started applying his knowledge to corrective eye surgeries and
he had a lot of success, and his speed with
this was almost terrifying. He was said to have conducted
six such surgeries in rapid succession, taking less than fourteen

(13:03):
minutes for all six of them. But this was in
part because he believed that once the problem was identified,
getting in and out very quickly was the best thing
for the patient. Noting that the actual work on the
tendon took him less than thirty seconds. He believed that
his consistently good recovery outcomes were in part due to
the patient not having to endure a really long procedure.

(13:28):
Brad had similar success applying his understanding of connective tissue
and body mechanics to scoliosis, and wrote about several patients
with lateral curvatures of the spine whose conditions were much
improved by surgical intervention. A lot of these things are
treated non surgically today, or if they're surgical, surgery is
not the first line. But he was so innovative with this. Yeah,

(13:51):
it's also important to remember this may squink people out.
I know it does me. It's one of the few
areas that I get a little like about. When he
was operating on people's eyes, they were awake, so he
really wanted to minimize their discomfort in every way he could,
and also minimize the chance that they would move or
twitch and potentially cause greater damage during the surgery. But

(14:16):
Braid also waded into some pretty controversial waters when he
used his connective tissue knowledge to operate on patients who
came to him for help with of all things, stammering.
He was not the only surgeon to do this during
the eighteen forties. You want to be clear. He wasn't
just like, yeah, sure, i'll cut this open. And he

(14:38):
only did this after he examined the patient and determined
that they actually had a physical problem that was causing
tongue paralysis. But there were a lot of doctors and
surgeons who protested these surgeries, not just his, but by
the medical establishment as bypassing other non invasive therapies, and
Braid did stop doing these after just a couple of years.

(15:01):
The pivotal moment in Braid's life as it relates to
hypnotism happened on November thirteenth, eighteen forty one, at the
Manchester Athenaeum. That evening he attended a demonstration given by
a traveling mesmerist named Charles la Fontaine. We will talk
about that after we pause for a sponsor break. There

(15:31):
are many descriptions of people being in states that could
be described as hypnotic going back thousands of years, and
some of those are certainly a matter of interpretation. There
are spiritual practices from places like Egypt and India going
back thousands of years, and Braid actually invoked Indian yogic

(15:51):
traditions as a historical example when he wrote about hypnotism.
Leader in his life. Swiss physician Paracelsus, working in the
sixteenth six introduced a couple of ideas that it seems,
would later get sort of amalgamated into one in the
work of Franz Mesmer. One was the concept of mumia,
of which Paracelsus wrote, quote for the mumia is the

(16:12):
man himself. The mummia is the balsam which heals the wound.
And the other that Paracelsus kind of introduced was this
concept of magnetic fields having curative and healing properties. Franz
Anton Mesmer is of course well known for his development

(16:32):
of the concept of animal magnetism. This seems to have
combined the mumia and magnetic work of Paracelsus to the
idea that he could heal patience by controlling the flow
of an invisible fluid. That's what animal magnetism supposedly was.
Mesmer was discredited in his own lifetime. In seventeen eighty four,

(16:55):
King Louis the sixteenth sent a commission to investigate Mesmeri
as a and that was because it was being perceived
at the time as a threat. There was a blind
trial that led to the determination that Mesmer's cures were
largely a matter of patients believing that they had improved
rather than showing any kind of actual physical improvement. Yeah,

(17:18):
I didn't dig into it here. But Mesmerism was considered
a threat to the state because in a country where
religion is so important, and a national religion is so important,
for someone to be like no I control paranormal forces.
It made the crowd very nervous. Let's get it, but listen,

(17:39):
it didn't matter. People didn't trust Louis the Sixteenth Commission,
even though people like Antoine Lavoisier were on it. And
during Mesmer's life and after his death, his concepts were
picked up by a number of other people, including armand
Marie Jacques de Chastinet Marquis de pai Segeux. So Chastine
de Paicegeux had tried out the use of magnets on

