James Esdaile - Connection With Hypnotism

Connection With Hypnotism

Esdaile is thought by many to have been a pioneer in the use of hypnosis for surgical anaesthesia in the era immediately prior to James Young Simpson's discovery of chloroform. However, Esdaile had studied neither hypnotism nor Mesmerism himself.

Although some would trace the practice of hypnotherapy back to Faria, Gassner, and Hell, it is conventional to trace what we now know as hypnotism back to the Scottish surgeon James Braid's reaction to a public exhibition of mesmeric techniques given by Charles Lafontaine in Manchester on 13 November 1841.

There are some similarities between both the theory and practice of Victorian Mesmerism and hypnotism. Braid reported favourably upon the Government committee chaired by Atkinson's September 1846 report on Esdaile's use of Mesmerism in an Indian hospital, although only 30% of his clients actually exhibited no signs of pain during their operations. However, Braid also expressed reservations about Esdaile's claims of supernatural powers possessed by certain subjects, and the fact that his operations were yet to be demonstrated in British hospitals.

In theory I entirely differ from Dr. Esdaile. He is a Mesmerist – that is, he believes in the transmission of some peculiar occult influence from the operator to the patient, as the cause of the subsequent phenomena.

In fact, as this report shows, Esdaile did not generally "Mesmerise" the patients himself but employed native Indian boys to spend 2–8 hours per day with each patient in a darkened room, employing a technique that involved breathing on the patient's body. The resemblance to the conventional techniques of Mesmerism is therefore minimal.