---
title: "James Braid (surgeon)"
chunk: 7/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Braid_(surgeon)"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:05:56.562119+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== 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 (per medium of Azam) the eminent hypnotherapist, and one of the founders of the Nancy School, Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904).
Braid hypnotised the English Swedenborgian writer J.J.G. Wilkinson, who observed him hypnotising others several times, and began using hypnotism himself. Wilkinson soon became a passionate advocate of Braid's work and his published remarks on hypnotism were quoted enthusiastically by Braid several times in his later writings. However, Braid's legacy was maintained in Great Britain largely by John Milne Bramwell who collected all of his available works and published a biography and account of Braid's theory and practice as well as several books on hypnotism of his own (see below).

== Works ==
Braid published many letters and articles in journals and newspapers; he also published several pamphlets, and a number of books (many of which were compendiums of his previously published works).
His first major publication was Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep (1843), written less than two years after his discovery of hypnotism.
He continued revising his theories and his clinical applications of hypnotism, based on his experiments and his empirical experience. Six weeks before his death, in a letter to The Medical Circular, Braid spoke of continuously having the daily experience of applying hypnotism in his practice for nineteen years; and, in a letter to The Critic, written four weeks before his death (this was his last published letter), he spoke of how his experiments and clinical experience had convinced him that all of the effects of hypnotism were generated "by influences residing entirely within, and not without, the patient's own body".
In 1851, Garth Wilkinson published a description of Braid's "hypnotism", which Braid described, two years later, as "a beautiful description of [my system of] hypnotism".
In April 2009, Robertson published a reconstructed English version, backward translated from the French, of Braid's last (lost) manuscript, On Hypnotism, addressed by Braid to the French Academy of Sciences.

== Bramwell: promoter and defender of Braid's heritage ==

John Milne Bramwell, M.B. C.M., a talented specialist medical hypnotist and hypnotherapist himself, made a deep study of Braid's works and helped to revive and maintain Braid's legacy in Great Britain.
Bramwell had studied medicine at Edinburgh University in the same student cohort as Braid's grandson, Charles. Consequently, due to his Edinburgh studies – especially those with John Hughes Bennett (1812–1875), author of The Mesmeric Mania of 1851, With a Physiological Explanation of the Phenomena Produced (1851) – Bramwell was very familiar with Braid and his work; and, more significantly, through Charles Braid, he also had unfettered access to those publications, records, papers, etc. of Braid that were still held by the Braid family. He was, perhaps, second only to Preyer in his wide-ranging familiarity with Braid and his works.
In 1896, Bramwell noted that, "[Braid's name] is familiar to all students of hypnotism and is rarely mentioned by them without due credit being given to the important part he played in rescuing that science from ignorance and superstition". He found that almost all of those students believed that Braid "held many erroneous views" and that "the researches of more recent investigators [had] disproved [those erroneous views]".
Finding that "few seem to be acquainted with any of [Braid's] works except Neurypnology or with the fact that [Neurypnology] was only one of a long series on the subject of hypnotism, and that in the later ones his views completely changed", Bramwell was convinced that this ignorance of Braid, which sprang from "imperfect knowledge of his writings", was further compounded by at least three "universally adopted opinions"; viz., that Braid was English (Braid was a Scot), "believed in phrenology" (Braid did not), and "knew nothing of suggestion" (when, in fact, Braid was its strongest advocate, and, also, was first to apply the term "suggestion" to the practice).
Bramwell rejected the mistaken view – very widely promoted by Hippolyte Bernheim – that Braid knew nothing of suggestion, and that the entire 'history' of suggestive therapeutics began with the Nancy "Suggestion" School in the late 1880s, had no foundation whatsoever:

The difference between Braid and the Nancy School, with regard to suggestion, is entirely one of theory, not of practice.
Braid employed verbal suggestion in hypnosis just as intelligently as any member of the Nancy school.
This fact is denied by Bernheim, who says:
"It is strange that Braid did not think of applying suggestion in its most natural form – suggestion by speech – to bring about hypnosis and its therapeutic effects. He did not dream of explaining the curative effects of hypnotism by means of the psychical influence of suggestion, but made use of suggestion without knowing it."
This statement has its sole origin in [Bernheim’s] ignorance of Braid's later works…
[Unlike Bernheim, Braid] did not consider [verbal] suggestion as explanatory of hypnotic phenomena, but… [he] looked upon it simply as an artifice used to excite [those phenomena].

[Braid] considered that the mental phenomena were only rendered possible by previous physical changes; and, as the result of these, the operator was enabled to act like an engineer, and to direct the forces which existed in the subject's own person. (Bramwell, 1903, pp. 338–39)

In 1897, Bramwell wrote on Braid's work for an important French hypnotism journal ("James Braid: son œuvre et ses écrits"). He also wrote on hypnotism and suggestion, strongly emphasizing the importance of Braid and his work ("La Valeur Therapeutique de l'Hypnotisme et de la Suggestion"). In his response, Bernheim repeated his entirely mistaken view that Braid knew nothing of suggestion (""A propos de l'étude sur James Braid par le Dr. Milne Bramwell, etc."). Bramwell's response ("James Braid et la Suggestion, etc.") to Bernheim's misrepresentation was emphatic:

"I answered [Bernheim], giving quotations from Braid's published works, which clearly showed that he not only employed suggestion as intelligently as the members of the Nancy school now do, but also that his conception of its nature was clearer than theirs" (Hypnotism, etc. (1913), p. 28).

== Footnotes ==

== Sources ==

=== Braid's publications (in chronological order) ===

=== Other editions of Braid's publications ===

=== Other sources ===