William S. Kroger

William Saul Kroger (April 14, 1906 – December 4, 1995 ) was an American physician who pioneered the use of hypnosis in medicine and was co-founder and founder of medical societies and academies dedicated to furthering psychosomatic medicine and medical hypnosis.

Though he was trained as a gynecologist/obstetrician, his contributions to the medical field cut across disciplines and specialties in the medical field, including psychiatry, psychosomatic illness and treatment, endocrinology, neurobiology and bioengineering as well as his own specialty of gynecology and obstetrics.

He is the author of the medical textbook Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, considered to be a classic instructional aid in the use of hypnosis in medical settings, as well as co-authoring Psychosomatic Gynecology, Including Problems of Obstetrical Care and Hypnosis and Behavior Modification: Imagery Conditioning, among others.

Early life Kroger was born in Evanston, Illinois.

Kroger's interest in hypnosis began at an early age when his father, Charles Mendel Kroger, hired a local hypnotist to generate publicity for his fur store. The hypnotist deeply hypnotized his assistant, then buried and awoke her. This inspired him to attempt to hypnotize other children in his neighborhood at age 13.

After receiving his bachelor's degree, he joined a psychoanalytic study club, which became the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and underwent his own analysis.

He received his medical training at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, obtaining his Doctor of Medicine in 1930. He pursued his interest in psychotherapy by taking coursework and pursued an expertise in analytic concepts under the direction of Sigmund Freud's student and founder of psychosomatic medicine, Franz Alexander.

A week earlier, he had performed the same procedure on another patient in Chicago who had an enlarged and overactive thyroid. Kroger carried out the "hypnoanesthesia" at Edgewater Hospital, where the patient's thyroid was removed in an hour-long operation. Following the surgery and after being de-hypnotized, the patient stood up from the gurney, asked for a sip of water and walked to her wheelchair to return to her room. She is quoted as saying, "I felt no pain. I could only feel pressure and what seemed like tugging at my throat." He also produced the medical film Hypnosis in Dentistry.

An early member and co-founder of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (SCEH), a professional hypnosis society for researchers founded in 1949, Kroger later co-founded the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis with Milton H. Erickson, which included clinicians into their ranks.

One of the cases Kroger and Douce study in the article is the 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping. The FBI asked Kroger to question a school bus driver who was kidnapped along with 26 children. Under Kroger's hypnosis, the driver was able to recall all but one of the digits on the kidnappers' car's license plate, and the kidnappers were subsequently convicted.

Kroger taught and trained FBI agents in hypnosis techniques and assisted in more than 30 cases, sometimes in conjunction with the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. He also consulted for the Los Angeles Police Department and other law enforcement agencies in the investigation of major crimes.

Private practice Kroger maintained a private practice in Beverly Hills and Palm Springs, California from 1960 until his retirement in 1986.

Death Kroger died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California on December 4, 1995.

Books and journal articles Kroger authored 13 books which include:

Psychosomatic Gynecology, Including Problems of Obstetrical Care (with S.C. Freed), 1951. Kinsey's Myth of Female Sexuality (with E. Bergler), 1954. Psychosomatic Obstetrics, Gynecology and Endocrinology: Including Diseases of Metabolism, 1961. Childbirth with Hypnosis (with J. Steinberg), 1961. Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1963. Hypnosis and Behavior Modification: Imagery Conditioning (with William D. Fezler), 1976.

He contributed the chapters "Hypnosis in Obstetrics" and "Hypnosis in Gynecology" in Prior's System of Obstetrics and Gynecology and to other books.

Kroger has also authored over 200 articles in medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Journal of Psychiatry and The Journal of Sex Research.

Awards 1954 - Third prize for an exhibit on hypnosis at the meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. 1959 - Award of Merit for program chairman of the most successful annual meetings of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. 1963 - Certificate of Merit for best book on hypnosis, Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. 1965 - The Society of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis' Shirley R. Schneck Award "For a physician who has made significant contributions to the development of hypnosis".