A study · The Netherlands, published in 2008

The dentures case: a man in a coma and the nurse who took out his dentures

In 1979, a nurse in Nijmegen took out the dentures of a man in a coma so he could resuscitate him. More than a week later, according to the nurse, the man recognized him and told him where he had put them. In 2008, the researcher Rudolf Smit tracked down the nurse and reconstructed the case. He concluded that the man was in no state to notice, in a normal way, that his dentures were being taken out or where they were put. An anesthesiologist answered him with a medical explanation, and the debate went on until 2010.

The question of the study is: what really happened to the man with the dentures, and could he have known without seeing it? We tell it step by step. If you only want to know what it found, go straight to the results.

Step 1

Before the study · The question

A famous story that nobody had checked

In 2001, the cardiologist Pim van Lommel published a study of 344 resuscitated people in the journal The Lancet. The article also told a story that did not come from any of those patients. A nurse had taken out the dentures of a man in a coma, and the man later knew where he had put them.

The story went around the world. Critics soon asked whether anyone had checked it. The psychologist Christopher French wrote in the same journal that the article did not say whether anyone had tried to confirm it with the patient. And in 2004, the anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee suggested that the man was partly conscious and heard what was going on.

Nobody yet knew who the nurse was, or exactly where the story came from.

Step 2

2007 · Told by the study

A researcher finds the original papers

Merkawah is the Dutch branch of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Rudolf Smit edited its magazine. Ruud van Wees was one of the authors of the Lancet article. In the summer of 2007, he handed Smit some folders from Merkawah’s archive.

Among them were the two documents the story came from. The first was a 1991 article by Vincent Meijers, another author of the Lancet article. Meijers wrote it from what a colleague of the nurse had told him. The second was a 12-page interview with the nurse himself. An interviewer from Merkawah did it in February 1994, and it was never published.

The nurse asked for his name not to be given. The articles call him T. G. They call the patient B.

Step 3

Late 1979 · Told by the nurse

What the nurse told

One night, an ambulance brought a 44-year-old man to the coronary care unit of the Canisius hospital in Nijmegen. A coronary care unit is the intensive care area for the heart. Passers-by had found him in a meadow. According to the nurse, he arrived ice-cold, with no pulse, with his eyes closed and with pupils that did not react to light.

To put in the breathing tube, the nurse took out the man’s upper dentures. He left them on a wooden shelf of the crash cart, which was already pulled out. They resuscitated him with hand compressions, with a machine that pounds the chest and with five electric shocks. Then he was moved to intensive care, still in a coma.

More than a week later, B. had already asked about his dentures, and nobody knew where they were. According to the nurse, when B. saw him, he told him that he was the one who had taken them out and where he had put them. He described the cart, the room and the people resuscitating him as if he had seen them from the ceiling. He also said he felt the pain of the compression machine.

We tell it in full in the story of the man with the dentures.

Step 4

April 2008 · Told by the study

Smit finds the nurse, 29 years later

Smit could not find the nurse. He did find the colleague named in the 1991 article. That colleague told him he had had nothing to do with the case. He had only passed the nurse’s story on to Meijers. He gave Smit the nurse’s phone number.

Smit spoke to the nurse by phone in April 2008. Then Titus Rivas did a long interview with him. According to Smit, the nurse repeated the essentials of what he had told in 1994 and said he remembered it as if it had happened the day before.

The nurse insisted on one point. He took out B.’s dentures as soon as he arrived, before the resuscitation in the room began. To him, it was unthinkable that B. could have noticed in a normal way that his dentures were being taken out. And the cart was unique in the whole hospital. It had been made there, and it was only in that room.

Step 5

2008 · Told by the study

What doesn’t match from one account to another

Smit compared the documents and found differences. He published them himself:

What B. wanted. In The Lancet, B. was afraid they would stop resuscitating him. In the 1994 interview, he wanted them to stop because it hurt. In 2008, the nurse explained that these were two different moments of the resuscitation.
How he left the hospital. In The Lancet, B. left healthy four weeks later. In 2008, the nurse said he later saw him from a distance and that he looked very ill with his heart. A few years later he read in the newspaper the death notice of a man from Ooy with the initial B.
How long the resuscitation lasted. The nurse spoke of three quarters of an hour and of more than an hour. The Lancet says an hour and a half.

Nobody could ask B. As early as 1994, when the nurse was interviewed, Merkawah looked for him and could not find him. Smit believes he died a few years later.

Step 6

2008 · Smit’s conclusion

For Smit, the man could not have seen it in a normal way

Smit concludes that the Lancet story matches well with what the nurse says. For him, B. was not conscious enough to notice in a normal way how his dentures were taken out and where they were put.

