Healing, Psychic
A popular early theory of psychic healing was that it was effected by a sudden and profound nervous change. The conception of the therapeutic power of such a change we owe to Franz Anton Mesmer (1733-1815). He brought it about by a combination of passes, unconscious suggestion, and supposed metallotherapy in an aparatus called the baquet. The baquet involved an oak tub filled with water, iron filings, and flasks of "magnetized water." Patients were connected to this baquet by holding rods or cords, which supposedly conveyed the "magnetism." The atmosphere was enhanced by music. Mesmer contended that a nervous effluence was passing into the patients.
There are many sensitives even now who claim curative power by such a fluid. But the discovery of magnetic action was put forward long before Mesmer as the basis of the sympathetic system of medicine.
The magnet itself was an illustration of the interaction of living bodies. Every substance was supposed to radiate a force. This force was guided by the in-dwelling spirit of the body from which it proceeded. A dissevered portion of a body retained something of the virtue of the body. This led to the deduction that instead of the wound, the weapon that caused it should be anointed, as the wound cannot heal while a portion of the vital spirit remains in disastrous union with the weapon and exerts an antipathetic influence upon its fellow spirit in the body (see powder of sympathy).
The sway of mesmerism was long and powerful. It yielded place to hypnotism after James Braid proved that somnambulism can be induced without passes by mere suggestion, or moreover that the patients can bring it about by themselves by staring at bright objects.
This discovery threw the nervous effluence theory overboard, although its possibility as a coordinating factor was by no means ruled out. Indeed animal magnetism has often, in one form or another, been rediscovered. A. A. Liébeault (1823-1901), for example, from his work treating children under four and curing some under three, claimed that magnetic healing was not due to suggestion. Similar successes were registered later by psychologist Julien Ochorowicz (1850-1917) on children under two. Liébeault even came to the conclusion that a living being can, merely by his presence, exercise a salutary influence on another living being quite independently of suggestion.
However that may be, the mysterious power that after Braid was ascribed to suggestion did not bring us any closer to understanding the curative process. It is more than likely that the ordinary hypnotizer has no curative power at all, and that his command simply starts a train of self-suggestion from the conscious mind, which otherwise would not have penetrated sufficiently deeply to bring about a nervous change.
It is even legitimate to suppose that the same power may be at work in charms, amulets, and incantations. E. W. Cox may have hit upon the truth when he wrote: "The use of the passes is to direct the attention of the patient to the part of the body then being operated upon. The effect of directing the attention of the mind to any part of the frame is to increase the flow of nerve force [or vital force] to that part."
The healer himself may have no knowledge of the process. The supposition that when he lays his hand on the diseased part of the body a magnetic current passes through may not be correct at all, even if the patients often experience a feeling of warmth, as of an electric shock. The healer's influence appears to be rather a directive one for the patient's own powers, which the healer turns into a more efficient channel. If the hypnotizer is more successful than the average psychic healer, an explanation may be found in the trance state into which the patient is thrown, giving him direct access to the subconscious self to which, to use the words of F. W. H. Myers, "a successful appeal is being made through suggestion." In the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, he suggests,
"Beneath the threshold of waking consciousness there lies, not merely an unconscious complex of organic processes but an intelligent vital control. To incorporate that profound control with our waking will is the great evolutionary end which hypnotism, by its group of empirical artifices, is beginning to help us to attain."
This vital control he believed to be the result of some influx from the unseen world; the efficacy of suggestion was dependent on the quantity of new energy that could be imbibed from the spiritual world by directing subliminal attention to a corporeal function.
The problem of psychic healing, however, is much more complex than it appears. It bristles with interesting and stubborn facts that refuse to be fitted into convenient pigeonholes. Suggestion appears to be ruled out when healers cure animals. The process of healing seems interwoven with psychical manifestations, the success of healing often serving as evidence of
the paranormal. Medical clairvoyance, psychometry, and direct and indirect action by spirits are concepts that demand consideration.
The somnambules of the early magnetizers diagnosed their own diseases. This was known later as autoscopy. It is now a rare phenomenon. As an intermediate instance between autoscopy and clairvoyant diagnosis, the curious case in Baron Carl du Prel's Experimental-Psychologie (1890) is worth mention. To a hypnotic subject it was suggested that, in his dream, he would find a certain cure for his ailments. The dream was very vivid, a voice giving medical advice was heard, and when these instructions were followed the patient's health considerably improved.
To the eyes of medical clairvoyants, the human body appears to be transparent. They see and describe in lay terms the seat and appearance of the disease. Some have a more restricted power and diagnose from the changes in the aura of the patient, the color being allegedly affected by illness.
