Does hypnosis really work? Again, that is up to debate. However almost all signs point to yes. Researchers are constantly finding new data that backs up the theory that hypnosis does indeed work.
How long have people been doing hypnosis?
In 3000 B.C. when the father of Chinese medicine, Wong Tai, wrote about healing techniques that involved using WORDS to help cure people.
In 1500 B.C. The Greek physician Asclepius carries out healing; later he is worshipped as the god of healing. Greeks, then ROmans, develop temples of sleep, where patients are told of their cure while dreaming!
In 1000 B.C. Egyptians have temples where priests carry out healing by word and touch.
In 500 B.C. King Pyrrhus of Epirus is able to cure by the touch of his big toe.
In 70 B.C. The Roman emperor Vespasian is said to be able to cure by the power of touch.
In 1060, the English king, Edward the Confessor, is said to have the power to cure by touching.
In 1100: King Philip 1 of France is reputed to have healing powers in his hands.
In 1493: Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), the Swiss-born academic who believed that a form of magnetism controls our health, is born.
In 1660: King Charles II of England uses the Royal Touch to cure his subjects.
In 1770s: Franz Anton Mesmer practices as a successful doctor in Vienna, and is a friend of Leopold Mozart and his brilliant musician son Wolfgang.
In 1774: A Jesuit priest, Maximilian Hell, who was the royal astronomer in Vienna, Austria, uses hypnotic techniques and metal plates. Mesmer borrows the same technique to cure a patient. He discovered animal magnetism.
In 1775-1776: A priest, Father Gassner, performs a form of stage hypnosis. His shows are witnessed by Mesmer, who claims Gassner is using animal magnetism.
In 1778: Rejected by the Austrian scientific community after the controversy of the case of Maria von Paradis, Franz Mesmer moves from Vienna to Paris.
In 1784: Benjamin Franklin heads up a committee of inquiry set up by King Louis XVI in Paris to examine Mesmer's claims. He dismisses the phenomenon of mesmerism and animal magnetism as all in the mind.
In 1784: Armand, Marquis de Puységur, a former student of Mesmer, discovers a form of deep trance he calls somnambulism.
In 1785 The Marquis de Lafayette tries but fails to impress George Washington with the benefits of mesmerism.
In 1808: British surgeon and proponent of the use of hypnosis in surgery, James, Esdaile is born.
In 1814: A Portuguese priest, Abbé Faria, develops the theory of suggestion and autosuggestion, and realizes the key to hypnotism: that everything takes place in the subject's mind, not in the mind of the mesmorist.
In 1821: First reports are heard of painless dentistry and surgery in France using magnetism.
In 1826: A French scientific commission gives qualified backing to mesmerism.
In 1830s: John Elliotson, president of the Royal Medicine and Surgical Society of London, shows an interest in animal magnetism and uses trances to perform 1,834 surgical operations.
In 1830s-50s, offshoots of mesmerism become popular in America.
In 1836: A teenage boy in Boston has a tooth extracted while under hypnosis.
In 1837: A second French commission rejects the therapeutic claims of mesmerism.
In 1840: A British surgeon in INdia, James Esdaile, performs hundreds of major operations - even amputations - on patients using mesmerism.
In 1840: The Magnetic Society is formed in New Orleans to study hypnosis and its effects.
In 1841: A Scottish eye doctor and physician, James Braid, sees a demonstration of mesmerism and later uses it to perform pain-free surgery.
In 1843: Braid publishes a book in which he renames mesmerism "hypnosis" from the Green name for the god of sleep, Hypnos.
In 1851: This is the year of the "mesmeric mania" in Britain.
In 1885: Sigmund Freud works under French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who uses hypnosis in his Paris clinic. Freud becomes a public champion of hypnosis.
In 1892: The British Medical Association reports favorably to the use of hypnosis in medicine.
In 1894: George du Maurier publishes a novel, Triliby, whose antihero Svengali has influenced generations about the nature of hypnosis.
In 1897: Freud turns his back on hypnosis in favor of the technique of free association.
In 1913: Ormond McGill, one of the great American hypnotists of the twentieth century, is born in Palo Alto, California.
In 1914: World War 1 commences. There is renewed interest in hypnosis, owing to the number of paralytic and amnesia cases with psychogenic origin, and a scarcity of psychiatrists available.
In 1919: The French expert Pierre Janet published a book predicting the re-emergence of hypnosis.
In 1923: Milton Erickson attends a lecture by the academic Clark Hull on hypnosis at Wisconsin University, and embarks on a journey to become America's most distinguished hypnotist.
In 1925-47: Use of hypnosis in dentistry is developed in the United States.
In 1930s: The flamboyant American hypnotist Milton H. Erickson establishes his reputation as a leading authority on clinical hypnosis: he is a master of indirect hypnosis.
In 1930: Clark Hill is forced to stop experiments using students because the authorities of Yale fear the dangers of hypnosis.
In 1940s: Ormond McGill, one of the leading figures in hypnosis in the United States, starts publishing the first of more than thirty influential books on the subject.
In 1943: The psychology professor George Estabrooks published a book claiming that hypnosis could have military uses.
In 1950s: The CIA experiments with hypnosis to interrogate spies and program agents.
In 1950: The word "brainwashing" is first used.
In 1951: A documented case in Sussex, England, in which Dr. A. Mason uses hypnotherapy to cure a teenage boy of the skin disease icthyosis, helps gain acceptance for the medical role of hypnosis.
In 1952: The Hypnotism Act is passed in the U.K. to license stage hypnotists.
In 1955: The British Medical Association recognizes the benefits of hypnosis as a treatment for some ailments and in the relief of pain.
In 1958: The American Medical Association officially accepts the usefulness of hypnosis as a form of therapy.
In 1962: The movie "The Manchurian Candidate" is released, highlighting fears of brainwashing.
In 1980: Milton Erickson dies after a long career in which he influenced whole generations of hypnotherapists.
In 1993: A British woman, Sharron Tabarn, dies following a seizure that occurs five hours after she took part as a volunteer in a stage hypnosis show.
In 1993: The American Psychiatric Association warns that memories recovered in therapy, including hypnosis, could be false.
In 1994: The case of Ms. Tabarn and other incidents of hypnotism are debated in the British Parliament. The government promises a review of the 1952 Hypnotism Act.
In 1995: A panel of experts convened by British Government rules that there is no evidence of serious risk to participants in stage hypnosis. However, certain licensing laws in the 1952 Act are tightened.
In 2001: Results of a Harvard study indicate that brain activity does change people under hypnosis; it backs the argument that there is a specific state of hypnosis.
In 2003-2006: Phone Mistress Isabella Valentine begins performing erotic hypnosis as a form of sexual mind control to relieve sexual gratification in phone sex callers.
