Abstract
<jats:p>The review article of the book by James Braid, "Neuropnology or the rationale of nervous sleep, considered in connection with animal magnetism," is intended to draw attention to the treatise of the outstanding surgeon and hypnologist of the 19th century, who was the first to color the physiological interpretation of the previously mystical method of hypnosis under the monopoly of Mesmerists. The book itself is dated 1843, published in Edinburgh by Andrew Shortrida Publishing house, and in 2026 it was digitized and translated for the library of the Chelyabinsk Institute of Psychoanalysis, where advanced hypnosis techniques are taught – the legacy of great scientists such as Sigmund Freud, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov, interpreted and refined by Alexander Vitalievich Savchenkov. By right of privacy, it can be assumed that the concept of "nervous sleep" introduced by Braide, his physiological interpretation of hypnotic phenomena and the standardized method of gaze fixation not only set the framework for the clinical and experimental study of hypnosis in 19th-century medicine, but also presumably influenced the French clinic (including the Salpetriere line), the work of J. M. Charcot, who interpreted hypnosis as a nervous state and used it in the study of hysteria; for clinical practice, J. Breuer and Z. Freud, who applied the idea of the hypnotic tradition to cure pathological experiences. It is known that the insufficiency of the hypnotic approach led the latter to the method of free associations. But one should not underestimate the objectivist program of I. P. Pavlov, for whom hypnosis became a model of inhibition of cortical processes and special states of higher nervous activity. Being familiar with the treatise "Neuropnology", one can find its trace on the formation of several later schools of hypnosis: physiological (Charcot, Pavlov), psychotherapeutic (Breuer, Freud) and clinico-suggestive (Nancy), with an emphasis on the systematic and step-by-step reproducible technique previously described by Braid, his notes on the dependence of phenomena on the nervous system and of course, there is no return to mystical interpretations of the process and the result.</jats:p>