James Braid

What he'd stumbled onto instead was something real, the power of expectation and suggestion to genuinely alter what people feel and do.

Decades later, a Scottish surgeon named James Braid took the same trance states and gave them an entirely new explanation.

He called it hypnosis, from the Greek word hypnos, meaning sleep.

And, he argued, it worked through focused attention and suggestion, not magnetism at all.

NICE recommends it as a relapse prevention option for people with a history of recurrent depression.

Let's summarise what we've learnt today.

Hypnosis has roots in mesmer's animal magnetism, reframed later by James Braid as hypnosis and in Charcot's clinical demonstrations.

It's explained today either by Hale-Gard's Neo-Dissociation Theory or Spanos' Sociocognitive Theory, with limited clinical uses but a real risk of confabulated memory.

And if only we could intervene in such a way that they don't end up getting to the point where they need surgery.

And a lot of other allied health and physicians have recognized this and said, how can we formularize, structure, provide a robust evidence base to bring people to a point where they can understand the decisions to make in their life and to actuate them for better health and wellness outcomes? And that's led me to search for something and then I found the inaugural James Cook University lifestyle medicine course and I thought I'll do that and then so studied that and so and then it was wonderful studying all that and you know and it isn't it isn't faint false praise to say that the most favorite unit was the health coaching one because it was so interactive and I learned a great deal and that revolutionized the way that I did my anesthetic pre-admission clinics and so I would find patients I could have 10 minutes with someone and make some inroads into stimulating some change talk and change thinking in their preparation for why they, you know, because it's my role at that time to suggest that they don't smoke or to suggest that they might eat something different.

And then they don't always know why.

And most doctors have just, you get a letter back saying, I told the patient to stop smoking.

They always lose consciousness and we do the thing.

And so that's not most of medicine or most of therapy.

You get internal physicians that go, oh, we tried this new medicine and they broke out in a full body rash and their heart function got 20% worse.

Okay, we'll try something else next time.

And I'll talk about that shortly.

So not long after, maybe about 50 years later, a Scottish surgeon by the name of James Braid coined the term hypnosis.

And he did that specifically to further distance the medical establishment from magnetism and charlatanism and mysticism.

And so the word hypnosis was born.

Braid and hypnotism.

Then came James Braid, the Manchester surgeon, who proceeded to tear down the accepted theories, substituting one of his own.

Braid may be called the father of hypnotism, the term being first employed in connection with his work.

His theory was that there was no such thing as animal magnetism, but the phenomena obtained by Mesmer and his followers was caused by a physiological condition brought about by physical means, such as fixing the eyes, rigidity of the muscles, et cetera.