t desideratum has been to find the best
means for regulating and controlling it, so as to render it subservient
to our will for relieving and curing diseases. The modes devised, both
by mesmerists and hypnotists, for these ends, are a real, solid, and
important addition to practical therapeutics.[152:1]

The importance of suggestive healing methods can hardly be
overestimated, and has been emphasized by many writers. Notable among
recent publications on the subject are Dr. T. J. Hudson's work, entitled
"The Law of Psychic Phenomena," and Dr. A. T. Schofield's "Unconscious
Mind." Dr. Pierre Janet, in one of his Lowell Institute lectures, in
Boston, November 3, 1906, remarked that

Before the time of Mesmer the sleep produced by magnetizers
was really the cause of numberless cures. Hypnotism, which has
replaced it little by little since 1840, and has been more
rapidly developed since 1878, differs from its ancestor more
in the interpretation of the phenomena than in the practices
themselves. It has naturally had the same therapeutic
applications, and its methods are probably legitimate.
Hypnotic sleep has had many helpful influences. It is really a
change in the equilibrium of the brain and mental faculties
and produces great modifications in the memory and in
sensibility. Life is indeed a long series of habits to which
we are accustomed; hypnotism changes these habits which in a
normal condition we do not try to modify, and on awakening,
all memory of the change is gone, although its effects may
remain.

Now oftentimes the nervous system becomes fixed in certain
disagreeable or dangerous habits, and the upsetting of these,
the uplifting of the mind from the rut, is of great service.
In the sleep of hypnotism speech, action, methods of thought,
all are changed, there is a cerebral rest, and beneficial
results often follow.

From the period following Braid's contributions up to the
foundation of modern hypnotism, . . . the history of the
subject may be briefly told. The field is occupied largely by
propagandists of one or another of the extravagant forms
of animal magnetism . . . by traveling mesmerists, by
sensationally advertised subjects, and by a small and
unorganized number of scientific men, attempting to stem the
tide of mysticism and error with which the others were