History
Since the 1840s hypnosis has been used for anaesthesia. Around the same time, chemical anaesthetics became widespread. One particularly famous example was a Doctor Esdaille who did 358 operations in India reported, back then. His name has been passed down to us as the name for the state of hypnotic coma, used in surgery.
Our materialist traditions of thinking and science have been very against mind power. These attitudes are the product of the enlightenment of the 1700s and later resistance to the subjectivity of magical thinking in religion. As far back as the 1770s and 1780’s Benjamin Franklin was part of a French royal enquiry into Mesmerism (the early version of Western hypnosis) said it was “all in the imagination”. It was under a mistaken framework that trivialises the power of the mind to affect the body, under the right conditions.
James Braid in the 1840s-50s realised the first step in our modern approaches when he realised that self-hypnosis was possible and that he could do what Mesmerists did for himself. His insight was the beginning of the realisation it was a collaborative process, but still, focus on the internal focus on the subjective experience.
Milton Erickson introduced another level in adding the insight that it was an interpersonal process that emerged at the relationship between the hypnotist and client.
This video
This video is old now, and the numbers are up to 9000+ operations done at this hospital in Belgium.