Next came the era of Elliotson in England, and of Esdaile in his hospital at Calcutta. Their method lay in mesmeric passes, Elliotson's object being mostly the direct cure of maladies, Esdaile's a deep anæsthesia, under which he performed hundreds of serious operations. His success in this direction was absolutely unique;--was certainly (setting aside supernormal phenomena) the most extraordinary performance in mesmeric history. Had not his achievements been matters of official record, the apparent impossibility of repeating them would probably by this time have been held to have disproved them altogether. The next great step which hypnotism made was actually regarded by Elliotson and his group as a hostile demonstration. When Braid discovered that hypnosis could be induced without passes, the mesmerists felt that their theory of a sanative effluence was dangerously attacked. And this was true; for that theory has in fact been thrown into the shade,--too completely so, in my opinion,--first by the method used in Braid's earlier work of the production of hypnotic phenomena by means of the upward and inward squint, and secondly, by the much wider and more important discovery of the efficacy of mere _suggestion_, set forth in his later writings. Braid's hypnotic experience differed much from that of hypnotists before and after him. His early method of the convergent squint produced results which no one else has been able to produce; and the state which it induced appeared in his view to arrest and dissipate even maladies of which neither hypnotist nor patient had thought as capable of cure. But he afterwards abandoned this method in favour of simple verbal suggestion, as he found that what was required was merely to influence the ideas of his patients. He showed further that all so-called phrenological phenomena and the supposed effects of magnets, metals, etc., could be produced equally well by suggestion.[59] He also laid stress on the subject's power both of resisting the commands of the operator and of inducing hypnotic effects in himself without the aid of an operator. To my mind the most important novelty brought out by Braid was the possibility of self-hypnotisation by concentration of will. This inlet into human faculty, in some ways the most important of all, has been as yet but slackly followed. But it is along with Braid's group of ideas that I should place those of an able but much inferior investigator, Dr. Fahnestock, although it is not clear that the latter knew of Braid's work. His book, _Statuvolism, or Artificial Somnambulism_ (Chicago, 1871), has received less attention than it merits;--partly perhaps from its barbarous title, partly from the crudities with which it is encumbered, and partly from the fact of its publication at what was at that date a town on the outskirts of civilisation. Fahnestock seems to have obtained by self-suggestion with healthy persons results in some ways surpassing anything since recorded.