Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep

James Braid's Neurypnology, or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, published by John Churchill in 1843, is the primary text that introduced the term hypnotism, reframing what mesmerists had described as a magnetic fluid passing between operator and subject as instead a physiological and psychological phenomenon induced through fixed attention, work that founded hypnotism as a subject of medical rather than purely occult inquiry. Its strength is that it is the original primary source for a term and a reframing that shaped how hypnotic phenomena have been studied ever since. Its limit is that Braid's own nineteenth century physiological explanations have since been superseded by modern neuroscience and psychology's understanding of hypnotic states, so a claim about how hypnosis actually works should rely on current research, with this source cited for the term's origin and reframing rather than for a correct modern mechanism.