James Braid (1795–1860) was a surgeon who coined the term hypnotism. Born in Scotland, he later moved to Manchester, England, where he witnessed demonstrations by the Swiss mesmerist Charles Lafontaine. Although skeptical of mesmerism, at one demonstration Braid suspected that a participant was not faking. He began a series of experiments on friends and family and discovered that he could induce the trance state by instructing them to stare at a fixed point, which caused paralysis of muscles in the eyelids. This focus on the eyes gave him reason to believe that the phenomenon was a kind of nervous sleep, as is reflected in the title of his most famous work, Neurypnology, an abbreviation of neuro-hypnology. Through subsequent experiments, he realized that the fixation of attention is sufficient for induction. His use of the word monoideism reflects this theoretical change. However, the word hypnotism stuck.