In the 1930s a Bedouin tribesman introduced a young Irish doctor to the powers of the subconscious mind. Sixty years later, after doing over four thousand operations using hypnosis. Dr Jack Gibson talks to Joe Griffin.

Joe Griffin: Can I take you back to the beginning, how you became interested in hypnosis because when you qualified as a surgeon it wasn't part of the curriculum.

Dr Jack Gibson: When I was a boy there was a clergyman who used hypnosis for people who were getting seasick and he cured them . I was most impressed by him. Later on when I took up medicine I went to my professor, I told him about hypnosis and he told me that no doctor uses hypnosis, it is only used by quacks. In the Channel Islands a few years later I watched a stage hypnosis show and I saw the possibilities. I asked a psychiatrist if hypnosis could be used to treat an asthma case. He said he could do it himself. He took the asthma case into a mental hospital, the doors were locked, the relatives weren't allowed to see the patient for three days and the patient came back a wreck.

Griffin: He was allegedly using hypnosis?

Gibson: I suppose he knew a bit about it but he didn't know much. It was while practicing surgery in the Middle East as a young graduate that I first encountered the beneficial effect of the controlled use of the subconscious mind. A Bedouin tribesman had a growth on his leg which tracked down between the muscles. He knew it would have to be removed. But he said "I won't have any anaesthetic". I offered him a local anaesthetic but he refused it. As I operated on him, I myself felt that he must be suffering great pain. I actually felt the pain myself. When the operation was over, he said, calmly, "May I see it before you put the dressing on?". It was only later when I learned to operate with hypnosis myself that I realised that he hadn't suffered any pain at all. Then, later on, I was in Africa, about 36 years ago, I was in a practice there, I was the surgical part of the practice. I went to see a man who had a bad chest, his bed was burnt from going to sleep smoking a cigarette at night. I was afraid of him setting the house on fire, for he had children in the house and it was a long way from anyone. I thought the children could be burnt to death. So I thought I'd hypnotise him, he was my first case. He went very deep. I was thrilled by it, and after that I got into it in a big way.

Griffin: Did he stop smoking?

Gibson: I don't know. He responded to my posthypnotic suggestions and I took it for granted he'd stop. I knew nothing about hypnosis then. Nowadays I would get him to confirm that he had stopped.

Griffin: So that was your first case!

Gibson: Then, only three days later, a person rang up. She had a paralysed leg and I suspected it was psychosomatic. So I went out to see her and, sure enough, it was. She got over it in about half an hour. I had enough sense to try to get her to face up to the things that made her leg paralysed.

Griffin: So you were doing psychotherapy as well as hypnosis from that point?

Gibson: Yes. And she was going to have a baby and she had the baby under hypnosis. It was absolutely marvellous.

Griffin: That was some time later?

Gibson: That was about a fortnight later.

Griffin: So, you'd established your credentials with her by getting her leg cured?

Gibson: Yes. After that I used hypnotherapy whenever possible. Later I came back to Ireland and took up a job as a surgeon in the hospital, here in Naas, and a very busy practice it was too.

Griffin: What was the reaction of the doctors here in the hospital when they saw you using hypnosis?

Gibson: Positive. I had no complaints in twenty years of working.

Griffin: So they had an open-minded attitude to it. Even using hypnosis as an anaesthetic?

Gibson: Yes.

Griffin: So how many operations do you think you've performed using hypnosis as an anaesthetic?

Gibson: Over four thousand, but that includes all the simple operations as well. I used it all of the time, for dislocations, for fractures, for people injured in car accidents. Very often they would have had a meal beforehand and of course then, to use anaesthetics, we'd have had to wait a long time for the stomach to empty but, with hypnosis, I could work straight away.

Griffin: Do you think that saved the hospital money?

Gibson: The amount of money saved was enormous.

Griffin: Yes. I was wondering about that. In terms of theatre time and keeping people longer in bed and having more doctors involved.