Smit admits two limits. The case is too old to check every detail, and there is no interview with the patient. That is why he writes that it cannot be definitive proof that consciousness continues when the body dies. Even so, he believes the nurse’s testimony confirms that something extraordinary happened.

Step 7

2010 · Gerald Woerlee’s response

An anesthesiologist proposes a medical explanation

Gerald Woerlee is an anesthesiologist and a professor at Leiden University. In 2010 he answered Smit in the same journal. He does not dispute what the nurse saw. He disputes what the nurse concludes from it.

For Woerlee, the key is the cold. B. had been lying in a cold meadow for a long time. With the body that cold, the lack of a pulse and pupils that don’t react do not mean that the brain has died. Emergency doctors have a saying for frozen patients: you’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. Cold also protects the brain when it gets little blood.

Woerlee cites cases of patients who regained consciousness during chest compressions. And he points out that the nurse himself said some patients woke up with that machine. According to Woerlee, B. may have been conscious but unable to move. He could not move because his brain was getting little oxygen. For Woerlee, the fact that B. felt the pain of the compressions is a sign that he was conscious.

So B. could have felt his dentures being taken out and heard them being put down on the wood. He could have heard the doctors, and the nurse’s voice, which the nurse himself says is very easy to recognize. And he could have seen the nurse’s face when the nurse opened his eyes to check his pupils. With all of that, Woerlee believes, B. later built a picture of the scene.

Step 8

2010 · Smit and Rivas reply

Smit and Rivas reply: the dentures came out before the machine

Illustration from The dentures case: a man in a coma and the nurse who took out his dentures: “Smit and Rivas reply: the dentures came out before the machine”

Smit and Rivas replied in the same issue of the journal. They quote a 2008 text in which the nurse answered the ideas Woerlee had published in 2004. The nurse says it took more than five minutes to bring B. up to the coronary care unit, with hardly any resuscitation. In the room, more than a minute went by without compressions and without circulation. And in that time, before the machine was switched on, he took out the dentures.

For Smit and Rivas, B. could not have pictured the cart from the noise alone. The nurse accepts that B. could have heard the bottles. But, according to him, the noise would not have told B. that there was a wooden shelf with his dentures on it. The nurse also accepts that the shelf was the only place where he could put them down with ease. Otherwise he would have had to put them among the bottles, and that is not done.

About the pain, Smit and Rivas admit they have no clear explanation. They offer two. It may have been an imagined pain, triggered by seeing the machine from outside the body. Or it may have been real pain, felt at the same time as B. was watching the scene from above.

Smit and Rivas acknowledge that everything rests on a single witness, and that this does not guarantee the case is solid. In 2019, with Anny Dirven, they published a book of cases that reproduces Rivas’s 2008 interview. In that interview, the nurse told the order the other way around. First they put the machine on, and it may have given some circulation. Then the nurse took out the dentures. The interview came before the written text. In the text against Woerlee, the nurse corrected the order emphatically. According to the book, in the interview he had listed the steps without thinking about their order.

Let’s see what can be known from these data and what can’t.

What is known?

What the investigation of the dentures case found

What it found

Where the Lancet story comes from. It comes from two documents. One is a 1991 article, written from what a colleague of the nurse told, a colleague who only passed the story on. The other is a 1994 interview with the nurse.
Who the witness is. He is the nurse who took out B.’s dentures. He told the essentials the same way in 1994 and in 2008.
When and where it happened. In late 1979, at the Canisius hospital in Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.
That the accounts differ. On what B. wanted, on how he left the hospital and on how long the resuscitation lasted.

What it couldn’t find out

What B. said exactly. Nobody ever interviewed him. What he said is known only from the nurse’s memory, told 15 and 29 years later.
At what time each thing happened. According to Smit and Rivas, the hospital records were destroyed over the years. Not even the exact date is left.
Whether B. was conscious at any moment. No measurement of his brain or his temperature survives. The nurse believes he wasn’t. Woerlee believes he was. Smit and Rivas admit they have no clear explanation for the pain he felt.
In what order the machine and the dentures came. The nurse told it in two ways in 2008.
Whether B. learned the details another way. The articles point to three possible ways. B. knew he had lost his dentures and had already asked about them before seeing the nurse. The nurse’s voice is easy to recognize. And the shelf was the easiest place to put them. No article says that B. used any of these ways.

How each side reads it

Those who see a case that is hard to explain

Rudolf Smit and Titus Rivas, researchers with Merkawah, in 2008 and 2010. They believe B. could not have been conscious when his dentures were taken out, and that he saw the cart from outside his body.
Pim van Lommel, the cardiologist who published the story in 2001. Smit and Rivas consulted him to answer Woerlee. According to them, van Lommel thinks Woerlee’s account is not the only one possible from a medical point of view.
In 2025, a group of researchers of these experiences created a scale to measure how convincing a case is. Van Lommel was among them. They gave the dentures case the highest level, “strong.” The scale rates how credible the witness is and does not require records from the time.

