Doctors Said He Was Dead, Then He Saw the Light | Dr. A.S. Wiltse NDE

What happens after death? In 1889, a Kansas physician found out firsthand, and his account was published in one of America's leading medical journals.

Dr. A.S. Wiltse of Skiddy, Kansas was a respected country doctor when typhoid fever brought him to the edge of death. As his family gathered around his bed, he bade them farewell, convinced the end had come. Then his consciousness detached from his body, and he watched the scene below like a spectator at his own deathbed. He saw his own lifeless body. He saw the grief of his family. And then he traveled somewhere no medical textbook had ever described.

His story, first published in the St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal in November 1889, is one of the most remarkable near-death accounts of the 19th century. Wiltse described moving through a strange dim region and emerging into a world of astonishing beauty, with trees, flowers, and a light more vivid than anything on earth. He approached a great wall of radiance and sensed a realm of still greater glory beyond it. He wanted to stay. He was sent back anyway, returning to his body against his own wishes, and the shock of re-entering his flesh was almost unbearable.

The experience changed everything for the rational, scientific doctor. He became convinced that consciousness survives the death of the body, and he allowed his account to be published and republished, including in F.W.H. Myers' classic work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. His testimony stands as one of the strongest early medical arguments that death is not the end. Listen to the doctor who died in 1889, saw what waits on the other side, and came back to tell the world.