(18:01):
a family employee after reading about Mesmer's work, and the
man appeared to go into a trance like state while
Chastined de Passegux did this whatever he was doing with
the magnets. Ruminating on this whole thing, Schastine de Passegueer
thought that a sleep state could be induced to more

(18:23):
fully affect Mesmer's magnetic healing, so he wasn't onto the
science of hypnotism, but he had kind of stumbled onto
the mechanism of it, and he was not the only
person who was fascinated by mesmerism and its potential uses.
Another example is the surgeon Juescoque, who claimed to use

(18:43):
mesmerism to sedate a patient who had breast cancer during
a surgical procedure to remove her tumor. Other medical professionals
used mesmerism in this same way, and there was even
a mesmeric hospital in Calcutta that was founded by doctor
James as Dale. Incidentally, though as Dale shifted entirely to

(19:04):
the use of ether once it was introduced as an
anesthetic and stopped trying to put his patients in a trance.
Charles Lafontaine studied the work of Poissiger. He also routinely
claimed that Louis the Sixteenth Commission had found the opposite
of their actual findings, saying that their review had validated mesmerism,

(19:26):
which it had not. Lafontaine was not, we should be clear,
a medical practitioner of any kind. He had a theatrical background.
He was more like a stage magician. Before becoming interested
in animal magnetism in eighteen forty one, Lafontaine decided to
go on a tour of Britain exhibiting his mesmerism technique.

(19:47):
This is pretty interesting because he spoke not one word
of English, so everything had to happen through interpreters. By
the time Lafontaine arrived in Manchester, Braid, like most medical practitioners,
had come to view mesmerism as completely fraudulent. Lafontaine had
appeared in London for a while before this, and there
was a lot of like huh, all right in the

(20:08):
reviews about it. Arthur and Edward Waite, writing about Braid's life,
noted quote the hostility was honest in its way, though
based on a priori considerations which are somewhat humiliating to recall,
as for example, that mesmerism had been practiced by impostors
and quacks, that most of its believers were ignorant or

(20:30):
mere smatterers, and that many of their stories were undeniably exaggerated,
if not actually invented. But a lot of people were
still interested in what Lafontaine builled as magnetism, So like
a lot of other people, Braid was very skeptical and
wrote later quote, I was led to discover the mode

(20:52):
I now adopt, with so much success, for inducing this
artificial condition of the nervous system by a course of
experiments instituted with the view to determine the cause of
mesmeric phenomena. From all I had read and heard of mesmerism,
such as the phenomena being capable of being excited in

(21:13):
so few and those few individuals in a state of disease,
or naturally of a delicate constitution or particularly susceptible temperament,
and from the phenomena when induced, being said to be
so exaggerated or of such an extraordinary nature, I was
fully inclined to join with those who considered the whole

(21:35):
to be a system of collusion or delusion, or of
excited imagination, sympathy, or imitation. A lot of people thought
Lafontaine was a fraud. Braid attended la Fontaine's third lecture
in Manchester on November thirteenth, eighteen forty one, and so

(21:56):
did a lot of other people, because write ups about
his earlier two lectures I'd really stoked public interests. So
even people who initially were like I don't care, were
suddenly like, I feel like I should check this out.
The Manchester Times described this scene on the third lecture, quote,
we should think there could not be less than six
or seven hundred persons present, among whom were many of

(22:16):
our leading medical and surgical practitioners and a few ladies.
La Fontaine's demonstration involved putting his assistant, who was a
young man named Eugen, into a so called mesmeric state,
and then letting people jab him with pins, under the
assurance that the young man could feel no pain in
this trance. This caused a mix of excited jabbing from

(22:42):
some volunteers who stepped forward to help, and horrified protests
from audience members who found the whole exercise cruel and
downright shameful. In addition to the pins, detonating caps were
discharged near this person's ears, Ammonia was held under his nose,
and a magnetic current was sent through wires that he held