Psychometrists do not require the presence of the patient at all. A lock of hair may be sufficient to put the medium on the right track. Sometimes an index, i.e., the mere mention of the name, will suffice. The medium, however, sometimes suffers sympathetically. Temporarily he or she often assumes the bodily conditions of the afflicted man and vividly experiences his ailments.
The therapeutic services of psychical research are now often acknowledged by psychoanalysts and physicians. Crystal gazing and automatic writing help to explore the subconscious mind. Long forgotten memories may be recalled and events of importance may be traced to their source and enable the psychoanalyst to form conclusions without hypnotic experiments. The divining rod (the diviner holding bacterial cultures in his hand) has also been discovered as a means of successful diagnosis, and the use of the pendulum in place of the rod has developed into the art of radiesthesia.
Spirit Healing
Often diagnosis and cure take place through alleged spirit influence, advice, or direct action. A physician, Josiah A. Gridley of Southampton, Massachusetts, confessed in his Astounding Facts from the Spirit World (1854) to have often known a patient's disease and the treatment to be followed before he ever went to see that patient. He attributed the remarkable success of his practice to his communion with the spirit world.
In England, the first spiritual healer, a lecturer on mesmerism named Hardinge, became convinced through spirit communications that epilepsy was due to demonic possession and undertook to cure such cases by spirit instruction. J. D. Dixon, a homeopathic doctor, was the next English healer who, after being converted to Spiritualism in 1857, treated his patients with prescriptions obtained by raps. Daniel Offord, a nine-year-old English boy, wrote prescriptions in Latin, a language which he did not know. He predicted the 1853 cholera epidemic two months in advance and prescribed a daily dose of half a teaspoonful of carbon as an antidote.
The spirits who assist mediums mostly claim to have been physicians on earth who have attained to a higher knowledge in the beyond. A. H. Jacob ("Jacob the Zouave") actually saw the spirits ministering to his patients. Mrs. J. H. Conant attributed Jacob's curative powers to the knowledge of "Dr. John Dix Fisher" in spirit; similarly "Dr. Lascelles" who worked through C. A. Simpson in the Seekers group in London; and "Dr. Beale," a spirit entity who claimed to have followed the medical profession on Earth and who worked through one Miss Rose, a medium. The strange cure of Mme X. (as recorded in the Proceedings of the SPR, vol. 9) was effected by a spirit doctor; the healing controls were Native Americans who were said to have been medicine men in their tribes.
The methods of Native American controls were quite interesting. As the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard describes in My Life in Two Worlds (1931),
"Mrs. Massey's chair was a wooden rocking one. Suddenly her chair began to rock backwards and forwards gently at first, then gathering speed, till it rocked at a tremendous rate. Then, to our horror, the chair turned a complete somersault. So did Mrs. Massey. She fell right on her head, and lay where she fell. I rushed to her, and before I realised what was happening North Star had taken control of me. A lump, the size of an egg, had come up on Mrs. Massey's head. North Star placed my hands upon it; in a few moments it had gone. North Star then left her head alone and proceeded to make passes over her body, particularly over the heart. He gave loud grunts of satisfaction, and seemed extremely well pleased with something. After about half an hour's hard work he stopped controlling me, and Mrs. Massey then disclosed the fact that she had felt very ill for some days past, and she felt better now than she had for months."
Further on, Leonard states,
"When North Star controlled me for healing, he always appeared to appeal to someone far higher than himself before commencing his treatment. He never spoke, but he used to hold his hands upward and outward as if he expected something to be put, or poured into them. His attitude was so obviously one of prayer, or supplication, though he was usually in a standing position."
The most well-known psychic healer was Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) who diagnosed and prescribed for thousands of ailments in a state of self-induced trance.
Healing at a Distance
Cases of healing at a distance are also on record. When the healer's magnetism is said to be transferred into water, paper, or cloth one may argue for suggestion as an explanation; there are, however, more difficult instances. According to a letter from E. W. Capron, quoted in Leah Underhill's The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism (1885) on the occasion of Capron's first visit to the Fox sisters in Rochester, he mentioned casually that his wife was affected with a severe and troublesome cough. Leah Fox in trance suddenly declared: "I am going to cure Rebecca of the cough." She then gave an accurate description of Rebecca and pronounced her cured. Returning home, Capron found her extremely well and the trouble never returned. Absent healing, through prayer groups, is now a regular activity of healing centers.
Cases are recorded in which an apparition at the bedside of a sick person effects a cure by the laying on of hands or by giving instructions. Materialized spirit hands made passes over the head, throat, chest, and back of Stainton Moses to relieve his bronchitis. While it may have been Stainton Moses's faith in the powers of his guides that effected the cure, this does not, however, explain how the healing took place.
