Thorstein Veblen - Achieving Prosperity - Ultimate Collection

The spiritualist newspapers don’t think Addison is so great a medium as they did!

Great accounts have recently come eastward from Chicago, of a certain Doctor Newton, who is said to be working miracles by the hundred in the way of healing diseases. This man operates with exactly the weapons all the miracle-workers, quacks, and impostors, ancient and modern use. All of them have appealed to the imaginations of their patients, and no person acquainted with mental philosophy is ignorant that many a sick man has been cured either by medicine and imagination together, or by imagination alone. Therefore, even if this Newton should really be the cause of the recovery of some persons from their ailments, it would be no more a miracle than if Dr. Mott should do it; nor would Newton be any the less a quack and a humbug.

Newton has operated at the East already. He had a career at New Haven and Hartford, and in other places, before he steered westward in the wake of the “Star of Empire.” What he does is simply to ask what is the matter, and where it hurts. Then he sticks his thumb into the seat of the difficulty, or he pokes or strokes or pats it, as the case may be. Then he says, “There—you’re cured! God bless you!—Take yourself off!”

Chicago must be a credulous place, for we are informed of immense crowds besieging this man, and undergoing his manipulations. One of the Chicago papers, having little faith and a good deal of fun—which in such cases is much better—published some burlesque stories and certificates about “Doctor” Newton, some of them humorous enough. There is a certificate from a woman with fourteen children, all having the measles at once. She says that no sooner had Doctor Newton received one lock of hair of one of them, than the measles left them all, and she now has said measles corked up in a bottle! Another case was that of a merchant who had lost his strength, but went and was stroked by Newton, and the very next day was able to lift a note in bank, which had before been altogether too heavy for him. There was also an old lady, whose story I fear was imitated from Hood’s funny conceit of the deaf woman who bought an ear-trumpet, which was so effective that

–—“The very next day

She heard from her husband in Botany Bay!”

The Chicago old lady in like manner, after having had Doctor Newton’s thumbs “jobbed” into her ears, certifies that she heard next morning from her son in California.

One would think that this ridicule would put the learned Dr. Newton to flight; but it will not until he is through with the fools.

I have already given an account of some of the messages from the other world in the “Banner of Light,” in which some of the spirits explain that they have turned into women since they died. This is by no means the first remarkable trick that the spirits have performed upon the human organization. Here is what they did at High Rock, in Massachusetts, a number of years ago. It beats Joanna Southcott in funny absurdity, if not in blasphemy.

At High Rock, in the year 1854 or thereabouts, certain spiritualist people were building some mysterious machinery. While this was in process of erection, a female medium, of considerable eminence in those parts, was informed by certain spirits, with great solemnity and pomp, that “she would become the Mary of a new dispensation;” that is, she was going to be a mother. Well, this was all proper, no doubt, and the lady herself—so say the spiritualist accounts—had for some time experienced indications that she was pregnant. These indications continued, and became increasingly obvious, and also, it was observed, a little queer in some particulars.

After a while, one Spear—a “Reverend Mr. Spear”—who was mixed up, it appears, with the machinery-part of the business, and who was a medium himself, transmitted to the lady a request from the spirits that she would visit said Spear at High Rock on a certain day. She did so, of course; and while there was unexpectedly taken with the pains of childbirth, which the spiritualist authorities say, were “internal”—where should they be, pray?—and “of the spirit rather than of the physical nature; but were, nevertheless, quite as uncontrollable as those of the latter, and not less severe.” The labor proceeded. It lasted two hours. As it went on, lo and behold! one part and another part of the machinery began to move! And when, at the end of the two hours, the parturition was safely over, all the machinery was going!

The lady had given birth to a Motive Force. Does anybody suppose I am manufacturing this story? Not a bit of it. It is all told at length in a book published by a spiritualist; and probably a good many of my readers will remember about it.

Well, the baby had to be nursed—fact! This superhumanly silly female actually went through the motions of nursing the motive force for some weeks. Though how the thing sucked—Excuse me, ladies; I would not discuss such delicate subjects did not the interests of truth require it.

If I had been the physician, at any rate, I think I should have recommended to hire a healthy female steam-engine for a wet nurse to this young motive force; say a locomotive, for instance. I feel sure the thing would have lived if it could have had a gauge-faucet or something of that sort to draw on. But the medical folks in charge chose to permit the mother to nurse the child, and she not being able to supply proper nutriment, the poor little innocent faded—if that word be appropriate for what couldn’t be seen,—and finally “gin eout;” and the machinery, after some abortive joggles and turns, stood hopelessly still.

This story is true—that is, it is true that the story was told, the pretences were gone through, and the birth was actually believed by a good many people. Some of them were prodigiously enthusiastic about it, and called the invisible brat the New Motive Power, the Physical Savior, Heaven’s Last Best Gift to Man, the New Creation, the Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Act of all Acts, and so on, and so forth.

The great question of all was, Who was the daddy? I don’t know of anybody’s asking this question, but its importance is extreme and obvious. For if things like this are going to happen, the ladies will be afraid to sleep alone in the house if so much as a sewing-machine or apple-corer be about, and will not dare take solitary walks along any stream where there is a water power.

A couple of miscellaneous anecdotes may not inappropriately be appended to this story of monstrous delusion.

Once a “writing medium” was producing sentences in various foreign languages. One of these was Arabic. An enthusiastic youth, a half-believer, after inspecting the wondrous scroll, handed it to his seat-mate, a professor (as it happened) in one of our oldest colleges, and a man of real learning. The professor scrutinized the document. What was the youth’s delight to hear him at last observe gravely, “It is a kind of Arabic, sure enough!”

“What kind?” asked the young man with intense interest.

“Gum-arabic,” said the professor.

The spirit of the prophet Daniel came one night into the apartment of a medium named Fowler, and right before his eyes, he said, wrote down some marks on a piece of paper. These were shown to the Reverend George Bush, Professor of Hebrew in the New-York University, who said that they were “a few verses from the last chapter of Daniel” and were learnedly written. Bush was a spiritualist as well as a professor of Hebrew, and he ought to have known better than to indorse spirit-Hebrew; for shortly there came others, who, to use a rustic phrase, “took the rag off the Bush.” These inconvenient personages were three or four persons of learning: one a Jew, who proved that the document was an attempt to copy the verses in question, by some one so ignorant of Hebrew as not to know that it is written backward, that is, from right to left.