(23:03):
in his hands, all to show that the subject was
cataleptic and quote insensible to all of these very cruel stimuli,
which were all still happening and involved injuring him in
some cases, which is wild to me. Simplified versions of

(23:24):
James Braid's story really make it sound like he went
to this lecture and demonstration, he saw Lafontaine, and he
just came away convinced that something worthwhile was going on
that did not actually happen, at least not initially. According
to Braid's account quote, the first exhibition of the kind
I ever had an opportunity of attending was one of

(23:47):
Monsieur la Fontaine's conversacione on the thirteenth November eighteen forty one.
That night, I saw nothing to diminish, rather than confirm
my previous prejudices. At the next conversacione six nights afterwards,
one fact, the inability of a patient who opened his
eyelids arrested my attention. I considered that to be a

(24:11):
real phenomenon, and was anxious to discover the physiological cause
of it. Next night, I watched this case when it
again operated on, with intense interest, and before the termination
of the experiment, felt assured I had discovered its cause,
but considered it prudent not to announce my opinion publicly

(24:31):
until I had an opportunity of testing its accuracy by
experiments and observation in private. So, as Braid mentioned in
that writing, he went to Lafontene's fourth Manchester appearance that
was on November nineteenth, and he was invited, along with
other medical professionals in attendance, to go on stage. Braid

(24:51):
really wanted someone who had never seen Lafontene's procedure before
to be the first person magnetized, to ensure that they
are imagination was not in play, that they weren't kind
of subconsciously buying into the idea. At one point, Braid
even offered to be magnetized himself, but Lafontaine said he
didn't think Braid was susceptible to it. There was apparently

(25:14):
so much arguing in the lecture hall over all of
this that the paper printed a scolding of all the attendees,
noting that they were treating a guest in their country
very rudely, which should not happen even if someone was
a charlatan. When Lafontaine had a fifth appearance on November twentieth,

(25:34):
Braid was there again. This time, he stood up and
he read a letter that he had sent to Lafontaine
in the morning, but he hadn't gotten a response to
that letter. The letter indicated that he still thought that
a sympathetic mind on the part of the subject was
creating their seemingly altered consciousness. He asked once again that

(25:55):
someone unfamiliar with this process be the subject and see
if Lafontaine's magnetism worked. This was actually met with some
resistance from some of the attendees, who thought that Braid
was basically interfering with a public lecturer by dictating how
that lecturer should give his presentation. But though his request

(26:15):
was not honored and a subject that had previously been
put into a trance was used once again, once Braid
was able to examine that person, he was convinced that
they were somehow in an altered state, although he did
not buy into la Fontaine's animal magnetism explanation, and he
wanted to figure out what was really happening. So we

(26:39):
will talk about how Braid conducted his own experiments to
test his idea. After we hear from the sponsors that
keep stuff you missed in history class going, Braid started
working on his ideas about the science behind la Fontaine's

(27:02):
magnetism right away, he wrote, quote, my first object was
to prove that the inability of the patient to open
his eyes was caused by paralyzing the leaventer muscles of
the eyelids through their continued action during the practiced fixed stare,
and thus rendering it physically impossible for him to open them.
With the view of proving this, I requested mister Walker,

(27:24):
a young gentleman present, to sit down and maintain a
fixed stare at the top of a wine bottle, placed
so much above him as to produce a considerable strain
on the eyes and eyelids to enable him to maintain
a steady view of the object. In three minutes, his
eyelids closed, a gush of tears ran down his cheeks,

(27:46):
his head drooped, his face was slightly convulsed. He gave
a groan, and instantly fell into profound sleep, the respiration
becoming slow, deep and sibilant, the right hand and arm
being agitated by slight convulsive movements. At the end of
four minutes, I considered it necessary for his safety to
put an end to the experiment. Braid also conducted this

(28:10):
experiment on someone that he said had no knowledge of mesmerism,
didn't know what it was, telling that subject that he
needed him to carefully watch. Quote a chemical experiment in
the preparation of some medicine, and then it had the
same effect noting quote in two minutes and a half,
his eyelids closed slowly with a vibrating motion. His chin

