and came across a site called occultopedia.com. The domain name makes me tend to take all written here with a grain of salt, but they say Anton Mesmer discovered hypnotism in the 1770s. He was an Austrian physician and called his discovery 'animal magnetism'. It was also called mesmerism and spread through Europe as a therapeutic technique. It was discovered that subjects felt no pain under surgery, and that in some cases there were side effects of a deep magnetized trance including clairvoyance, telepathy, remote viewing and eyeless vision.

So, I agree with Tori, hypnosis becomes a possibility.

James Braid, a Scottish surgeon, coined the term 'hypnosis' from the Greek word for sleep, advanced the study of the subject in the 1840's.