The law and the healing mediums.

— Under the title of A Mystery, several newspapers of last May reported the following fact:

“One of these days, two ladies of the Saint-Germain district presented themselves to the commissioner of their quarter and drew his attention to a certain P… who, according to them, had abused their confidence and their credulity, asserting that he would cure them of illnesses against which their care had been powerless.

“Having opened an inquiry on the matter, the magistrate learned that P… passed for a skillful physician, whose clientele was increasing daily, and who performed extraordinary cures.

“According to his answers to the commissioner's questions, P… seems convinced that he is endowed with a supernatural faculty, which gives him the power to cure merely by the laying of his hands upon the diseased organs.

“For twenty years he was a cook; he was even cited as skillful in his trade, which he abandoned a year ago to consecrate himself to the art of healing.

“If he is to be believed, he had several visions and mysterious apparitions, in which an envoy of God revealed to him that he had a humanitarian mission to fulfill upon the Earth, in which he must not fail, under penalty of being damned. Obeying, he said, this order come from heaven, the former cook installed himself in an apartment on the rue Saint-Placide, and the sick did not delay in flocking to his consultations.

“He prescribes no medicines; he examines the patient, whom he must treat while fasting, palpates him, seeks and discovers the seat of the malady, upon which he applies his hands in a cross, pronounces a few words that are, he says, his secret; then, with his prayer, an invisible Spirit comes and tears out the malady.

“P… is certainly a madman. But what is extraordinary, inexplicable, is that he has proved, as the inquiry establishes, that he cured, by this singular process, more than forty persons afflicted with grave maladies.

“Several testified to him their gratitude by gifts of money. According to a will found at his home, an elderly lady, a property owner in the surroundings of Fontainebleau, made him heir to a sum of 40,000 francs.

“P… was arrested and his trial, which will certainly not delay in coming before the correctional police, promises to be curious.”

— We are neither apologist nor detractor of Mr. P…, whom we do not know. Is he in good or bad conditions? Is he sincere or a charlatan? We do not know; it is the future that will prove it; we take sides neither for nor against him. We mention the fact just as it is reported, because it comes to join the idea of all those who believe in the existence of one of those strange faculties that confound Science and those who wish to admit nothing outside the visible and tangible world. By dint of hearing this spoken of and seeing the facts multiplying, one is forced to grant that there is something to it and, little by little, the distinction is made between truth and hypocrisy. In the report that precedes, you have surely noted that curious passage, and the no less curious contradiction that it contains: “P… is certainly a madman. But what is extraordinary, inexplicable, is that he has proved, as the inquiry establishes, that he cured, by this singular process, more than forty persons afflicted with grave maladies.”

Thus, the inquiry establishes the cures; but, because the means he employs is inexplicable and is not recognized by the Faculty, he is certainly mad. If so, the abbé prince of Hohenlohe, whose marvelous cures we reported in the Review of December 1866, was mad; the venerable curé of Ars, who, he too, performed cures by singular processes, was mad; and so many others. The Christ, who cured without a diploma and employed no medicines, was mad and would have paid many fines in our days. Mad or not, when there is a cure, many people prefer to be cured by a madman than to be buried by a man of good sense. With a diploma, all medical eccentricities are permitted. A physician, whose name we forget, but who earns a great deal of money, employs a much more bizarre process; with a brush, he paints on the faces of his patients little red, yellow, green, blue lozenges, surrounding the eyes, the nose and the mouth, in a quantity proportional to the nature of the illness. On what scientific datum is this kind of medication based? A writer's joke in poor taste claimed that, to spare enormous expenses of publicity, this physician had the patients carry it for free, on their faces. Seeing in the streets these tattooed faces, one naturally asks what it is. And the patients answer: it is the process of the famous Doctor So-and-so. But he is a physician; it matters not whether his process is good, bad or insignificant; everything is permitted to him, even to be a charlatan: he is authorized by the Faculty. If an undiplomaed individual should wish to imitate him, he would be prosecuted for fraud. They cry out against the credulity of the public regarding charlatans; they marvel at the throng of people to the house of the first to come along announcing a new method of healing, to the house of the somnambulists, the impostors and others; at the predilection for old wives' remedies, and they fasten upon the ineptitude of the human species! The first cause is due to the very natural desire that the sick have to be cured, and to the failure of Medicine in a very great number of cases. If physicians cured more frequently and surely, people would not go elsewhere; it even happens almost always that exceptional means are not resorted to until after the official resources have been uselessly exhausted. Now, the sick person who wants to be cured at any price worries little whether it is according to the rule, or against the rule. We shall not repeat here what is today clearly demonstrated regarding the causes of certain cures, inexplicable only to those who do not wish to take the trouble to go back to the source of the phenomenon. If the cure occurred, this is a fact, and this fact has a cause. Would it be more rational to deny it than to seek it? – They will say that it is chance; the sick person cured himself. – So be it; but, then, the physician who declared him incurable gave proof of great ignorance. And, moreover, if there are twenty, forty, a hundred similar cures, is it always chance? It must be granted that it would be a singularly persevering and intelligent chance, to which one might give the name of Doctor Chance. We shall examine the question from a more serious point of view.

