Dental Hypnosis: Hypnosis in Dentistry

How a Paris dentist, a royal investigation and a Canadian gallbladder shaped the history of dental hypnosis

In 1980, a Canadian dentist named Victor Rausch lay on an operating table in Ontario and told the surgical team he wouldn’t need an anaesthetic.

They were about to remove his gallbladder. That meant a long incision through the abdominal wall, followed by cutting, clamping and stitching deep inside the body. Rausch had no general anaesthetic, no spinal block, and no local injection. What he had was years of practice using hypnosis on nervous patients in his own dental chair, and the conviction that he could do it to himself.

He stayed awake through the whole operation. He later described feeling pressure and tugging, but no pain worth mentioning, and he chatted with the staff while they worked. He published an account of it in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis.

It sounds like a modern stunt. In fact, it was the latest chapter in a story that runs through Parisian salons, a royal investigation, a Calcutta hospital and two American dentists. One of them would change medicine forever, and the other would end his life in a New York jail.

A tub, some iron rods and a magnetised apricot tree

The story begins in the 1770s with Franz Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician who believed an invisible fluid flowed through all living things. Illness, he said, was a blockage in this “animal magnetism,” and he could clear it.

By the 1780s Mesmer was the sensation of Paris. His patients sat around a large wooden tub, the baquet, filled with water and iron filings. They gripped iron rods sticking out of it, held hands to form a chain, and waited while Mesmer moved among them in a lilac silk coat. Soft music played. Before long, someone would shriek, laugh, weep or collapse into convulsions. Mesmer called these episodes “crises,” and they were the point of the treatment.

In 1784, King Louis XVI ordered an investigation. The commission he appointed was one of the most remarkable panels ever assembled:

Benjamin Franklin, then the American envoy to France
Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the doctor whose name would soon be attached to a very different device.

They designed some of the first blinded experiments in scientific history. In the most famous one, in Franklin’s garden at Passy, a young man was told that one particular apricot tree had been magnetised. He was led blindfolded from tree to tree, and he grew more and more agitated. At the fourth tree he collapsed. It was the wrong tree. None of them had been magnetised.

The commission’s verdict was that there was no magnetic fluid. The effects were real, but they came from “imagination.” They meant this as a dismissal. Two centuries later, it reads more like a discovery.

The tooth that came out in silence

Mesmerism survived its royal debunking, and some doctors began to notice something odd. Patients in a mesmeric trance didn’t seem to feel pain.

In 1837, a Paris dentist named Jean-Étienne Oudet reported that he had pulled a tooth from a mesmerised woman who showed no sign of discomfort. He presented the case to the French Academy of Medicine, where it was received with deep suspicion.

The suspicion turned to outrage in England. In 1842, a surgeon named W. Squire Ward amputated a labourer’s leg above the knee in Nottinghamshire while the man was in a mesmeric trance. The patient lay calm and quiet throughout. When the case was presented to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society in London, one of its leading members, Marshall Hall, had a simple explanation: the man must have been faking. Apparently he had trained himself to lie still while his leg was sawn off, just to fool the doctors.

Meanwhile, a Manchester surgeon named James Braid had watched a travelling stage mesmerist and decided there was no magnetism involved at all. What was happening, he said, was a state of fixed, focused attention. In 1843 he gave it a new name, borrowed from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep: hypnotism.

Braid later realised the name was misleading, since hypnotised people aren’t asleep, but by then it had stuck.

The dentists who killed the trance

Then dentistry changed everything, in a way that very nearly finished hypnosis off.

In December 1844, a dentist in Hartford, Connecticut, named Horace Wells went to a travelling show where volunteers inhaled “laughing gas.” He noticed that one man gashed his leg badly while under its influence and didn’t seem to notice. The next day, Wells inhaled nitrous oxide himself and had a colleague pull one of his teeth. He felt nothing.

A few weeks later, Wells demonstrated the technique at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It went badly. The patient cried out, possibly because he hadn’t been given enough gas, and the watching medical students hissed and shouted “Humbug!” Wells left in disgrace.

