Feeling No Pain P.2

The following article by Jerome Beatty and ads were originally published in the November 1945 issue of The American Magazine (In the public domain https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_American_Magazine_(1906-1956)) Additional photos of Milton H. Erickson are supplied by The Milton H. Erickson Foundation Archives

Edited by Sarah Clinebell, Archives Specialist

Dr. Erickson is 43 years old and became first interested in hypnotism when he was 12, growing up on a Wisconsin farm. Another boy bought for 10 cents a book called, How to Be a Hypnotist. In spite of the detailed instructions, neither boy could hypnotize anybody, and young Milton, looking at the picture, said, “Of course you couldn’t learn to do that for 10 cents. But wait till I grow up. I’m going to be a hypnotist.”

Possibly the book referred to above, but not certain, undated

He was 22 and a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin when, in a psychology class, he first learned how to hypnotize. He returned to the farm that summer and went to work on five of his sisters and a brother and made subjects of them all. From the beginning he took hypnotism seriously. Instead of performing all the usual vaudeville tricks, he studied his subjects and their hypnotic behavior as though he were in a scientific laboratory.

His most satisfactory experience, he told me, came in the kitchen one morning when his littlest sister tipped over the coffeepot and spilled the boiling liquid on one of her shoulders. He had previously taught her to go into a trance instantly and he said quickly, “Go to sleep! Feel no pain!” She went to sleep, he recalled, and felt no pain.

Erickson continued his research at University of Wisconsin, where he was graduated from the college, then from the School of Medicine, specializing in psychiatry.

Dr. Erickson with his parents and siblings, ND

University of Wisconsin Medical School Graduating Class, 1928. Dr. Erickson front row, fourth from the left

He told me about one of his experiments with a football player who was miserable because he had bitten his tongue severely in scrimmage. He hypnotized the football player, Dr. Erickson said, gave him general suggestions about eating only soft food until his tongue healed, then told him that on his way to the next class he would start thinking of his tongue, but when he reached a certain house on the shore of Lake Mendota, he would see something on the lake – perhaps a sailboat – and he would forget about his tongue and remember the sailboat, and keep forgetting until his tongue healed. A pleasant idea would take the place of a painful one. Then he awakened him.

Two weeks later the football player came to Erickson and said, “My tongue is well. Every time I start to think of my tongue I think of a sailboat. What’s a sailboat got to do with my tongue?”

Dr. Erickson interned at the Colorado General Hospital and at the Colorado Psychopathic Hospital, after being thoroughly investigated to see if he was a fit person, for his research in hypnosis at Wisconsin had made some doctors look at him with lifted eyebrows.

When he became assistant physician at the Rhode Island State Hospital for Mental Diseases, he was warned that he must never use hypnotism there, for if the news got around it might ruin the hospital. He abandoned hypnosis until he joined the Research Service of the Worcester, Mass., State Hospital, where the superintendent believed that anything that would help a patient should be used, but even there he proceeded on tiptoe.

Eleven years ago Dr. Erickson joined the staff at Eloise Hospital and Infirmary, where Wayne County has an outstanding hospital for mental patients. He has been careful not to furnish the slightest cause for criticism by the taxpayers. He is there as head of the Department of Psychiatric Research and Training, and he has used no hypnosis on the county’s patients except in a very few rare cases in which the patient and his relatives asked for it, and he insisted that relatives sit in at all the sessions.

Staff photo, Eloise Hospital and Infirmary, 1938. Dr. Erickson front row, third from right.

I am convinced that Dr. Erickson would become a rich man if he wanted to leave Eloise and set up private practice, but he is interested in research and teaching to further the skillful use of hypnosis by other psychiatrists. When he has time to spare he uses it to teach other medical men, who, more and more, are asking if they can’t come to learn his technique. (So please – his secretary asked me to put this in – please don’t write him asking for aid.)

TO BE CONCLUDED IN PART 3….