Introduction

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, medical hypnotism arrived in Britain provoking worries among the public and medical practitioners about its safety and professionalism. The fin de siècle was a time of great change and societal anxiety in Britain. Medical hypnotism was debated in journals, newsprint and fiction beside other worries like degeneracy, decadence and the end of empire. The New Hypnotists, Charles Lloyd Tuckey, John Milne Bramwell, George Kingsbury and Robert Felkin were Victorian physicians who battled the medical orthodoxy and courted public opinion to legitimise and popularise medical hypnotism and therapeutic trance. Trance had difficult links to mesmerism, entertainment, spiritualism and the occult which made it highly problematic for the newly established professional, materialist medical profession. In part as a result of the efforts of the New Hypnotists, medical hypnotism left a significant imprint on British cultural life and there was considerable interplay between the spheres of medical/scientific culture and popular culture which are often considered to be separate. Hypnotism and suggestion became an important component of psychotherapeutics, an eclectic and almost forgotten range of pre-war psychological therapies.