(28:31):
fell on his breast. He gave a deep sigh and
instantly was in a profound sleep, breathing loudly. Having just
been to an eye doctor appointment where I had to
like look up with my eyes for a retinal photograph
for like a few seconds, the idea of maintaining that

(28:51):
I posture for three minutes sounds awful to me, And
that is why he thought your body just shut down
at that point. Yeah. All of this was to disprove
something that Lafontaine and other mesmerists claimed. They also said
that the key to mesmerism was a connection that flowed

(29:12):
between the practitioner and the subject, and often this included
physical touch. Lafontaine would grasp his subject's thumbs while inducing
their trance. But, as Braid guessed, there was a scientific
basis for this that had nothing to do with animal
magnetism that was associated with Mesmer's work. It didn't require

(29:33):
this kind of physical connection. Braid was reluctant to outright
denounce that mesmerizers had some kind of connection going on,
writing quote, now, I do not consider it fair or
proper to impugne the statements of others in this matter,
who are known to be men of talent and observation,

(29:54):
and of undoubted credit in other matters, merely because I
have not personally witnessed the phenomena or been able to
produce them myself, either by my own mode or theirs,
with my present means of knowledge. I am willing to
admit that certain phenomena to which I refer have been
induced by others, but I still think most of them

(30:17):
may be explained in a different and more natural way
than that of the mesmerizers. When I shall have personally
had evidence of the special influence and its effects to
which they lay claim, I shall not be backward and
bearing testimony to the fact basically that all amounts to.

(30:38):
I don't think the mystic part of it is real,
but if I ever have an experience that convinces me otherwise,
I'll surely say so. Yeah, he's so kind, he's very magnanimous.
Like listen, I don't want to trash talk these guys,
but I really don't think they know what's going on.
But his other issue with Mesmerism was an issue of

(31:00):
a subject's consent. Once he had developed his focus method
of achieving a translate state, he stated that his way
of doing this was just superior, writing quote mine also
has this advantage that I am quite certain no one
can be affected by it in any stage of the process,
unless by the free will and consent of the patient,

(31:22):
which is at once sufficient to exonerate the practice from
the imputations of being capable of being converted to immoral purposes,
which has been so much insisted on to the prejudice
of animal magnetism. This has arisen from the mesmerizers asserting
that they have the power of overmastering patients irresistibly, even

(31:44):
whilst at a distance, by mere volitions and secret passes.
And Braid was eager to show that he could achieve
the same results that la Fontaine had without having any
contact with the subject, so he gave his own lecture
on no November twenty seventh, just days after having encountered
Lafontaine for the first time, to demonstrate he had quickly

(32:08):
come to the conclusion that the state of being hypnotized,
although he wasn't using that term yet, was tied to
an exhaustion of the nervous system. He also believed that
anyone could hypnotize themselves because he had determined that you
could not be hypnotized without your own consent. He was
onto the idea that you can bring yourself out of

(32:29):
hypnosis if you want to. Yeah. His whole thing is
you have to have someone willingly concentrate on an object
so long that it actually like strains their nervous system
and their connective tissue in a way that puts them
to sleep. And they can literally look away at any
time if they want, and if they go into this trance,

(32:49):
their conscious mind is still in there and can go
I don't want to be hypnotized anymore, which a lot
of like modern day institution that study hypnosis will also
say like hypnosis is a thing you can absolutely opt
out of at any point in the process. James Braid

(33:09):
had uncoupled this state of being from mesmerism and magnetism,
but he still wasn't quite correct in his assessment of
how it worked. So you'll recall that in his early
descriptions of his tests using intense focus to achieve this state,
he mentioned the subject falling asleep, and while he didn't
think it was the same as being asleep. The use

(33:31):
of that word has caused him confusion. He did think
that it was closely related to sleep. His first name
for it was neuro hypnology or nervous sleep, and his
first book on the subject, which was written in eighteen
forty three, went by a shortened version of that word,
which was neuropnology. It was the full title was Neuropnology,