Gibson: But they never considered that.

Griffin: Something that would be very relevant today, don't you think , when all the state medical services are overburdened financially?

Gibson: Well, they could cut down expenses tremendously. You take a fractured nose, admit to hospital, operate the next day. Whereas I would just take the fellow and hypnotise him and give it a push to straighten it, put on a splint to keep it in place, and then let him home. The cost would be a fraction of the cost of an admission.

Griffin: So do you see a case for doctors and anaesthetists being actually trained in hypnosis and using it?

Gibson: I think all doctors and anaesthetists should be trained in the use of hypnosis.

Griffin: What do you think stops that happening?

Gibson: Prejudice!

Griffin:: What do you think is the source of that prejudice?

Gibson: Money!

Griffin: It is not in some people's financial interests to use hypnosis.

Gibson: I have trained doctors here and they don't use it. If they went into a surgery and there were twenty people there and each of them willing to pay for treatment, and if they were to take the people out who needed hypnotherapy and give them an hour or an hour and a half they would obviously see fewer patients and therefore earn less money. But what they don't realise in the national health service where people are paid so much per year, if they treated an asthma case they'd get better and they'd save an awful lot of money and save a lot of time.

Griffin: So you found asthma responds well to hypnosis?

Gibson: Absolutely. Dramatically.

Griffin: Is this particular types of asthma?

Gibson: All cases of asthma, particularly with children.

Griffin: There was an anecdote in your book about you once being invited to see what you could do for a hospital ward full of children suffering from asthma. The children stayed there an average of six months. All the children you worked with responded really well to hypnosis. Yet you were asked to discontinue your work by the hospital authorities.

Gibson: Yes. They thought I was using magic. There is probably no condition among children which is so easy to treat with self hypnosis. I have found that most asthmatics lose their attacks almost right away, their lives transformed in the process. Sometimes the attacks stop with the child's first lesson in relaxation. To help the child (or an adult) to learn how to relax in the event of another attack a self hypnosis tape is very useful. If the child has learned to relax listening to the tape, then in the event of an attack it is relatively easy for the child to relax listening to the tape and let the spasm pass. In my view, having dealt with many asthmatic cases, there is one factor common to all allergies and that factor is subconscious fear. It is only in the reaching of the subconscious mind, with the erasure of the erroneous information stored there and its replacement with the true facts, that a cure will be effected. When an asthmatic attack occurs fear causes the muscles in the lungs to go into spasm, but if a child has learned how to relax, the first thing he must think about is relaxing and then the fear will go, and with it the asthmatic attack. So that in time he becomes free from asthma.

Griffin: More generally, would you see hypnotherapy as an effective treatment mode for many illnesses?

Gibson: I believe hypnosis to be as effective as antibiotics. Of course, antibiotics will cure diseases which hypnosis cannot help, but hypnosis can cure cases where antibiotics are of no use whatsoever.

Griffin: Can you expand on that?

Gibson: If any doctor were to practise without using antibiotics he would risk being struck off the medical register - many of his patients would die unnecessarily without their use. Yet, if one who had used hypnosis were faced with the choice of whether he should give up using antibiotics or hypnosis, he would be faced with a difficult choice. At first sight it might appear that antibiotics are, beyond question, the more important. Yet antibiotics, unlike hypnosis, can touch only a small proportion of human suffering. When penicillin was first discovered , a small batch was sent to the north of England for experimental use, no one seemed to believe in it and it lay there unused. Consequently, even though a relatively junior surgeon, I was allowed to make the first trial and I injected it into a septic hip joint. The result was dramatic and I have prescribed antibiotics ever since. I believe that shutting one's eyes to the use of hypnotherapy is as unscientific as the shutting of eyes then was to the possible use of penicillin. That's because, if they are closed to the fact that there is access to the subconscious mind,we will continue to treat patients symptomatically with such things as tranquillisers, sleeping tablets, bronchial dilators and so on, instead of aiming at curing the root cause of the complaints.

