Pre-History to 3,000 BCE

 (BCE = BC,  and CE = AD in modern history writing.)

• Shamans and medicine people learned early on to make suggestions to the sick and convince them they would get well.  Many of the remedies they employed were given in an atmosphere of high excitement, accompanied with drumming, the use of fire, and other mysteries.   

• Kings and leaders, including Genghis Khan, found their messages controlled the bicameral minds of early human beings.  

3,000 BCE to 1,700 CE

• Wong Tai, the Father of Chinese Medicine (2,600 BCE) left details of trance-producing incantations and healing activities.  

• The Jewish Scriptures, the Talmud, and the Hindu Vedas gave detailed accounts of procedures we might consider today to be hypnosis.  

• Hipprocates, the Father of Western Medicine, wrote about hypnotic incidents.  We get the term "hypnosis" from the Greek word for sleep.  

• Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples cured illnesses with a technique that has been described by some scholars as hypnotherapy. 

1,700 CE to 1,900 CE

• In 1774, Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, an Austrian physician, witnessed exorcisms  by Fr. Maximilian Hell, who touched subjects with an iron cross.  Mesmer developed a practice he called “Animal Magnetism.”   His hypnotic work was dismissed by a French committee of inquiry, including the American Minister in Paris, Benjamin Franklin.  Franklin declared it was the imagination of Mesmer’s subjects rather than his power that produced the beneficial results. 

•   Surgeon John Elliotson, a leading doctor in London, performed 1,834 surgical operations using magnetism. 

•  James Braid, a Scottish physician, renamed the technique hypnosis from the Greek word for sleep.  It was becoming increasingly obvious that it was the client’s imagination that made hypnotism work, and not any power possessed by the hypnotist. 

• In India,  British surgeon James Esdaile performed thousands of operations using hypno-anesthesia.  His important contribution was officially ignored.  

• In France, a country physician, Ambroise August Liebault, treated some of his patients with hypnosis.  He was the first man to actually teach that hypnosis is suggestion accepted by clients, and not any kind of power that hypnotists exercise over them.  This is now taken for granted by professional hypnotists. 

 1,500 CE to the Present

• French pharmacist Émile Coué developed theories of waking hypnosis and auto-suggestion that he successfully brought from France to the United States.  He finally established the important concept that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis.  

• In America, Dr. Milton Erickson developed new psychological techniques that revolutionized the clinical practice of hypnotism.  

• Hypnotism was used to treat trauma cases in the two World Wars. 

• Dentists began to use hypnotic-anesthesia regularly in their practices, and recognition of the therapeutic practice of hypnotism was granted by dental and medical associations in several countries. 

• Since the 1950s, professional associations for hypnotists have been formed in many countries, including the USA and Britain.  

• National laws have recognized the validity of hypnotism, whether practiced by medical doctors or by professionally certified lay practitioners.

•   Many new techniques have been developed to enhance the effectiveness of the work done by hypnotists, including Light and Sound induction devices.

Some famous historical personalities 

who used hypnosis and auto-suggestion 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91),

Frederick Chopin (1810-1849)

Thomas Edison (1847-1931)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Henry Ford (1863-1947)

Winston S. Churchill (1874-1965)

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)