(33:51):
or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep Considered in Relation with
Animal Magnetism. The quotes that we've been reading his writing
about this whole thing and coming into this knowledge are
all from that book, and in addition to describing the
way that he became interested in the subject, he also
lays out the details of numerous cases in which hypnotism

(34:12):
was used medically. By the time he published the book,
he was using the term neuropnology to apply to the
science as a whole, and then the word hypnotism to
replace the uses of mesmerism or magnetism. In the representation
of this more scientific approach, he also included a lot
of cases of patients who had health improvements through the

(34:33):
use of hypnosis. So in one example, he writes, quote
miss E Atkinson had been unable to speak above a
whisper for four years and a half, notwithstanding every known
remedy had been perseveringly adopted under able practitioners. After the
ninth hypnotic operation, she could speak aloud without effort, and
has continued quite well ever since, now about nine months.

(34:57):
Another example that he gave was a woman named Miss Collin,
who had had a seizure and as a consequence, was
left with quote her head bound firmly to her left shoulder.
When I first examined her, no force I was capable
of succeeded in separating the head and shoulder in the
slightest degree. Experience led me to hope, however, that I

(35:17):
might be able to do so after she was hypnotized.
Having requested all present except the patient, her father, and
her physician to retire, I hypnotized her, and in three
minutes from commencing the operation, with the most perfect ease
to myself and without the slightest pain to the patient,
her head was inclined in the opposite direction, and in

(35:38):
two minutes more she was roused and was quite straight.
Miss Collins had he described some additional twitching after this
initial success, but that her own doctor named Chawner was
able to use Braid's hypnotism method and rid her of it,
and as of when Braid wrote the account, she had
been a year without complaint. It also explains in the

(36:01):
book why he felt it so necessary to lecture publicly
on this topic, which is to straighten out all the
confusion being caused by so much misunderstanding and non scientific practitioners. Quote.
I felt it to be a duty I owed to
the cause of humanity and my profession to use my

(36:21):
best endeavors to remove these fallacies, so that the profession
generally might be at liberty to prosecute the inquiry and
apply it practically without hazarding their personal and professional interest.
By prosecuting it in opposition to popular prejudice, it appeared
to me there was no mode so likely to ensure

(36:44):
this happy consummation as delivering lectures on the subject to
mixed audiences. He also wrote numerous articles, pamphlets, and books
on the subject to try to help educate the public
about the science of hypnotism. Is a really valid need
because a lot of people still did view hypnotism as

(37:05):
pretty shady per George Fletcher in nineteen twenty nine, quote
his Manchester career was one of success and distinction, but
he had little connection with official medicine in the city.
The fact is that his advocacy of hypnotism, an advocacy
which strikes one now as having been temperate and reasonable,
led to his being regarded by his more disciplined brethren

(37:27):
as something of a charlatan. But Braid continued in his
work and refined his own understanding of hypnotism over the years.
He shifted from thinking it was something that was induced
through a sort of sleep state, so something physiological, to
it being a psychological phenomenon, and he also continued his

(37:47):
work as a surgeon throughout his life. James Braid died
suddenly on March twenty fifth, eighteen sixty. According to a
newspaper account, Braid quote went to bed on Saturday night
in his usual good health health, but about nine o'clock
yesterday morning he observed, I feel great pain at my
spine and in my back, and I'm very cold. By

(38:08):
his request, a cup of tea was fetched. He drank it,
breathed heavily twice or thrice, and died. His death was
determined to have been of natural causes. Some sources conclude
that he had a cerebral hemorrhage, but others state that
Braid died of a heart attack, and since there was
no autopsy, it's uncertain which is correct, but it happened

(38:29):
very quickly. Braid was buried at Neston, Cheshire, in the
parish churchyard. His obituary in The Guardian described a man
who was much admired and who devoted himself to helping others. Quote.
Braid had much more than a local reputation, which was
due not alone to his theory of hypnotism, which some
years ago he pertinaciously but temperately advocated in opposition to