In October 1846, his former partner, a dentist named William Morton, returned to the same hospital with ether. Surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumour from the neck of a patient called Gilbert Abbott, who slept through it. Warren turned to the audience and declared that this was no humbug. The room where it happened is still called the Ether Dome.

Wells’s life unravelled. He became dependent on chloroform, and in 1848, in New York, he was arrested after throwing acid at women in the street while intoxicated. Days later, at the age of 33, he took his own life in his cell.

Within a few years, ether and chloroform had swept the world, and mesmeric surgery was finished. In Calcutta, the Scottish surgeon James Esdaile had performed hundreds of operations on patients in a trance, including the removal of huge tumours. His results were dismissed by sceptics who claimed his Indian patients simply didn’t feel pain the way Europeans did. Once chemical anaesthesia arrived, nobody needed to argue the point any more.

So dentists had helped open the door to the trance, and two dentists slammed it shut.

Back in the chair

Hypnosis never quite disappeared, though, and in the twentieth century it crept back into dentistry. Dentists noticed what chemistry couldn’t fix. A local anaesthetic can numb a tooth, but it can’t touch the dread that keeps people away from the dentist for years. That fear drives avoidance, and avoidance turns small problems into big ones.

By the mid-twentieth century, enough dentists were using hypnosis to calm patients that the practice had its own name, hypnodontics, and its own professional societies. Victor Rausch was one of those dentists. His gallbladder operation was an extreme demonstration of something his patients experienced every day in milder form.

The same idea has since returned to the operating theatre. Some hospitals now combine hypnosis with local anaesthetic for selected operations, an approach explored in our article on hypnosis surgery.

What the scanners revealed

So what was actually happening to Oudet’s patient, or Ward’s labourer, or Rausch?

In 1997, a team at the University of Montreal led by Pierre Rainville found part of the answer. They put hypnotised volunteers’ hands in hot water while scanning their brains. Some volunteers were given suggestions that the heat felt more unpleasant; others were told it felt less unpleasant. The water never changed temperature.

The brain region that registers the raw sensation barely changed either. But activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area tied to how much pain bothers us, rose and fell with the suggestions. Hypnosis wasn’t blocking the signal. It was changing the suffering attached to it.

Franklin’s commission had been right that it was “imagination.” What they couldn’t have known is that imagination, in this sense, shows up on a brain scan.

What the modern trials say

Today’s research on dental hypnosis is less dramatic than Rausch’s gallbladder, and more useful.

In 2015, Heide Glaesmer and colleagues in Germany studied 102 patients having teeth removed. Those who had hypnosis added to their usual care felt significantly less anxious during the procedure, though not afterwards. It helped exactly when they needed it.

In 2024, a review led by Serge Steenen pulled together 173 randomised trials of treatments for adult dental anxiety. It found moderate-certainty evidence that hypnosis reduces anxiety during oral surgery. The average effect was small, but some people respond far more strongly than others.

There are still gaps:

Gagging. The gag reflex is one of the most common reasons people say they want dental hypnosis. Yet when Cochrane reviewers searched for proper trials in 2019, they found none that met their standards.
Children’s injections. For needle pain in children, the reviewers found one small trial, with 29 children, that looked promising, and they rated it very uncertain.

The last word goes to Franklin

Hypnosis didn’t turn out to be a mysterious fluid or a stage trick. It is what Braid suspected: a focused state of attention, in which expectation and suggestion can reshape how an experience feels.

Victor Rausch showed what the mind can do at its most extreme. For most of us, the goal is more modest: getting through the hardest minute in the dental chair a little calmer than before. Franklin would probably have called that imagination. He’d have been right.

Dental Hypnosis: Hypnosis in Dentistry

A tub, some iron rods and a magnetised apricot tree

The tooth that came out in silence

The dentists who killed the trance

Back in the chair

What the scanners revealed

What the modern trials say

The last word goes to Franklin

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