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TELEPATHIC DIAGNOSIS!

TELEPATHIC DIAGNOSIS! Dr. J. A. Quackenbos of New York, who has from time to time enriched the field of psychiatrics by amazing if undemonstrable statements, has had the good fortune to find a Belgian woman having the power to diagnose disease at a distance; when entranced and commanded to go (in psychism) to a designated patient she can describe the latter's bodily conditions. On several occasions, being several miles away, the Belgian seeress has defined, with startling exactness, lesions of which she could know nothing. The procedure is as follows: Let the physician be designated as Dr. A; the Belgian mystic Mme. B and a woman (the sister of a New York physician) as Miss C, whose business it is to hypnotize or put into a quasicataleptic state Mme. B, and then to direct the latter to go (psychically) to the patient, look into his body and describe the nature of his trouble. This is done in detail by Mme. B, who points out conditions of which Dr. A, Miss C and her own (Mme. B’s) objective self could not have had the slightest knowledge. In one instance, in which Dr. Quackenbos followed her statements through the telephone, Mme. B “diagnosed, while five miles away, an obscure case in my office and told correctly the cause of the lesion.” She not only feels and acts the part of the person en rapport, “but she is that person unmistakably, possessed of his knowledge, character traits, feelings and mental attitudes; he talks through her lips, suffers through her bodily organs and energizes through her brain. A remote subject is thus brought face to face with me, and I am enabled to effect salutary changes against his objective will and consent by appeal to the commingled subliminal selves. If this unparagoned means of enforced attention results from a spiritual facility that is lasting, then every man and woman in the world is accessible through this channel; susceptible to corralling by this subliminal method of approach; coercible to apprehension of the wrongness of positions, incentives and motives for action when they are wrong, and changeable to right view and moral action.” Every one will at once see the possibilities and advantages of this method of diagnosis: Should a physician be sent for on an inclement night, or summoned to a case of virulent and dangerous infection, he need not leave his comfortable bed, but may instead simply reach over for the receiver, and telephone the hypnotist, who will in turn call up the medium-diagnostician, who will then throw herself into the requisite psychic state, pay the patient a hypnotic visit and find out what the trouble is. It is but fair, however, to note the objection that the medium-diagnostician is apt to suffer in her trance, because she then “assumes the symptoms and sensations she discovers, and on several occasions she has suffered acutely for hours from pains and perceptions similar to those of the patient.” How these results are achieved Quackenbos is not sure, though be writes of a “series of 10,000 experiences with hypnotized patients.” He knows that “telepathy works through the subconscious”; that “time and space offer no obstructions”; that “matter is penetrable and perceptive and becomes infinitely sublimated”; yet he “must admit that the laws of telepathic transmission are unknown.” He gives Bozzano's explanation of telepathy as being “due to an initial physiopsychic vibration which, expanding concentrically in all directions, reaches the brain of the percipient, bringing with it the agent's thought,” and he believes that Mme. B's power lies in intercepting the vibrations that link her to the person she is in search of. Mme. B, for her part, describes “spirally undulating physiopsychic vibrations which, she thinks, may have curative powers.” As usual in such writings as this, we are assured that the race is on the threshold of a discovery, of wonders far beyond any yet disclosed; that man is going to be “superior to all science as at present interpreted”—poor, much-objurgated science, which is after all nothing else than systematized common sense—nothing else than the crystallized, reasoned wisdom of the ages! And a lot of weird statements are breezily set forth which are “commonly admitted” by “advanced thinkers”—“leaders of science,” among whom Quackenbos cites only the name of the sensational Flammarion! On the other hand, we do know that such phenomena as spiritualism, clairvoyance, prescience and the like have been patiently investigated by such men as Huxley, Faraday, Newcomb, Spencer and Darwin, their conclusions having been pretty well summed up in the latter's observation, “the Lord have mercy on us all if we have to believe in such rubbish.” For further details we must refer the impatient reader to Quackenbos' article,1 among the many astonishing features of which the most astonishing is that it appears, not in a theosophic journal, but in the North American Review. 1. Quackenbos, J. A.: Is Telepathy a Fact or a Delusion? North Am. Rev., September, 1912. JAMA. 1912;59(19):1723-1724 Back to top Article Information Editor's Note: JAMA 100 Years Ago is transcribed verbatim from articles published a century ago, unless otherwise noted. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png JAMA American Medical Association

TELEPATHIC DIAGNOSIS!

JAMA , Volume 308 (18) – Nov 14, 2012

TELEPATHIC DIAGNOSIS!

