Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  THROUGH TWO MAJOR conceptual shifts, the medical profession played its own inadvertent role in promoting the cult of the undead. In the first, British physicians adopted a remarkably different and modern attitude toward disease. To understand the meaning of life, physicians must know what brings people to the edge of death. The eighteenth century viewed the body as a hydraulic instrument, maintaining health through a balance of the four humors, which eventuated in four separate and distinct temperaments. From the time of Hippocrates, dis-ease involved an unbalance inside the body—an excess, say, of the liquid called black bile, which led to a malady known as melancholia. The melancholic was unbalanced or uncentered (eccentric)—not at ease. He or she had lost his or her “temper.” Through the right combination of prayer, astrological prognostication, and chemical concoction, the physician could help set the body back into balance, into a renewed sense of harmony. In severe cases, the patient might need more serious medical intervention. At those moments, the surgeon would make an incision in an arm or a leg—or anywhere the patient felt pressure—and release some of the excess liquid. An enema or a powerful purgative could release even more of the offending fluid. Of course, to the untrained eye, all that liquid gushing out of the body looked like ordinary blood.

  Beginning in 1803, physicians posited the idea of very small units, called germs—“the seed of disease”—that invaded the body, resulting not in dis-ease but in disease. This evolved into Louis Pasteur’s “germ theory of disease” in 1863. The medical profession had thus reduced the idea of disease, and thus the essence of the healthy human being, to its most basic unit. Practitioners now viewed the body as a mechanism, capable of warding off illness through the internal warning beacon called the immune system. And the immune system became the basic mechanism by which a person sustained life itself. Like so many other innovations and ideas of the period, germs, too, constituted a eureka moment, a breakthrough in the path toward defining life. Only here, the definition started not with the beginnings but more with the finales, with life’s nemesis, illness.

  In that same year, 1803, the word vaccinate first appears, to refer to an inoculation of the virus cowpox as a protection against smallpox. With the new body, disease came, like William Blake’s “invisible worm” in the night, to suck the life out of unsuspecting people, no matter their class or age or color, in a brand new way. Germs remained invisible to the naked eye, and so physicians sometimes implanted in the patient’s body an all-seeing “eye”—prompting the use of a new word, inoculation, from ocular, to describe the procedure—to help ward off invading germs, such as those that resulted in the scourge of the century, syphilis. Hence the Medical and Physical Journal entry for 1803: “The vaccine virus must act in one or other of these two ways: either it must destroy the germ of the small-pox . . . or it must neutralize the germ.” Vaccine is the body’s Sherlock Holmes, helping to solve the mystery of disease.

  If the doctors did not vaccinate, they had to find the right medicine to combat the invading germ. They even began using something they called placebos, what the period called “ghost pills,” to coax the patient back into good health with medicine no stronger than an old-fashioned dose of goodwill. In the context of the new illnesses, we can view Dracula as a harbinger of the rampant diseases of the blood, the embodiment—or disembodiment—of infection. He enjoys a truly parasitic relationship with the living, feeding off of their blood. No wonder that the most popular play in the nineteenth century, in terms of audience attendance, was Ibsen’s Ghosts, about the spread of syphilis, which killed thousands of people and transfigured thousands more into cadres of the living dead.

  How the immune system worked, for the overwhelming majority of people, was not unlike the way most of us know the innards of our own computers—as an invisible and incomprehensible control center, a phantom program directing the entire operation. While we rely heavily on the computer’s program, few of us, even with the box splayed wide open, can actually locate that program. Likewise, no physician or patient could locate the immune system. Not so with the four humors. Bloodlet a patient in the Middle Ages and, as the humors left the body, one could inspect them up close. But the immune system existed only as a relationship between parts. In and of itself, the immune system—a system in which we still believe wholeheartedly—did not exist, just one more theft in the great robbery of the solid human being, contributing to its ultimate ghostliness.

  In the second and perhaps more important conceptual shift, the medical profession relocated the seat of feeling and perception, moving it from its earlier sites, in the Renaissance, in the heart or kidneys or liver, to the organ of current critical importance, the brain. This changed the way physicians configured morbidity. Patients died from the brain first, before they made their gradual slide into lethargy and bouts of deep sleep, descending finally into a coma. Nietzsche’s own father began his demise in 1849, for example, with what the attending physician termed a “softening of the brain.” His protracted death took eleven months of the most excruciating pain.

