Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class James Braid, Surgeon and Father of Hypnotism About this episode Braid is known for his work in hypnotism. But he was also a surgeon with a reputation for pioneering new treatments before he became fascinated with the scientific underpinnings of mesmerism.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:32 Holly Frey? We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
2:16 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. 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 and then I find something else in that 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 on Emile Coe and Coe-ism, because we are going to talk about hypnosis
2:58 Holly Frey? and how that actually became a thing, separate from mesmerism.
3:07 Holly Frey? In 1899, one of James Braid's most significant texts was reprinted. That's 56 years 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. His life would seem to have been of an unchecked and even character. It was free from early struggles, for it was entered under favorable circumstances, and it was moderately successful throughout,
3:49 Holly Frey? 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 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."
4:10 Holly Frey? 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 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 just a paragraph. So he kind of proved himself wrong in that opener, anyway. But we're going to talk about James Braid today.
4:50 Holly Frey? So James Braid was born on June 19, 1795, at his family's home, that was Ryllaw House in the parish of Portmoke in the county of Kenross, Scotland. You may also 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 Suddy 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 1812, when he enrolled at Edinburgh University. On November 17, 1813, James married a woman named Margaret Mason.
5:34 Holly Frey? 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 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 in his doctoral thesis about Braid that it was unclear if James and Margaret lived with the Andersons
6:16 Holly Frey? 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 1814 to 1815, that included lectures at the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary. In November of 1815, 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 and silver mines in the area. During his time that he was there,
6:59 Holly Frey? he treated all kinds of ailments from severed fingers to suffocation in the mines. 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 he continued through his career. After working in Lead 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 1825. And after he moved there, he met another surgeon named William Maxwell, and these two men became close colleagues. And while this is sometimes described as a partnership,
7:42 Holly Frey? 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. 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.
8:25 Holly Frey? A surgeon could also 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 imputations.
8:42 Holly Frey? Braid was practicing as a surgeon at a time when this was shifting. The Royal College of Surgeons in London was founded in 1800 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 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 2000 that was published in the British Medical Journal, which said, quote, "Medical qualifications in the United Kingdom have been in an unholy
9:25 Holly Frey? muddle ever since the Medical Act of 1858, when no less than 18 independent medical institutions offered a range of bachelorships, licenses, diplomas, memberships, fellowships, and doctorates, all officially recognized by the General Medical Council. This cannot be altered." Yeah, it's basically like this is so set in stone. Yeah. And so still today, the surgeons are mister and miz and mrs and miss. Yeah. And not doctor. Yeah, which some would argue now that is more of an honorific because of the associated skill you need with it.
10:06 Holly Frey? I will say, I did find a lovely, 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 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, which took some time, he and Braid became pretty good friends.
10:48 Holly Frey? And in 1828, 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 Scotland at the time. While 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 usher the city through a cholera epidemic in 1832.
11:32 Holly Frey? 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 in expected working hours. Yeah, he specifically thought like young people 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 talipis equinevaris, or more commonly, clubfoot.
12:16 Holly Frey? 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 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 kept up with the latest literature, was an early adopter of instead
13:01 Holly Frey? 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 be like on the cutting edge of this technique. He stated in his writing that he was performing this surgery almost daily and 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 same concepts and understandings of this connective tissue.
13:45 Holly Frey? 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 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 with the eyes. This started with patients who had an issue of chronic squinting, where the connective
14:30 Holly Frey? 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 way connective tissues could cause problems like crossed eyes or wall eyes. 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 14 minutes for all six of them. But this was in part because he believed that once the problem was identified, getting
15:14 Holly Frey? in and out very quickly was the best thing for the patient, noting that the actual work on the tendon took him less than 30 seconds. He believed that his consistently good recovery outcomes were in part due to the patient not having to endure a really long procedure. 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, like surgery is not the first line, but he was so innovative with this.
15:55 Holly Frey? Yeah, 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.
16:05 Holly Frey? 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 like they would move or twitch and potentially cause greater damage during the surgery.
16:21 Holly Frey? But Brad 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 1840s, we want to be clear, he wasn't just like, yeah, sure, I'll, I'll cut this open. And he only did this after he examined a 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 Brad did stop doing these after just a couple of years.
17:05 Holly Frey? The pivotal moment in Brad's life as it relates to hypnotism happened on November 13th, 1841, at the Manchester Athenaeum. That evening, he attended a demonstration given by a traveling mesmerist named Charles LaFontaine. We will talk about that after we pause for a sponsor break.
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20:06 Holly Frey? We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health Versus Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.
20:49 Holly Frey? Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health Versus Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
21:15 Holly Frey? There 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 traditions as a historical example when he wrote about hypnotism later in his life. Swiss physician Paracelsus, working in the 16th century, 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, "For the mumia is the man himself.
