But there is good reason to believe that Mesmer's treatment was a real factor in his cures, for in many cases the patient had been treated by orthodox methods for years without effect. Perhaps, as the doctors said, it was "only the recuperative force of Nature", but if the doctors could not set that force to work, and Mesmer somehow could, he is just as much entitled to the credit of the cure as if he had done it by bleeding or drugging. However, by one sort of persecution or another, he was driven out of Paris, and more or less discredited. After a visit to England, he retired to Switzerland, where he lived in obscurity until his death in 1815. The method was kept alive by various disciples, such as the Marquis de Puységur, Dupotet, Deleuze, and many more, but in an amateurish sort of way. The first-named found that in one of his patients he could induce a trance state which showed peculiar features. In trance, the man knew all that he knew when awake, but when awake he knew nothing of what had happened in trance. This second condition thus seemed to be equivalent to an enlargement of personality. Both in England and France the medical side came to the front again, in the hands of Braid (a Manchester surgeon who first used the term "hypnotism", from Greek _hypnos_, sleep, and whose book _Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep_ was published in 1843), Liébeault, Bernheim, Elliotson, and Esdaile. Elliotson and Esdaile still believed in a magnetic effluence, but the idea was given up by Braid and the "Nancy school" (the investigators who followed the lines of Liébeault of Nancy), for it was found that patients could be hypnotised without passes or strokings or any manipulation. Braid told his patients to gaze fixedly at a bright object, _e.g._, his lancet. Liébeault produced sleep by talking soothingly or commandingly filling the patient's mind with the idea of sleep. In some cases it was found that patients could hypnotise themselves by an effort of will (this was confirmed more recently by Dr Wingfield's experiments with athletic undergraduates at Cambridge), and this disposed of the hitherto supposedly necessary "magnetic effluence" from the operator. The most modern opinion is pretty much the same. Dr Tuckey, who learnt his method from Liébeault himself, and who practised for twenty years in the West End of London, is convinced that the whole thing is suggestion. So is Dr Bramwell, who shares with Dr Tuckey the leading position among hypnotic practitioners in England. The latter, it may be remarked, was the first qualified medical man to write an important book on the subject in English, after Braid.