James Braid (physician)


 * This article is about a physician. For the golfer see James Braid (golfer).



James Braid (June 19, 1795 – March 25, 1860), was born in Fife, and was the son of James Braid and Anne Suttie. He married Margaret Mason (or Meason) on 17 November 1813. They had two children, James (b. 1822), and a daughter.

An eminent Scottish neurosurgeon, Braid was an important and influential pioneer of what we now term hypnotism.

Background
Braid was apprenticed to Leith surgeons Charles Anderson (i.e., both the father and the son), and attended the University of Edinburgh from 1812–1814, where he was also influenced by Thomas Brown, M.D. (1778–1820), who held the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh from 1808 to 1820.

He obtained the diploma of the Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of the City of Edinburgh, the LRCS (Edinburgh), in 1815.

Braid was appointed surgeon to Lord Hopetoun's mines at Leadhills, Lanarkshire, in 1816; and in 1825 he set up in private practice at Dumfries. One of his patients, Mr. Petty, invited Braid to move his practice to Manchester, England. Braid moved to Manchester in 1828, continuing to practise from there until his death in 1860.

Surgeon
Braid was a highly skilled and very successful surgeon:
 * "[and] though he was best known in the medical world for his theory and practice of hypnotism, he had also obtained wonderfully successful results by operation in cases of club foot and other deformities, which brought him patients from every part of the kingdom. Up to 1841 he had operated on 262 cases of talipes, 700 cases of strabismus, and 23 cases of spinal curvature."

Mesmerism
Braid became interested in the phenomenon known as mesmerism in November 1841, when he personally observed demonstrations given by a traveling French mesmerist named Charles Lafontaine (1803-1892); and, in particular, he examined the physical condition of Lafontaine's mesmerized subjects and concluded that they were, indeed, in quite a different physical state. Upon reflection, he became convinced that he had discovered the natural psychophysiological mechanism underlying these quite genuine phenomena, and he immediately delivered a series of five public lectures in Manchester that commenced on 27 November 1841.

Hypnotism
In early 1842 — as a response to a direct attack upon himself and his work that had been made in a sermon delivered by a Manchester cleric, and had been immediately published in an unaltered form by that cleric, despite Braid's attempts to rectify the cleric's misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and outright errors — Braid published the contents of an (unanswered) letter that he had privately written to the cleric as a twelve page booklet entitled Satanic Agency and Mesmerism Reviewed.

As part of his representation of his (then current) sleep-based physiological theory of hypnosis, Braid summarized and contrasted his own view with the other views prevailing at that time.
 * "The various theories at present entertained regarding the phenomena of mesmerism may be arranged thus:— First, those who believe them to be owing entirely to a system of collusion and delusion; and a great majority of society may be ranked under this head. Second, those who believe them to be real phenomena, but produced solely by imagination, sympathy, and imitation. Third, the animal magnetists, or those who believe in some magnetic medium set in motion as the exciting cause of the mesmeric phenomena. Fourth, those who have adopted my views, that the phenomena are solely attributable to a peculiar physiological state of the brain and the spinal cord."

Terminology
In this booklet, Braid used the term hypnotism for the first time (rather than in his 1843 work, Neurypnology, as is often asserted); and, although, he was the first to use the terms hypnotism, hypnotize and hypnotist in English, the cognate terms hypnotique, hypnotisme, hypnotiste had been intentionally used by the French magnetist Baron Etienne Félix d'Henin de Cuvillers (1755-1841) at least as early as 1820.

In a letter written to the editor of The Lancet in 1845, Braid emphatically states that:
 * "I adopted the term "hypnotism" to prevent my being confounded with those who entertain those extreme notions [sc. that a mesmeriser's will has an "irresistible power… over his subjects" and that clairvoyance and other "higher phenomena" are routinely manifested by those in the mesmeric state], as well as to get rid of the erroneous theory about a magnetic fluid, or exoteric influence of any description being the cause of the sleep. I distinctly avowed that hypnotism laid no claim to produce any phenomena which were not "quite reconcilable with well-established physiological and psychological principles"; pointed out the various sources of fallacy which might have misled the mesmerists; [and] was the first to give a public explanation of the trick [by which a fraudulent subject had been able to deceive his mesmerizer]…
 * [Further, I have never been] a supporter of the imagination theory — i.e., that the induction of [hypnosis] in the first instance is merely the result of imagination. My belief is quite the contrary. I attribute it to the induction of a habit of intense abstraction, or concentration of attention, and maintain that it is most readily induced by causing the patient to fix his thoughts and sight on an object, and suppress his respiration.

Induction
In his first publication, he had also stressed the importance of the subject concentrating both vision and thought, referring to "the continued fixation of the mental and visual eye" as a means of engaging a natural physiological mechanism that was already hard-wired into each human being:
 * "I shall merely add, that my experiments go to prove that it is a law in the animal economy that, by the continued fixation of the mental and visual eye on any object in itself not of an exciting nature, with absolute repose of body and general quietude, they become wearied; and, provided the patients rather favour than resist the feeling of stupor which they feel creeping over them during such experiment, a state of somnolency is induced, and that peculiar state of brain, and mobility of the nervous system, which render the patient liable to be directed so as to manifest the mesmeric phenomena. I consider it not so much the optic, as the motor and sympathetic nerves, and the mind, through which the impression is made. Such is the position I assume; and I feel so thoroughly convinced that it is a law of the animal economy, that such effects should follow such condition of mind and body, that I fear not to state, as my deliberate opinion, that this is a fact which cannot be controverted."

In 1843 he published Neurypnology: or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, his first and only book-length exposition of his views. According to Bramwell (1896, p.91) the work was popular from the outset, selling 800 copies within a few months of its publication.

Braid thought of hypnotism as producing a "nervous sleep" which differed from ordinary sleep. The most efficient way to produce it was through visual fixation on a small bright object held eighteen inches above and in front of the eyes. Braid regarded the physiological condition underlying hypnotism to be the over-exercising of the eye muscles through the straining of attention.

He completely rejected Franz Mesmer's idea that a magnetic fluid caused hypnotic phenomena, because anyone could produce them in "himself by attending strictly to the simple rules" that he had laid down. Braidism is a synonym for hypnotism, though it is used infrequently.

Death
Braid maintained an active interest in hypnotism until his death; and just three days before his death he sent a manuscript Note sur le sommeil nerveux ou hypnotism ("Note on nervous sleep, or hypnotism") to Dr. Azam.

Braid died on 25 March 1860, in Manchester, after a just few hours of illness. According to some contemporary accounts he died from "apoplexy", and according to others he died from "heart disease". He was survived by his wife, his son James (also a surgeon), and his daughter.

Influence
Braid’s work had a strong influence on a number of important French medical figures, especially Étienne Eugène Azam (1822-1899) of Bordeaux, Braid’s principal French “disciple”, the anatomist Pierre Paul Broca (1824–1880), the physiologist Joseph Pierre Durand de Gros (1826-1901), and the eminent hypnotherapist and co-founder of the Nancy School Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823-1904).

James Braid Society
In 1997 Braid’s part in developing hypnosis for therapeutic purposes was acknowledged by the creation of the James Braid Society, a discussion group for those “involved or concerned in the ethical uses of hypnosis.” The society meets once a month in central London, usually for a presentation on some aspect of hypnotherapy.