— Are the undiplomaed persons who treat the sick by magnetism; by magnetized water, which is nothing but a dissolution of the magnetic fluid; by the imposition of hands, which is an instantaneous and powerful magnetization; by prayer, which is a mental magnetization; with the concurrence of the Spirits, which is yet another variety of magnetization, liable under the law against the illegal exercise of Medicine?

The terms of the law are certainly very elastic, because it does not specify the means. Strictly and logically, one can consider as exercising the art of healing only those who make a profession of it, that is, who draw profit from it. Nevertheless, condemnations have been seen pronounced against individuals who occupy themselves with such care out of pure devotion, without any interest, overt or concealed. The offense lies, then, above all, in the prescription of remedies. However, notorious disinterestedness is generally taken into consideration as an attenuating circumstance. Until now it had not been thought that a cure could be operated without the use of medicines; therefore, the law did not foresee the case of curative treatments without remedies, and it is only by extension that it would be applied to the magnetizers and the healing mediums. Official Medicine recognizing no efficacy in magnetism and its appendages, and still less in the intervention of the Spirits, one could not legally condemn for illegal exercise of Medicine the magnetizers and the healing mediums, who prescribe nothing beyond magnetized water, because that would be to recognize officially a virtue in the magnetic agent and to place it in the class of curative means; it would be to include magnetism and healing mediumship in the art of healing, and to give the lie to the Faculty. What is sometimes done in such cases is to condemn for the offense of fraud and abuse of confidence, as making one pay for a thing without value, the person who draws direct or indirect profit from it, or even concealed profit, under the name of optional remuneration, a veil in which one must not always trust. The appreciation of the fact depends entirely on the way of regarding the thing in itself; often it is a question of personal opinion, unless there is presumed abuse, in which case the question of good faith must always be taken into consideration. Then justice appreciates the aggravating or attenuating circumstances. Everything is entirely different for the one whose disinterestedness is proven and complete. Since he prescribes nothing and receives nothing, the law cannot reach him, otherwise it would be necessary to give it an extension that neither the spirit nor the letter allows. Where there is nothing to gain, there can be no charlatanism. There is no power in the world that can oppose the exercise of healing mediumship or magnetization, in the true acceptation of the word.

Nevertheless, they will say, Mr. Jacob charged nothing, and was nonetheless interdicted. It is true; but he was neither prosecuted nor condemned for the fact in question. The interdiction was a measure of military discipline, because of the disturbance that the throng of people heading there could cause in the camp; and if, afterward, he invoked that interdiction, it was because it suited him. If he had not belonged to the army, no one could have troubled him. (See the Review of March 1866: Spiritism and the Magistracy). n [1] T.'s N.: Although the original gives the year 1865, the article above was published in 1866.