James Braid (surgeon)

James Braid (surgeon)

James Braid (19 June 1795 – 25 March 1860) was born at Ryelaw House, in the parish of Portmoak, Kinross, Scotland. He was the son of James Braid and Anne Suttie. He married Margaret Mason (or Meason) on 17 November 1813. They had two children, James (born 1822), and a daughter.

A Scottish physician and surgeon, specialising in eye and muscular conditions, Braid was an important and influential pioneer of hypnotism and hypnotherapy. Braid adopted the term "hypnotism" as an abbreviation for "neuro-hypnotism" or nervous sleep (that is, sleep of the nerves), in his lectures of 1841-2, and it is from his influential work that others derived the term "hypnosis" in the 1880s. Braid is regarded by many as the first genuine "hypnotherapist" and the "Father of Modern Hypnotism".

“Although Braid believed that hypnotic suggestion was a valuable remedy in functional nervous disorders, he did not regard it as a rival to other forms of treatment, nor wish in any way to separate its practice from that of medicine in general. He held that whoever talked of a "universal remedy" was either a fool or a knave: similar diseases often arose from opposite pathological conditions, and the treatment ought to be varied accordingly. He objected being called a hypnotist; he was, he said, no more a "hypnotic" than a "castor-oil" doctor.” — John Milne Bramwell (1852–1925)