The Doctor Who Put His Patients to Sleep for Weeks

In a medical practice in 1880s Stockholm, some of Dr Otto Wetterstrand’s patients went to sleep and didn’t properly wake up for weeks.

They weren’t in comas, and they weren’t drugged. They were hypnotised. Wetterstrand believed that keeping certain patients in a deep hypnotic sleep, not for minutes but for days on end, could heal illnesses that nothing else would touch.

The doctor from Skövde

Otto Georg Wetterstrand was born in 1845 in Skövde, a small town in western Sweden. He studied medicine at Uppsala and received his medical licence from Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute in 1871. Like many ambitious doctors of his generation, he was drawn to the new science coming out of France.

In the town of Nancy, Hippolyte Bernheim and the country doctor Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault had shown that ordinary people could be hypnotised, and that hypnotic suggestion could relieve a startling range of complaints. Wetterstrand became one of their disciples and is credited as the first Swedish doctor to use suggestive psychotherapy. He soon became one of the most famous hypnotists in Europe.

His book on hypnotism in practical medicine appeared in Swedish in 1888, in German in 1891 and in English in 1897. It lists the conditions he treated: insomnia, headaches, neuralgia, paralysis, stuttering, epilepsy, asthma, drug habits, rheumatism, and many more.

Sleep as medicine

What made Wetterstrand famous, and controversial, was his use of prolonged hypnotic sleep.

Most hypnotists of the day used short trances lasting a few minutes or perhaps an hour. Wetterstrand went much further. A 1902 report in a British medical journal described how, instead of short sessions, he advocated the curative effects of prolonged sleep. He treated epilepsy and other serious conditions by keeping patients in a hypnotic trance for three or four weeks.

His reasoning was simple. If a few minutes of deep rest and suggestion could help, why not give an exhausted or overwrought nervous system weeks of it? A German hypnosis manual from 1909 noted that he had long used weeks-long “continuous sleep” for states of exhaustion and impending agitation, with satisfactory results.

To modern eyes, it raises obvious questions. How were patients fed and cared for? How deep was the “sleep”, really? And how much did his results owe to rest, attention and expectation rather than hypnosis itself? Those questions are worth asking. But in an era with few effective treatments for nervous complaints, Wetterstrand’s approach was gentle compared with many alternatives.

The hypnotised night guards

Wetterstrand wasn’t the only one testing how far hypnotic sleep could go. The same 1902 report described an even stranger experiment by the Swiss psychiatrist Auguste Forel at Zurich’s Burghölzli asylum.

Forel reportedly hypnotised many of his asylum attendants, both men and women. For ten years, he used hypnosis in the night watching of dangerous patients. Warders were hypnotised and trained to sleep beside these patients and to wake the instant they heard one attempt to get out of bed. Suggestion was used to block out every other sound. The report claimed these warders could perform night duty for six months, and work hard all day, without showing signs of fatigue.

It’s a remarkable claim, and one worth treating with healthy scepticism. But it shows how seriously some of the leading psychiatrists of the age took the idea that sleep itself could be shaped by suggestion.

A darker echo in Sydney

The idea of treating patients with prolonged sleep didn’t die with Wetterstrand. It returned in the 20th century in a very different form, and one chapter of that story happened in Australia.

From the 1960s to the late 1970s, at Chelmsford Private Hospital in Sydney, psychiatrist Harry Bailey used what he called “deep sleep therapy”. There was no hypnosis. Patients were kept unconscious for days or weeks with heavy doses of barbiturates, often combined with electroconvulsive therapy. The results were catastrophic. Many patients died or suffered lasting harm, and a New South Wales Royal Commission in the late 1980s condemned the treatment.

The contrast with Wetterstrand is striking. His patients slept through suggestion. Bailey’s were held under by drugs. One approach relied on the patient’s own responsiveness, and the other took control of the body entirely.

What happened to prolonged hypnotic sleep?

It faded. As medicine developed effective drugs, and as psychiatry moved towards psychoanalysis and later towards scientific trials, weeks-long hypnotic sleep came to seem impractical and unproven. Wetterstrand died in 1907, and his method largely went with him.

But his books survive, and they are now in the public domain, free for anyone to read. They’re a window into a moment when hypnosis was at the very edge of medicine: full of ambition, hard to measure, and pursued by doctors who believed, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, that the sleeping mind could heal the body.

Today’s research is far more modest, and far more careful. Studies like the Zurich fish experiment, described in our article on hypnosis and sleep, suggest hypnotic suggestion really can change how deeply people sleep, for some of them, for one night. It’s a long way from four weeks in a trance. But in its quiet way, it suggests Wetterstrand was onto something.

Further reading

1. Wetterstrand OG. Hypnotism and Its Application to Practical Medicine. Translated by Henrik G. Petersen. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897. Public domain, via the Wellcome Collection: https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/pdf/b21912403
2. “Hypnotism” (report of a lecture by J. Milne Bramwell), 1902. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5268971/
3. Review of Wetterstrand’s Hypnotism and Its Application to Practical Medicine, 1897. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8766042/
4. Gerling R. Der Praktische Hypnotiseur. 1909. Projekt Gutenberg-DE: https://projekt-gutenberg.org/authors/reinhard-gerling/books/der-praktische-hypnotiseur/chapter/9
5. “Otto Georg Wetterstrand.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Georg_Wetterstrand

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