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The New York Times November 4, 1939
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'FROZEN SLEEP' AIDS NARCOTIC ADDICTS
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The use of "frozen sleep" in the treatment of drug addiction and psychiatric derangement, with "beneficial effects," was reported yesterday before the symposium on temperature of the American Institute of Physics at the Hotel Pennsylvania by Dr. L.W. Smith and Dr. Temple Fay of Temple University, Philadelphia, originators of the "frozen sleep" treatment that has been used with considerable success int he alleviation of pain and prolongation of life in thirty cases of hopeless cancer patients.

To physicians who had become morphine addicts, Dr. Smith reported, apparently have been cured of their addiction after being placed in the refrigeration room, where the temperature of the body is brought down to as low as 75 degrees Fahrenheit, for five days. During that period the patient lives in a state of artificial hibernation, in which bodily activities are at a much lower ebb than normal.

One of the patients, Dr. Smith added, showed a recurrence of the craving for narcotics after six months. He was placed in the refrigerator a second time, and once more lost his addiction. It is too early to tell whether the "cure" will be permanent, it was said, but these treatments give promise that a new avenue of approach to the treatment of narcotic addiction has been opened.

Similar beneficial effects were reported by Dr. Smith and Dr. Fay in the case of a woman who suffered from post-operative psychiatric derangement of violent proportions. She was placed in a state of frozen sleep for twenty-four hours and the symptoms subsided for three days. When the symptoms returned she was placed again in the refrigerator, this time for seven and a half days, after which she returned to normal.

These results, Dr. Fay reported are regarded as sufficiently encouraging by one of the country's leading psychiatrists to try this new method of treatment on insane patients in one of the large psychiatric institutions.

Reporting on further results in the application of frozen sleep to hopeless cancer cases, Dr. Smith and Dr. Fay said that several of them were still alive and well eighteen and a half months after the beginning of treatment, while most of them had their lives prolonged, with an alleviation of their great pains in thirty of thirty-four cases thus treated. None of these patients was expected to live more than six weeks at the time treatment was started.

Dr. Fay described new refrigeration units with blankets containing coils of tubing capable of regulation, and thermostatically controlled, that offer a wide variation in temperature between 20 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. These units, recently supplied by "the commercial world of science," have supplemented for the most part the cracked ice methods of temperature reductions in use only a few weeks ago, and so far "have seemed to offer prompt and favorable means by which patients' temperatures can be rapidly reduced from normal to the desired level," he said.