Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis in Medicine, Dentistry and Psychology

William Saul Kroger (April 14, 1906 - December 4, 1995) was an American medical doctor 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 (1963), 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 (1951) and Hypnosis and Behavior Modification: Imagery Conditioning (1963), among others.

Born in Evanston, Illinois, Kroger attended Northwestern University and received his pre-medical Bachelor’s degree in 1926. He then 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.

He died in 1995 aged 89.