PART B: MODERN HISTORY

Section 12. Milne Bramwell

Bramwell is best remembered for his classic text, Hypnotism, It's History, Practice and Theory, which even to the present day remains one of the finest books ever written on hypnotism. In his book, he states that his own first introduction to the subject was indirectly due to Dr. James Esdaile, for Esdaile left India and lived for sometime in Bramwell's native town of Perth. Many of Esdaile's experiments were seen afterwards reproduced by Bramwell's father who was also a physician. Bramwell witnessed many of these experiments as a boy, and they deeply impressed him. He was an avid reader and student at Edinburgh when Professor John Hughes Bennett again drew his attention to hypnotism.

After leaving Edinburgh, Bramwell became engaged in general practice, and hypnosis was almost forgotten until he learned that it had been revived in the wards of the Salpetriere. On March 28, 1890, he gave a demonstration of hypnotic anesthesia to a larger gathering at Leeds. This was reported in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, and referrals of patients became so great that he abandoned general practice and limited himself to the practice of hypnotism. Bramwell was somehow able to avoid most of the great opposition and misrepresentation that had been heaped on earlier physicians connected with the science. Bramwell was probably most famous for his work in clinical hypnosis in medicine and surgery. However, he also wrote on hypnotic theories, hypnosis in animals, the management of hypnotic experiments, experimental phenomena of hypnosis, and even on such occult subjects as spiritualism, clairvoyance, and telepathy.

Moll, an English contemporary, is equally famous for his book on hypnosis. Moll's book, copyrighted a few years before Bramwell's, was arranged a bit differently and is noteworthy for its dissertation on the legal aspects of hypnosis which Bramwell did not cover, but which is liberally quoted in an earlier book of mine, Legal Aspects of Hypnosis, the first complete volume on the subject ever written. Moll demonstrated how everyday suggestions differ from hypnosis, and also gave the first reference to waking hypnosis. He anticipated Erickson's studies of the post-hypnotic state, and also investigated the relationship between hypnotist and the subject. His book has long been considered one of the best possible introductions to the study of hypnosis and was one of the first pieces of literature to objectively separate hypnosis from the mystical elements which surround it.

Section 13. Other Physicians of the Era

The first reported use of hypnosis utilized as an anesthetic occurred on April 12, 1829, when Jules Cleznet, a French surgeon, performed a breast operation. The first reported uses of hypnosis in America were in 1843, one year after Braid coined the term, in New York, Ohio, Illinois and Missouri by Doane, Dugas and others. Crile's contribution to hypnotic literature was that he recognized that even though a patient was "unconscious" during inhalation anesthesia, that the greater part of his brain was still awake, and nerve impulses could still reach the brain producing cerebral depression and other undesirable manifestations. Dupuytren, the famous French surgeon who is best known for his work on contractures, made the statement that "pain kills like hemorrhage," and indeed many patients of that era of medicine preferred death to extreme pain. William Kroger, a well-known obstetrician hypnotist, reported the decline of the use of hypnoanesthesia following the development of chemoanesthesia.

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