  Beyond disease, of course, lay death itself. And very few scientists in search of the basic matrix of life wanted to acknowledge the finality of death. As patients made their passage to the beyond, they dwelled for protracted periods of time at the threshold. No one knew quite how long, and so physicians advised that friends and relatives could—or maybe even should—continue holding conversations with them, even though they got no response. They deemed those patients neither dead nor alive, but more accurately undead. The comatose could still hear, physicians counseled, and they comforted loved ones by insisting that they, the physicians, could measure the levels of understanding of the near dead with one of a variety of electrical appliances that had been developed in the nineteenth century. The most popular, the galvanometer, recorded the electrical activity that the body continued to release, in its aliveness and all through its stages of decay, through the skin.

  Surgeons preferred to experiment on those who had very recently died, arguing that they held on more vigorously to that ultimate source of life, their so-called “vital powers.” At London’s Royal College of Surgeons, Professor Giovanni Aldini performed galvanic experiments on the recently drowned, believing that powerful electric shock could provide the “means of excitement” to bring the deceased back to life. He left a record of his many and involved experiments in an 1803 book, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism, detailing the scores of instances when he truly believed he had restored life in a dead person.

  These so-called operating rooms, like the viewing rooms at the morgue, filled up every day with curious onlookers. Some came to witness the cutting up of cadavers. Many more came to see magic. They came specifically to gawk at the handiwork of Giovanni Aldini, scientist as showman, who played to that expectant and near-worshipping crowd. On one particular afternoon in that very charged year, 1803, he placed the heads of two decapitated criminals on two tables and jolted them with an electrical impulse to make them grimace. The crowd loved it, quieting down only when Aldini shouted out to them—Tell me, if you are able, are these criminals alive or dead? Moments later, he first made the hand of one of the headless corpses clutch a coin, and then made the other hand toss a coin into the by now frightened and astonished audience.

  But by far the greatest experiment on the dead, and the one that attracted the largest crowds, involved shocking not just the hand or head of a dead person but the heart itself. Fifteen years before the publication of Frankenstein, Professor Aldini announced to the assembled crowd that he would reanimate the heart of a corpse. By contemporary accounts, Aldini’s performance lasted several hours; not a single person left the room. With electrical stimulation, he first made the dead man’s jaw quiver, his left eye open, and his face convulse. He then applied conductors to the ear and rectum, which muscular contractions, according to Aldini himself, “almost [gave] an appearance of re-animation,” the operative words being almost and appearance. And then the climax of the rean
imation show: The right hand clenched and the right auricle of the heart contracted. At any rate, that’s what Aldini told the audience. They believed. The applause went on and on.15

  The scrim separating the living from the dead became more and more transparent. While writers scrambled to find new words to capture that emerging world of otherness, scientists tried to find ways of entering that forbidden territory. In either case, the idea was to make that stubborn and ineffable world give up its secrets. If there is a need, some entrepreneur will always arrive to profit from it. By the 1870s, more and more people had suddenly found themselves with the uncanny ability to journey to the other side and make the dead communicate with the living. The list included magicians, mediums, illusionists, sensitives, ghost talkers, slate writers, hucksters, and average citizens with newly discovered and rare gifts.

  A new vocabulary emerged to categorize these supernatural experiences. The English adopted the already existing French word clairvoyance, “a keenness of insight,” and used it for their supernatural needs: “a mental perception of objects at a distance or concealed from sight.” By the 1880s, the word was in common use. H. G. Wells, one of the most potent writers of a new kind of spectral fiction, used the word very early on. A short time later, Percy Bysshe Shelley coined a word to describe those semi-living patients who languished in hospital beds, and those semi-dead corpses on autopsy tables, and those other half-alive creatures that stalked the pages of short stories and novels. Shelley pronounced them hovering in a state of suspended animation.

  The Grimm brothers, who collected European fairy tales in the nineteenth century, found one in particular emblematic of the period, “Briar Rose,” or more commonly, “Sleeping Beauty,” one of the tales that Freud may have included in his category of the uncanny. The era worked out gradations of those who hovered between categories. If they could still walk around, Science magazine had yet another word to describe people in that specialized state, sleepwalkers or somnambulants. And for those people who, under the influence of the full moon, sleepwalked, the period had coined yet another word, lunambulants.

  The public’s interest in scientific and medical anomalies such as sleepwalkers, hibernators, and those in hypnotic trances or in states of suspended animation culminated in a movement, beginning in the late 1840s, called spiritualism. As with the ghost gathering at the Villa Diodati in 1816, we can date the advent of spiritualism to a particular evening, May 31, 1848, in Hydesville, New York, when two young sisters, Catherine and Margaret Fox, astonished their guests by supposedly successfully communicating with departed celebrities. The two young women heard their “rappings” from the other side in a session they called a séance. I can find no instance of the word séance, as an occasion for making contact with the departed, before 1845.