21:58 Holly Frey? The mumia 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 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 patients by controlling the flow of an invisible fluid. That's what animal magnetism supposedly was. Mesmer was discredited in his own lifetime.
22:38 Holly Frey? In 1784, King Louis XVI sent a commission to investigate Mesmerism, 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, 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 crown very nerve. I get it.
23:22 Holly Frey? But listen, it didn't matter. People didn't trust Louis XVI's 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 Chastinay, Marquis de Puyseguer. So Chastinay de Puyseguer had tried out the use of magnets on a family employee after reading about Mesmer's work. And The man appeared to go into a trance-like state while Chastin de Pasiguer did this, whatever he was doing with the magnets. Ruminating on this whole thing, Chastin de Pasiguer thought that a sleep state could be induced
24:07 Holly Frey? to more fully affect mesmer's magnetic healing. So he wasn't on to the science of hypnotism, but he had kind of stumbled on to 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 Jules Cloquet, who claimed to use 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 Dr. James Esdale. Incidentally, though, Esdale shifted entirely to the use of ether, once it was introduced
24:51 Holly Frey? as an anesthetic and stopped trying to put his patients in a trance. Charles LaFontaine studied the work of Poiseguer. He also routinely claimed that Louis XVI's commission had found the opposite of their actual findings, saying that their review had validated mesmerism, 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 1841, LaFontaine decided to go on a tour of Britain exhibiting his mesmerism technique. This is pretty interesting because he spoke not one word of English, so everything had
25:36 Holly Frey? to happen through interpreters. By the time LaFontaine arrived in Manchester, Braid, like most medical practitioners, had come to view mesmerism as Completely fraudulent. La Fontaine had appeared in London for a while before this, and there was a lot of like, huh, all right, in the reviews about it. Arthur 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 mere smatterers, and that many of their stories were undeniably exaggerated, if not actually invented."
26:22 Holly Frey? But a lot of people were still interested in what La Fontaine billed as magnetism. So, like a lot of other people, Braid was very skeptical, and wrote later, quote, "I was led to discover the mode 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 so few and those few individuals in a state of disease or naturally of a delicate constitution or particularly susceptible temperament,
27:07 Holly Frey? 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 to be a system of collusion or delusion or of excited imagination, sympathy, or imitation."
27:29 Holly Frey? A lot of people thought La Fontaine was a fraud. Braid attended La Fontaine's third lecture in Manchester on November 13th, 1841. And so did a lot of other people, because write-ups about his earlier two lectures had really stoked public interest, 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 700 persons present, among whom were many of our leading medical and surgical practitioners and a few ladies." La Fontaine's demonstration involved putting his assistant, who was a young man named Eugene, into a so-called mesmeric state,
28:13 Holly Frey? 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 some volunteers who stepped forward to help and horrified protest 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 in his hands, all to show that the subject was cataleptic and, quote, "insensible" to all of these very cruel stimuli.
28:57 Holly Frey? Which were all still happening and involved injuring him in some cases, which is wild to me. Simplified versions of James Braid's story really make it sound like he went to this lecture and demonstration, he saw La Fontaine, 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 Monsieur La Fontaine's conversazione on the 13th November, 1841."
29:38 Holly Frey? That night, I saw nothing to diminish rather than confirm my previous prejudices. At the next Conversazione, six nights afterwards, one fact, the inability of a patient to open his eyelids, arrested my attention. I considered that to be a real phenomenon and was anxious to discover the physiological cause of it. Next night, I watched this case with 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 until I had an opportunity of testing its accuracy by experiments and observation in private.
30:23 Holly Frey? So as Braid mentioned in that writing, he went to La Fontaine's fourth Manchester appearance, that was on November 19th, and he was invited along with other medical professionals in attendance to go onstage. Braid really wanted someone who had never seen La Fontaine's procedure before to be the first person magnetized, to ensure that their 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 La Fontaine said he didn't think Braid was susceptible to it. There was apparently 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
31:06 Holly Frey? treating a guest in their country very rudely, which should not happen even if someone was a charlatan.
31:14 Holly Frey? When La Fontaine had a fifth appearance on November 20th, Braid was there again. This time, he stood up and he read a letter that he had sent to La Fontaine 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 someone unfamiliar with this process be the subject and see if La Fontaine'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.
31:59 Holly Frey? But though his request 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 LaFontaine's animal magnetism explanation. And he wanted to figure out what was really happening. So we 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.
32:35 Holly Frey? Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge,
33:20 Holly Frey? protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
34:09 Holly Frey? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jesay have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends
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36:10 Holly Frey? Brad started working on his ideas about the science behind La Fontaine's 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 leviter 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 Mr. Walker, 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.
36:53 Holly Frey? In three minutes, his eyelids closed, a gush of tears ran down his cheeks, 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 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,
37:37 Holly Frey? quote, "in two minutes and a half, his eyelids closed slowly with a vibrating motion, his chin 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 eye posture for three minutes sounds awful to me. And that is why he thought your body just shut down at that point. Yeah. Um, all of this was to disprove something that LaFontaine and other mesmerists claimed.
