How the miracle doctor fell into oblivion - and why writer Rinus Spruit hopes for rehabilitation

He brought hypnosis and psychotherapy as treatment methods to the Netherlands and had a thriving practice with the well-known writer Frederik van Eeden. But mention the name Albert Willem van Renterghem, and (almost) no one will ring a bell. With his book The miracle doctor compiler Rinus Spruit hopes for honour.

Albert Willem van Renterghem (1845-1939) was once considered "the miracle doctor of Goes". After attending consultations by French doctor Ambroise Liébeault, the founder of hypnosis therapy, the rural doctor from Zeeland decided to treat his patients with this new method as well. The results exceeded everyone's expectations. The well-known writer and physician Frederik van Eeden convinced him to start a clinic in Amsterdam. Van Renterghem was apprenticed to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, translated some of their books and thus brought psychotherapy to the Netherlands. But despite his great merits for psychiatric care in our country, both Albert van Renterghem and his autobiography disappeared into oblivion. Until writer Rinus Spruit, himself a Zeeuw and former nurse, heard about this miracle doctor.

How did you come across this story?

'In 1993, I read in a door-to-door magazine that 90 copies of Doctor Van Renterghem's autobiography had been reprinted. He had written it in 1920 and had ten of them made at the time. I read that this man had been a doctor in the countryside in Zuid-Beveland, and that he had later gone to Amsterdam and practised hypnosis and psychoanalysis. I wanted to know more about that. His autobiography gave a nice picture of the healthcare of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was very primitive. Doctors still had almost nothing to offer their patients: there was no penicillin, and diseases like tuberculosis and diabetes could not be cured. Surgeries could not even be performed because there was no anaesthetic.'

'People died of all kinds of infectious diseases, such as diphtheria. Van Renterghem wrote candidly and with humour about what he experienced. Reading it is like being there yourself. I was sorry that not everyone could take note of it. But then again, the book was 1400 pages thick; he had written everything down in it, right down to the menus of the restaurants where he had eaten.'

Who was the book intended for? Purely for his family?

'He started writing this autobiography in 1920, after his working life. He had ten copies printed: six for his family, and then another four for the archives of two libraries and two universities. The books had to remain sealed until 1975, I think because of the privacy of the patients he had treated, who were mentioned by name. He informed the municipality of Goes that the book could become public in 1975. So I think he had a greater intention with it anyway.'

How did you reduce a 1400-page book to a readable story?

'I had to make sharp choices. For instance, I left out all kinds of family matters, as well as the many journeys with his wife and the years when he was a naval doctor. I tried to distil the essence of his life from the book. So the beginning as a country doctor in Heinkenszand, the moment he came into contact with hypnosis, his contact with writer and physician Frederik van Eeden, their practice in Amsterdam, which grew into a new clinic on Van Breestraat. His contact with Sigmund Freud and with Carl Jung, and his discovery of psychoanalysis. Van Renterghem was seen as the man who introduced psychoanalysis to our country. He was president of the Dutch Association for Psychoanalysis; a man of distinction, also internationally. Patients came from far and wide, calling him "the miracle doctor from Goes". He was regarded as the leading man in the field of mental health care in the Netherlands. Professor and psychiatrist H.C. Rümke described him as a "legendary figure" and said that the flowering of psychotherapy was due to him.'

So how do you explain that he is completely unknown today?

'He died in 1939, so the war years are in between; that will have played a part. Moreover, nowadays hypnosis is something many people question, and I think that's why they didn't take him quite seriously. I can't find any other good explanation for it.'

How did hypnosis treatment work?

'He put his patients to sleep, said things like, "You will get better" or "Your pain will be gone" and made suggestions to them. With that, he managed to cure many people. He mainly treated patients with psychosomatic complaints: physical complaints that had a psychological cause. In Amsterdam, he started focusing more and more on mental illnesses. By the way, he himself preferred hypnosis therapy to psychoanalysis, because it gave faster and better results, and so he could help more people with it. Given the results, it is a pity that these methods are hardly used today, if at all.'

Give an example of such a healing?

'At the surgery came village butcher Rottier, an old acquaintance of Dr Van Renterghem. The man had been suffering from chest pain, right under the collarbone, for years. No abnormality could be found, and medicines never helped. Van Renterghem had just returned from France from studying with Dr Liébeault, and wondered if that method would help. He put the patient under hypnosis, put his hand on the painful spot and assured the butcher that his pain was gone and gone for good. "Breathe deeply!" said Van Renterghem, "and again, and again. Do you feel how wonderfully free your chest is now? You will have no more pain!" He assured his patient that he would wake up fresh, delicious and without pain. And indeed: when Rottier regained consciousness, he was no longer in pain. That's how it often went.'

Which passages touched you the most?

'There are two of them. He writes about a 12-year-old girl dying of tuberculosis. He comes by every day and sees her getting sicker and sicker. They have lovely conversations every time. One day he comes and she has just died. He condoles the mother and she says, "Marietje gave another bag of sweets for you to give to your children." And then he is so moved that he has to cry.

'The story about his sick little daughter also made a big impression. The six-year-old girl has diphtheria, a disease for which there is no medication at the time, and as a result of a narrowing of the trachea, she becomes increasingly cramped. Then a carriage stops in front of the doctor's house; the coachman asks the doctor to come with her immediately, as the mayor of Heinkenszand is very short of breath. Van Renterghem is in two minds: will he stay with his child or go to the mayor? He lets his father watch over his little daughter and leaves. On his return - the mayor is dead - the girl is also dying. Only one treatment is possible and that is tracheotomy, or making a hole in the trachea. He fails to save his daughter in time.'

What role did Frederik van Eeden play in the whole thing?

Van Eeden's intervention marked the turning point in Van Renterghem's career. Van Eeden heard about his success with hypnosis and asked if he could attend a GP consultation. The hypnosis treatments made a deep impression on Van Eeden. "You should not continue to vegetate in Goes," he wrote to Van Renterghem. "You should come to Amsterdam then we can start a clinic there together for therapeutic hypnotism." That was the beginning of Van Renterghem's grandiose career. Without that intervention, he would have been stuck in Goes as an ordinary GP.'

As an author, what could you get out of this project? After all, it is someone else's text.

'That's right, I hardly changed anything about it either. But I did compose the book, so to speak, by my choices in what I wanted to include and not include. I also liked that work. He writes very candidly, also about everything he did not do well, the deaths, the losses in his family. I can't improve on that.'