Why This Is the Model Case for Salvaging a Discarded Claim

The 1784 royal commission had shown that the effects of animal magnetism followed the subject's belief rather than the magnetiser's passes, and the usual reading of that verdict, then and now, was that the whole business was empty. Braid's contribution was to notice that the commission had established something positive and nobody had picked it up: if belief and attention can produce insensibility to pain and dramatic behavioural change, then belief and attention are doing something worth studying in their own right. He kept the phenomenon, discarded the fluid, renamed the field and handed it to medicine. Surgical anaesthesia by suggestion was practised on that basis, notably by James Esdaile in India, in the years just before ether made the question moot.

The later French schools at Nancy and at the Salpetriere argued at length about whether suggestion or a pathological susceptibility was the essential factor, and the Nancy position, which is close to Braid's, is the one that survived. Hypnosis is today an accepted clinical and experimental subject with a substantial literature, while animal magnetism is a chapter in a history book, and the difference between those two fates is almost entirely Braid's doing.