38:20 Holly Frey? They also said that the key to mesmerism was a connection that flowed 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 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 impugn the
39:01 Holly Frey? statements of others in this matter who are known to be men of talent and observation 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 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
39:43 Holly Frey? to which they lay claim, I shall not be backward in bearing testimony to the fact." Basically, that all amounts to, "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, he's so kind. He's very magnanimous. Like, listen, I don't, 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 the issue of a subject's consent. Once he had developed his focus method of achieving a trance-like state, he stated that his way of doing this was just superior, writing, quote, "Mine also has this advantage, that
40:26 Holly Frey? 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, which is at once sufficient to exonerate the practice from the imputations of being capable of being con- reverted 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 whilst at a distance by mere volitions and secret passes. And Braid was eager to show that he could achieve the same results that LaFontaine
41:06 Holly Frey? had without having any contact with the subject. So he gave his own lecture on November 27th, just days after having encountered LaFontaine for the first time to demonstrate. He had quickly 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 on to the idea that you can bring yourself out of hypnosis if you want to. Yeah, his whole thing is you have to have someone willingly concentrate on an
41:48 Holly Frey? 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, if they go into this trance, 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 institutions 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 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
42:31 Holly Frey? 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 of that word has caused some confusion. He did think that it was closely related to sleep. His first name for it was neurohypnology, or nervous sleep. And his first book on the subject, which was written in 1843, went by a shortened version of that word, which was "neuropnology." It was, the full title was, "Neuropnology: 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,
43:15 Holly Frey? 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 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 use of hypnosis. So, in one example, he writes, "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
43:59 Holly Frey? 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." Another example that he gave was a woman named Miss Collins, who had had a seizure and as a consequence, was left with, "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 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,
44:43 Holly Frey? 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 two minutes more, she was roused and was quite straight." Miss Collins had, he described some additional twitching after this, this initial success, but that her own doctor, named Channer, 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. Braid also explains in the 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.
45:27 Holly Frey? Quote, "I felt it to be a duty I owed to the cause of humanity and my profession to use my 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 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.
46:11 Holly Frey? And that was a really valid need because a lot of people still did view hypnotism as pretty shady. Per George Fletcher in 1929, 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 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
46:52 Holly Frey? state, so something physiological, to it being a psychological phenomenon. And he also continued his work as a surgeon throughout his life. James Braid died suddenly on March 25, 1860. According to a newspaper account, Braid, quote, "went to bed on Saturday night in his usual good health, but about 9 o'clock yesterday morning, he observed, 'I feel great pain up my spine and in my back, and I'm very cold.'" By 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.
47:37 Holly Frey? And since there was no autopsy, it's uncertain which is correct, but it happened 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 temporally advocated in opposition to that of mesmerism, but very greatly to his special skill in dealing with some dangerous and difficult forms of disease. Among his friends, he was ever warm-hearted and cheerful, and his kindness in devoting his skill
48:21 Holly Frey? for the benefit of humble sufferers in cases where money, recompenses could not be anticipated or where it was declined when tendered, has endeared him to large numbers by the strongest feelings of gratitude."
48:38 Holly Frey? I mean, that's a pretty good obit to have. It is. 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. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to talk about him. It's like, he literally was, was trying to clean up, like, their sewage system and their infrastructure and like, Yeah. improve overall quality of life for everybody in the city. I'm 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 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 I will explain now today.
49:20 Holly Frey? Just the weirdest intro. This is from our listener Claudine who writes, hello Holly and Tracy. I'm writing to you again from the past, but this time I'm only three months behind instead of five. Listen, we're never going to 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 patent. Most patents are utility patents, 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, or, and this is not my area, the steps to make a pharmaceutical. A design patent, on the other hand, is quite the opposite in that it grants the holder exclusive rights to how a thing looks, as long as those looks are specifically not functional.
50:05 Holly Frey? 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 pre-pended. Design patents are common 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 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. Insert shrug emoji.
50:47 Holly Frey? 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 through this, Claudine. I love this. I, 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 very, very brief to me.
51:16 Holly Frey? It's like, it would literally say in some cases, like, see appended 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, didn't even think about the need or the, the value in explaining the differentiation between the two. So, thank you for that. Listen, I'll send you a virtual hug anytime. Oh, yeah.
51:46 Holly Frey? We love it. We love it. And I, 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 layers of understanding to anything we've talked about, or if you just want to send us pictures of your pet, your embroidery, whatever you've got going on, a tree, I don't care, I love it. Spring flowers. Or autumn leaves, if you're in the other hemisphere. Yeah. Listen, I've been posting lots of pictures of the flowers I'm growing in my office online lately. You can send those pictures to us at [email protected] .
52:35 Holly Frey? 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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