Those who see a normal explanation

Gerald Woerlee, anesthesiologist at Leiden University, in 2004 and 2010. He believes the cold kept B.’s brain alive and that the compressions gave him back some consciousness. With what he heard, felt and saw, B. later built a picture of the scene.
Christopher French, psychologist at the University of London, in 2001. He pointed out that the article did not say whether anyone had tried to confirm the details with the patient. And he recalled that other similar cases lost strength when they were checked.

What can be said with the data

If the nurse remembers the order correctly, B.’s dentures were out before the machine gave him any circulation. That is hard to explain in a normal way. But that order rests on the memory of one person, almost 30 years later, and he himself told it in two ways. B. also felt the pain of the compressions, and for Woerlee that shows he was partly conscious. Besides, there were normal ways to learn part of what he said.

That is why the case does not show that B. saw the room from outside his body. Nor does it show that he was conscious and heard everything, because no measurement from that night survives.

What would settle it

This case can no longer be settled. With a similar case, it would take:

writing down what the patient says, with a date, before anyone tells him anything;
having the time of each step of the resuscitation in the medical record;
and another member of the team confirming, on their own, what the patient describes.

A case from 1979, first told in 1991

The first written account came 12 years later, and the nurse did not write it.

The nurse told it in person 15 years later and again 29 years later.

The figures of the dentures case
Item	Figure
Year it happened	1979
Age of the patient	44
Electric shocks during the resuscitation	5
Years until the first article, by Vincent Meijers	12
Years until the 1994 interview with the nurse	15
Years until the 2008 interviews	29
Interviews with the patient	0

What these figures don’t tell

How long the resuscitation lasted. The accounts give three quarters of an hour, more than an hour and an hour and a half.
The exact date. All that is known is that it was in late 1979.

Frequently asked questions

What is the dentures case?

It is a case from the Netherlands, from 1979, that Pim van Lommel published in 2001. A nurse took out the dentures of a man in a coma during resuscitation. According to the nurse, the man recognized him more than a week later and told him where he had put them. Rudolf Smit investigated it in 2008.

Has the dentures case been checked?

Not fully. Everything the patient said is known from the nurse’s memory, told 15 and 29 years later. Nobody interviewed the patient and, according to the researchers, the hospital records were destroyed.

How does Gerald Woerlee explain the dentures case?

Woerlee is an anesthesiologist. He believes the cold protected the patient’s brain and that the chest compressions gave him back some consciousness. According to Woerlee, the patient could not move, but he heard and felt what was going on. The researchers Rudolf Smit and Titus Rivas reply that the dentures came out before the chest compression machine was switched on.

Why did nobody interview the man with the dentures?

When researchers became interested in the story, they could no longer find him. According to Smit, he had probably already died. Years later, the nurse read in the newspaper the death notice of a man from Ooy with the initial B.

Where this page comes from

The study

Rudolf Smit (2008), “Corroboration of the dentures anecdote involving veridical perception in a near-death experience,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 27(1):47-61Read for free

Assessments and criticism

Gerald Woerlee (2010), “Response to ‘Corroboration of the dentures anecdote involving veridical perception in a near-death experience’,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 28(4):181-191Read for free
Rudolf Smit and Titus Rivas (2010), the reply to Woerlee, Journal of Near-Death Studies 28(4):193-205Read for free
Christopher French (2001), “Dying to know the truth: visions of a dying brain, or false memories?,” The Lancet 358:2010-2011View in the journal (free with registration)
Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven and Rudolf Smit (2019), The Self Does Not Die, the book of cases that reproduces the 2008 interviewBuy the book
Greyson and others (2025), the scale of veridical cases, Frontiers in Psychology 16:1661390Read for free

To understand more

Van Lommel: 344 resuscitated people in ten hospitals, the study that published the caseRead
The 14 Virginia cases: seeing what could not be knownRead
Cardiac arrest with cold in the operating roomRead

Our archive

Our reading of the three articles from 2008 and 2010 and of the chapter on the case in the book by Rivas, Dirven and Smit, checked on October 23, 2026

More studies

AWARE: the pictures hidden on the shelves
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AWARE II: a random picture and the brain on the screen
Above the patient was a tablet with a random picture. Headphones said the names of three fruits. And the doctors measured the brain during resuscitation.
Van Lommel: 344 cardiac arrest survivors in ten hospitals
Ten hospitals asked every cardiac arrest survivor what they remembered. They saw them again after 2 and 8 years.