Neurologist J. M. Charcot (1825-1893) notes,
"The faith which was healing power seems to me to be the greatest of medicines, for it may succeed where all other remedies have failed. But why should faith, which works on the soul, be considered more miraculous than a drug, which acts on the body? Has anyone yet understood how a drug can cure?"
St. Bernard, the Abbot of Clairvaux (1090-1153), Valentine Greatrakes (1662), Jacob The Zouave (1828-1913), J. R. Newton (1810-1883), the Earl of Sandwich (1839-1916), author of My Experiences in Spiritual Healing (London, 1915), and such modern healers as the late Harry Edwards (1893-1976) to mention a few names only, put many astonishing cures on record that seem to be authentic.
The Nature of Healing
The mind-cures of Christian Science must also be considered. These are wrought by the perception of God as the sole reality and the belief that neither matter nor evil exist. Reports of spectacular healings come from the records of the Church of Christ Scientist, just as they come from Roman Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, and various Spiritualist, occult, and
metaphysical groups. There appears to be little objective difference between spiritual healing, divine healing, mind-cure, and faith-cure (the removal of pain by faith in God's power and by prayer). In this respect, one may go back to the ancient days when sleeping in the temple, after having invoked the help of God, often brought about healing at the shrines of Aesculapius, Isis, and Seraphis.
Astonishing instances of healing are recorded in Carré de Montgeron's book La Verité des Miracles opérés par l'intercession de M. de Paris (Cologne, 1745-47), dedicated to the king of France. Miracles took place at the tomb of the Abbé Paris, the Jansenist, in 1731 and the three or four years following. The cure of Mlle. Coirin was without precedent. Cancer had completely destroyed her left breast, and the case seemed utterly hopeless. A visit to the tomb not only cured her, but restored the breast and nipple without any trace of a scar. She was examined in Paris by the royal physician, M. Gaulard, who declared the restoration of the nipple an actual creation. Other physicians deposed before notaries that the cure was perfect. Other amazing cures followed.
The cemetery of St. Médard became so famous for this occurrence that the ire of the Jesuits was aroused and soon afterward, according to Voltaire, it was inscribed on the churchyard wall:
De par le Roi—défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu.
Voltaire said that God obeyed and the miracles stopped. This, however, is contradicted by the cures, which kept on occurring for a space of 25 years. And miraculous cures were effected at Treves in Germany by touching a relic known as the Holy Coat of Treves in 1891. Holywell in Wales was called the Welsh Lourdes for similar occurrences. Lourdes itself has become an established site for miracles in healing.
Recent Developments
The most sensational modern development of psychic healing is psychic surgery, which takes two forms. The first, in which the medium mimes operations, is allegedly guided by the spirit of a dead doctor; in the second, in which psychic healers appear to perform real operations, either with their bare hands or with primitive instruments, wounds heal instantaneously. The latter type of psychic surgery, practiced widely in the Philippines and Brazil, remains highly controversial, with conflicting evidence of authenticity and fraud.
Since the rise of parapsychology, psychic healing has been considered under the general heading of psychokinesis. During the 1960s, some interesting healing research was carried out, as various people who claimed healing powers were put to the test in laboratories in attempts to effect living objects. The most spectacular of these experiments used Oscar Estabany, a Hungarian immigrant, who worked with cancer researcher Bernard Grad of McGill University, Montreal. Through the 1960s, Grad involved Estabany in a set of ever more complicated experiments that had as their object the stimulation of the growth of plants and the increase of the rate of healing in wounds on mice. Biochemist Justa Smith also found that Estabany could stimulate the growth of enzymes. The choice of targets in these carefully controlled experiments was made in each case to take the factor of suggestion away.
In one of the most interesting of experiments, Estabany was not allowed near the plants, but merely held the water used to water the plants in his hands. As with other experiments, the plants watered with Estabany's water grew taller.
The Estabany experiments stand as among the most impressive in psychokinesis and are a demonstration of the healing power inherent in at least some human beings. The understanding of a healing power in some persons underlies the popular practice of therapuetic touch developed by Dolores Krieger, a nursing instructor, during the mid-1970s.
Sources:
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Dooley, Anne. Every Wall a Door. London: Abelard-Schuman, 1973. Reprint, Bergenfield, N.J.: E. P. Dutton, 1974.
Edwards, Harry. A Guide to the Understanding and Practice of Spiritual Healing. Surrey, England: Spiritual Healing Sanctuary, 1974.
——. Thirty Years a Spiritual Healer. Surrey, England: Spiritual Healing Sanctuary, 1968.
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