Medicine: Hypnosis for Surgery

The draped woman patient on the operating table at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village was almost ready for surgery. Her left breast was bared for the surgeon’s knife to remove a benign growth. But the patient had been given no anesthesia, was fully conscious. Beside the surgeon stood Chicago’s Dr. William S. Kroger, taking the place of the anesthesiologist. His substitute for anesthesia: hypnosis.

Much of Dr. Kroger’s work was already done. The night before, he had hypnotized the patient in her own room. Now, with only a cue, he was able to assure her that she would feel no pain. To make doubly sure, he gave her instructions to make her lose all sensation in her right hand. Then he told her to put this hand to her chest so that this area too would lose sensation. Satisfied that she was in a deep enough hypnotic state, Dr. Kroger told the surgeon: “Your patient is ready.” For ten minutes, as the surgeon removed the growth and sewed up the wound, Dr. Kroger kept on intoning reassurance to the patient and inducing her to lapse into a deeper hypnotic state. When the operation was over, he alerted her out of it by a pre-arranged signal—a touch on the shoulder. She had no memory of pain, felt no nausea or other discomfort.

To Medical Hypnotist Kroger, this was no stunt but a serious demonstration of the wider use which, he insists, medicine should make of hypnotism, at least in conjunction with anesthesia. This demonstration was viewed last week on closed-circuit TV by physicians at an international meeting of anesthesiologists in Manhattan. Only the week before, he had performed a similar service for a patient in Chicago, Mrs. Roberta Westwood, with an enlarged and overactive thyroid. After four weeks of preparation and a day-before dress rehearsal, Dr. Kroger carried out his hypnoanesthesia at Edgewater Hospital, and most of the patient’s thyroid was cut out in an hour-long operation. Mrs. Westwood wakened as directed, sat up on the operating table, asked for a drink of water and walked to the wheel chair to go back to her room. Said she: “I felt no pain. I could only feel pressure and what seemed like tugging at my throat.”