Volume 42, Number 7 · April 20, 1995
Going Unconscious
By Jonathan Miller
It was in a mood of irritable skepticism that the Scottish surgeon James Braid attended a public demonstration of Animal Magnetism—in which people were said to fall into trances—on the night of November 13, 1841. From everything he had read and heard about the trances that occurred at the bidding of the operator—the person who induced the trances—he reports that he was 'fully inclined to join with those who considered the whole thing to be a system of collusion and delusion, or an excited imagination, sympathy, or imitation.' After observing the demonstration, he considered that the trances were quite genuine, but at the same time he felt satisfied 'that they were not dependent on any special agency or emanation passing from the body of the operator to that of the patient as animal magnetizers allege.' He returned to the demonstration when it was repeated by popular demand a week later, and on this occasion he felt that he had identified the cause of these mysteriously punctual onsets of 'nervous sleep.' He was to devote the last eighteen years of his life to the topic, and under the proprietary title of Hypnotism he explained and redescribed the process in terms which would have been unrecognizable to its eighteenth-century discoverer, Franz Anton Mesmer.
Feature, 8008 words
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