Griffin: How can hypnosis help one to find that root cause?

Gibson: The nervous system is composed of the voluntary and autonomic nervous system. The autonomic system is controlled by the subconscious mind. Hypnosis gives access to the subconscious mind. If we, as doctors, do not accept this fact then we are cowboys. Cowboys without lassoes, for if we cannot catch this elusive beast, we will continue to see the appalling unnecessary suffering and death from readily curable psychosomatic diseases.

Griffin: The other side of all this is that, if people respond so well to suggestion, then presumably influential figures like doctors in their practice may be giving what are, in effect, hypnotic suggestions, but may not be aware they're giving them when they are offering a prognosis on an illness. For example, when the doctor casually says 'we are talking here about months rather than years', the patient may take that as gospel, he may take it as a form of hypnotic suggestion and actually die on cue.

Gibson: It's true.

Griffin: So perhaps part of the education process that is needed is for all health care personnel to be aware of the power of suggestion, both negative and positive.

Gibson: Yes. We've need to be very aware of that.

Griffin: You on your part must be unique in having performed over four thousand operations, major and minor, using hypnosis. Probably very few doctors in the world could claim to have had that much experience with the medical use of hypnosis.

Gibson: Except of course with acupuncture in China. Acupuncture, I think, is hypnosis being used.

Griffin: That's interesting. I saw some research done by two doctors in the states called Spiegel and Spiegel and they found that the subjects who responded well to acupuncture also respond well to hypnosis. They also speculated that acupuncture is a form of hypnotic induction.

Gibson: It is. About thirty years ago a Mr Chance, a great orthopaedic consultant here in Ireland, was very taken with hypnosis and he advised me to use it but added "for goodness sake give them an injection at the same time, it doesn't matter if it's only vitamin B or water, let them feel the injection does it”. I couldn't do that, I didn't think it was honest. The acupuncture people have a needle and they jab the needle in. The acupuncturist is convinced it works, the patients are convinced it works, the hospital is convinced it works — and so it does work.

Griffin: But why it works is another matter.

Gibson: They can put the needles in sites other than the official sites and it still works. Or they can use electrical wires to simulate the acupuncture and get even better results. Their success rate is very similar to that of pure hypnosis.

Griffin: Since you have raised the issue, can I ask you when you were using hypnosis in surgery what proportion of patients would respond to hypnosis?

Gibson: That's a question I find hard to answer as I kept no notes. There is a difference between a cold case and an emergency. If I said to you, "will you have this finger off under hypnosis or a general anaesthetic" almost for certain you would say a general anaesthetic, and if I tried to hypnotise you, it wouldn't work. But if you came into hospital with your finger bleeding and your stomach full and there is no way we can operate on you for some time , you would accept hypnosis. I think we have a high rate of patients under those conditions who are good subjects.

Read on >>

© Human Givens Publishing Limited and Jack Gibson (1997)

This article first appeared in an early edition of the Human Givens journal. It was republished in 1997 in Therapia.

Dr Jack Gibson, FRCSI, DTM&H (Lond.) graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons Dublin in 1933, having won almost every available medal. He gained his fellowship in 1934 the youngest ever to be awarded this distinction. He then obtained the Diploma of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from London in 1935. He took two locums, one in Aden and the second in Malawi. After a hospital appointment in England he returned to Africa as Dean of the Native Medical Aids School, forerunner of the present Durban Medical School. After the outbreak of war, he worked in England as a surgeon in the hospitals of the Emergency Medical Service. He later returned to Ireland as County Surgeon in Naas, Co. Kildare. He has performed over 4,000 operations using hypnosis alone. Since retiring from surgery in 1979 he devoted his time to the treatment of psychosomatic disorders using hypnotherapy.He died peacefully in 2005 aged 95.

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following books both by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following books both by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

Return to top