 One of his first and most important patients was Victor Race, a 23-year-old peasant in the employ of the Puységur family.Race was easily "magnetized" by Puységur, but displayed a strange form of sleeping trance not before seen in the early history of Mesmerism.Puységur noted the similarity between this sleeping trance and natural sleep-walking or somnambulism, and he named it "artificial somnambulism".