The words hypnosis and hypnotism both come from the term neurohypnosis (nervous sleep), they were all coined by Etienne Felix d'Henin de Cuvilliers in the 1820s. The term hypnosis comes from the Greek ὑπνος hypnos, "sleep", and the suffix -ωσις -osis, or from ὑπνόω hypnooō, "put to sleep" (the basis of aorist hypnōs-) and the suffix -is. These words were popularized in English by the Scottish surgeon James Brade (to whom they are sometimes mistakenly attributed) around 1841. Braid based his practice on a method developed by Franz Mesmer and his followers (which was called "mesmerism" or "animal magnetism"), but differed in his theory as to how the procedure worked. In ancient Russia, hypnosis was called "enchantment", and hypnotized people were called "charmed" or "enchanted".
Abbot Faria, a Catholic monk, was one of the pioneers of the scientific study of hypnosis, continuing the work of Franz Mesmer. Unlike Mesmer, who claimed that hypnosis was mediated by "animal magnetism," Faria believed that it worked solely through the power of suggestion. Soon hypnosis began to find its way into the world of modern medicine. The use of hypnosis in the medical field has become popular thanks to surgeons and therapists such as Elliotson and James Esdale, and researchers such as James Brade, who have helped uncover the biological and physical benefits of hypnosis. According to his writings, Brade began to hear reports of various Oriental meditation practices shortly after the publication of his first publication on hypnosis, Neuropnology (1843). He first discussed some of these Oriental practices in a series of articles entitled Magic, Mesmerism, Hypnotism, etc., from a historical and physiological point of view. He drew analogies between his own practice of hypnosis and various forms of Hindu yogic meditation, and other ancient spiritual practices, especially those involving voluntary burial and apparent hibernation of a person. Brade's interest in these practices stems from his study of Dabistan-i Mazahib, the "School of Religions", an ancient Persian text describing a wide range of Eastern religious rituals, beliefs and practices. Although he completely rejected the transcendental or metaphysical interpretation given to these phenomena, Braid acknowledged that these descriptions of Oriental practices confirm his opinion that the effects of hypnosis can be produced alone, without the presence of anyone else (as he had already proved to his own satisfaction by experiments that he conducted in November 1841); and he saw correlations between many "metaphysical" Oriental practices and his own "rational" neurohypnotism, and completely rejected all the fluid theories and magnetic practices of the Mesmerists.
Avicenna (980-1037), a Persian physician, documented the characteristics of the state of "trance" (hypnotic trance) in 1027. Hypnosis was rarely used as a medical device at that time; the German physician Franz Mesmer reintroduced it in the 18th century.
Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) believed that there is a magnetic force or "fluid" in the universe, called "animal magnetism", which affects the health of the human body. He experimented with magnets to influence this field to induce healing. By about 1774, he came to the conclusion that the same effect could be created by passing his hands in front of the subject's body, which would later be called "Mesmeric Passes".
In 1784, at the request of King Louis XVI, two royal commissions on animal magnetism were specifically commissioned (separately) to investigate the claims of a certain Charles d'Eslon (1750-1786), a disgruntled disciple of Mesmer, about the existence of an essential (and not metaphorical, as Mesmer assumed) "animal magnetism", "magnetic animal", and similarly a physical "magnetic fluid", "magnetic liquid". Among the researchers were scientist Antoine Lavoisier, electricity and terrestrial magnetism expert Benjamin Franklin and pain relief expert Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
The members of the Commission investigated d'Eslon's practice; and, although they unconditionally admitted that Mesmer's "cures" were indeed "cures," they did not investigate whether (or not) Mesmer initiated these "cures". Notably, in their studies of the d'Eslon procedures, they conducted an extensive series of randomized controlled trials, the experimental protocols of which were developed by Lavoisier, including the use of both "fictitious" and "genuine" procedures and, importantly, the first use of "blindfolding" for both researchers and their subjects.
As a result of their investigations, both Commissions concluded that there was no evidence to support d'Eslon's claim of the substantial physical existence of either his alleged "animal magnetism" or his alleged "magnetic fluid"; and in the process they determined that all the effects they observed could be directly attributed to physiological (rather than metaphysical) action, namely, that all experimentally observed phenomena can be directly attributed to "contact", "imagination" and (or) "imitation". Eventually Mesmer left Paris and returned to Vienna to practice Mesmerism. Following the conclusions of the French committee, Dugald Stewart, an influential academic philosopher of the "Scottish School of Common Sense", called on doctors in his "Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind" (1818) to save the elements of Mesmerism by replacing the supernatural theory of "animal magnetism" with a new interpretation based on "common sense", the laws of physiology and psychology. During Braid's time, the Scottish School of Common Sense introduced the dominant theories of academic psychology, and Braid refers to other philosophers of this tradition in all his writings. Therefore, Braid revised the theory and practice of Mesmerism and developed his own method of hypnosis as a more rational alternative based on common sense.