(38:53):
that of mesmerism, but very greatly to his special skill
in dealing with some dangerous and differ occult forms of disease.
Among his friends, he was ever warm hearted and cheerful,
and his kindness in devoting his skill for the benefit
of humble sufferers in cases where money recompenses could not

(39:14):
be anticipated or where it was declined when tendered, has
endeared him to large numbers by the strongest feelings of gratitude.
I mean, that's a pretty good od bit to have.
He clearly was very loved by his community because he
did a lot of work in the community. Like it's
easy to forget in the midst of all the hypnotism,

(39:34):
and it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk
about him. It's like he literally was trying to clean
up like their sewage system and their infrastructure and like
improve overall quality of life for everybody in the city,
and like he was pretty great, right, but it all
kind of gets lost in the hypnotism talk, which is
also very important. But yeah, I have listener mail that's

(39:55):
sort of a not really a correction, but like a
nuanced thing, okay, that I opted to not bring up
in the course of the thing we talked about. But sure,
we'll explain now today just the weireness t intro. This
is from our listener Claudine, who writes, Hello, Ali and Tracy.
I'm writing to you again from the past, but this
time I'm only three months behind instead of five. Listen,

(40:17):
We're never gonna judge. Nope. I listened recently to the
episode about inventions for pets, and it sounded like maybe
you haven't learned about the difference between a design patent
and a utility pattern. Most patents are utility patterns. Meaning
they grant the patent holder exclusive rights to a machine,
the way a machine or thing works, or a set
of steps like the steps performed by a piece of software,

(40:39):
or and this is not my area, the steps to
make a pharmaceutical. A design patent, on the other hand,
is quite the opposite, and that it grants the holder
exclusive rights to how a thing looks, as long as
those looks are specifically not functional. You can tell that
a patent is a design patent if the claims say
something like just look at the pictures, and if the
patent number has a D prepended. Design patents are common

(41:02):
where the thing being patented doesn't do anything new, but
the look of it was new, and it wasn't obvious
for the thing to look that way. Apple, the computer company,
not the fruit, has many design patents on icons, and
car companies often have design patents on the shape of
a car think Porsche, or on specific bodywork on a car. Anyway,
I figured you'd get multiple emails on this topic, but

(41:24):
I'm several episodes past the pet Invention episode and it
wasn't mentioned, probably because this topic is way too pedantic
to be interesting to your listeners. In search shrug emoji.
On an unrelated note, there have been so many times
over the past year that I just wanted to give
you both a hug. I hear you and feel your
pain every step of the way. Guess I need a
hug too. Stay strong and carry on. We will get

(41:46):
through this, Claudine, I love this. I know there is
a difference between utility and design patents. In that case
where we were talking about the patents for various dog
toys and whatnot, even for a design patent, some of
those seemed to very very brief to me. It's like
it would literally say in some cases like see appended

(42:08):
diagram and that was it. I was like, wait, there's
not even like not even like a little cozy. I
invented a dog toy or I designed a dog toy,
but I did not get into it. And I really
didn't even think about the need or the value in
explaining the differentation between the two. So thank you for that. Listen,

(42:29):
I'll send you a virtual hug anytime. Oh yeah, we
love it. We love it, and I love pedantic things
when they're related to stuff like this, So rock on,
bring it on all the time. If you would like
to write to us, about some thing you have expertise
in that could clarify or add nuance or extra extra

(42:51):
layers of understanding to anything we've talked about. Or if
you just want to send us pictures of your pet,
you're embroidery, whatever you got going on a tree, I
don't care it. Bring flowers or bottom leaves. If you're
in the other hemisphere. Uh yeah, listen, I've been posting
lots of pictures of the flowers I'm growing in my

(43:11):
office online lately. You can send those pictures to us
at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}James Braid, Surgeon and Father of Hypnotism