Abstract

Dr. J. A. Quackenbos of New York, who has from time to time enriched the field of psychiatrics by amazing if undemonstrable statements, has had the good fortune to find a Belgian woman having the power to diagnose disease at a distance; when entranced and commanded to go (in psychism) to a designated patient she can describe the latter's bodily conditions. On several occasions, being several miles away, the Belgian seeress has defined, with startling exactness, lesions of which she could...
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Publisher
American Medical Association
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 American Medical Association. All Rights Reserved.
ISSN
0098-7484
eISSN
1538-3598
DOI
10.1001/jama.2012.3315
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Dr. J. A. Quackenbos of New York, who has from time to time enriched the field of psychiatrics by amazing if undemonstrable statements, has had the good fortune to find a Belgian woman having the power to diagnose disease at a distance; when entranced and commanded to go (in psychism) to a designated patient she can describe the latter's bodily conditions. On several occasions, being several miles away, the Belgian seeress has defined, with startling exactness, lesions of which she could know nothing. The procedure is as follows: Let the physician be designated as Dr. A; the Belgian mystic Mme. B and a woman (the sister of a New York physician) as Miss C, whose business it is to hypnotize or put into a quasicataleptic state Mme. B, and then to direct the latter to go (psychically) to the patient, look into his body and describe the nature of his trouble. This is done in detail by Mme. B, who points out conditions of which Dr. A, Miss C and her own (Mme. B’s) objective self could not have had the slightest knowledge. In one instance, in which Dr. Quackenbos followed her statements through the telephone, Mme. B “diagnosed, while five miles away, an obscure case in my office and told correctly the cause of the lesion.” She not only feels and acts the part of the person en rapport, “but she is that person unmistakably, possessed of his knowledge, character traits, feelings and mental attitudes; he talks through her lips, suffers through her bodily organs and energizes through her brain. A remote subject is thus brought face to face with me, and I am enabled to effect salutary changes against his objective will and consent by appeal to the commingled subliminal selves. If this unparagoned means of enforced attention results from a spiritual facility that is lasting, then every man and woman in the world is accessible through this channel; susceptible to corralling by this subliminal method of approach; coercible to apprehension of the wrongness of positions, incentives and motives for action when they are wrong, and changeable to right view and moral action.” Every one will at once see the possibilities and advantages of this method of diagnosis: Should a physician be sent for on an inclement night, or summoned to a case of virulent and dangerous infection, he need not leave his comfortable bed, but may instead simply reach over for the receiver, and telephone the hypnotist, who will in turn call up the medium-diagnostician, who will then throw herself into the requisite psychic state, pay the patient a hypnotic visit and find out what the trouble is. It is but fair, however, to note the objection that the medium-diagnostician is apt to suffer in her trance, because she then “assumes the symptoms and sensations she discovers, and on several occasions she has suffered acutely for hours from pains and perceptions similar to those of the patient.” How these results are achieved Quackenbos is not sure, though be writes of a “series of 10,000 experiences with hypnotized patients.” He knows that “telepathy works through the subconscious”; that “time and space offer no obstructions”; that “matter is penetrable and perceptive and becomes infinitely sublimated”; yet he “must admit that the laws of telepathic transmission are unknown.” He gives Bozzano's explanation of telepathy as being “due to an initial physiopsychic vibration which, expanding concentrically in all directions, reaches the brain of the percipient, bringing with it the agent's thought,” and he believes that Mme. B's power lies in intercepting the vibrations that link her to the person she is in search of. Mme. B, for her part, describes “spirally undulating physiopsychic vibrations which, she thinks, may have curative powers.” As usual in such writings as this, we are assured that the race is on the threshold of a discovery, of wonders far beyond any yet disclosed; that man is going to be “superior to all science as at present interpreted”—poor, much-objurgated science, which is after all nothing else than systematized common sense—nothing else than the crystallized, reasoned wisdom of the ages! And a lot of weird statements are breezily set forth which are “commonly admitted” by “advanced thinkers”—“leaders of science,” among whom Quackenbos cites only the name of the sensational Flammarion! On the other hand, we do know that such phenomena as spiritualism, clairvoyance, prescience and the like have been patiently investigated by such men as Huxley, Faraday, Newcomb, Spencer and Darwin, their conclusions having been pretty well summed up in the latter's observation, “the Lord have mercy on us all if we have to believe in such rubbish.” For further details we must refer the impatient reader to Quackenbos' article,1 among the many astonishing features of which the most astonishing is that it appears, not in a theosophic journal, but in the North American Review. 1. Quackenbos, J. A.: Is Telepathy a Fact or a Delusion? North Am. Rev., September, 1912. JAMA. 1912;59(19):1723-1724 Back to top Article Information Editor's Note: JAMA 100 Years Ago is transcribed verbatim from articles published a century ago, unless otherwise noted.

Journal

JAMAAmerican Medical Association

Published: Nov 14, 2012

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