  From that first evening in Hydesville, the craze for talking to the dead—for what the locals called the “spiritual telegraph”—thoroughly and completely seized the popular imagination. P. T. Barnum helped the Fox sisters achieve worldwide fame by having them perform before large audiences in his American Museum, located in lower Manhattan, from 1841 to 1865. Thomas Edison, the man who loved all forms of “talking machines,” worked on a device that would capture and amplify the voices of the spiritual world; he had much more success with a tool that closely resembled his design for listening in on the spirit world, the telephone. The most normal, solid citizens in America and England, however, did not really need Barnum or even Edison; thousands of the most ordinary men and women followed the lead of the Fox sisters and held séances in their own living rooms in hopes of making contact with friends and family who had passed, in the jargon of the day, into Summerland, or the borderland, the spirit world, the seventh heaven, or the misted realm. So numerous and varied were the séances that several newspapers came into being during this time covering the weekly news, exclusively, of the spiritualism movement.

  By 1888, contemporary accounts put the number of spiritualists in America alone at an astonishing eight million. Towering spiritual authorities like Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky lectured on the benefits of competing psychic movements, like anthroposophy and theosophy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, according to her husband, attended way too many séances for her own good. Her favorite spiritual guide was a Scotsman named Daniel Dunglas Home. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle practically went through his entire family fortune trying to get the word out about the spirit world and the existence of fairies. He wrote lengthy and detailed explanations of the possibilities beyond the world of the visible, in his monumental study The History of Spiritualism. With its many and diverse sects, the spiritual movement had spread by the 1880s to most parts of the world. Byron’s intimate gathering at the Villa Diodati, which resembled in its own way a kind of séance, had mushroomed, seventy years later, into an industry of colossal proportions—all in the service of rounding up and making contact with every available ghost. And the world held untold numbers of them.

  Illusionists quickly saw the potential in the séance and took it, as they said, on the road. In England the great illusionist was Daniel Dunglas Home, a friend of William James and the favorite, as we have seen, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A Scotsman by birth, he moved to Connecticut as a young man, and worked his magic, in the early 1850s, out of a brown-stone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Browning reported, in the summer of 1855, that at one of Home’s séances, “we were touched by the invisible.”16 His great fame derived from talking to the dead and his purported feats of levitation, contemporary accounts of which have him at times hovering six or seven feet off the floor. A caricature of Home during the period shows him, like Mary Poppins, bouncing off the ceiling of a drawing room, three or four people standing around, their mouths wide open in shock and amazement. Not surprisingly, many people denounced him as an utter fraud.

  No such charges were ever leveled at the great Italian spiritualist, a woman named Eusapia Palladino. She traveled all through Europe, Spain, Poland, and Russia producing, by all accounts, the most extraordinary effects, including “simple” levitations, elongating her body at will, physically materializing from the dead, producing the impression of spirit hands and faces in wet clay, and so on.

  In America the leading spiritualists were the Davenport brothers, Ira and William, two established illusionists from Buffalo, New York, who typically raised the dead through spiritual rappings and made contact with them through slate writings and talking boards (the Ouija board). They began their careers in 1855 and very quickly began traveling the world and becoming incredibly famous. The brothers mightily disavowed any hocus-pocus or trickery and claimed a true “spirit connection” with the other world. Near the end of Ira’s checkered career and life, in 1910, however, he revealed his secrets for tapping into the spectral world to his greatest admirer and often principal doubter, Harry Houdini. Ira Davenport died just one year later, a short distance from Lily Dale, a spiritualist camp in upstate New York.

  In Britain, Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s coauthor of the theory of natural selection, attended his first séance in 1865, which he undertook, he said, in the hope of disabusing science of its total devotion to the mechanical. For Wallace, scientists needed to find the secret of life on the other side. And he came to wonder if evolutionary theory had really missed the essential point—it could explain physical evolution with great clarity but left no place for the soul and thus diminished the meaning of human life. He could find evidence for his theory, he conjectured, in no other place than psychic research. So fascinated was he with exploring the spectral world that he helped launch, in 1882, along with a few other colleagues, Britain’s Society for Psychical Research. One of the colleagues he would eventually entice into the group was no less a figure than the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, the younger brother of Henry James, William James. The American Society for Psychical Research opened three years later, in 1885. To give the group more legitimacy, basically in deference to William James, Wallace asked Cambridge Uni
versity to consider psychical research as just one more branch of anthropology. They refused. Nonetheless, the BSPR grew rapidly, and counted as members medical doctors, barristers, scientists, clergy, business executives, writers, artists, and poets, all involved in sorting verifiable ghost stories from the fraudulent.

  Change the conditions slightly, from the mechanical to the technological, and substitute the spiritual movement for New Age religion, and we arrive at the twenty-first century. The 2005-2006 television season opened with Ghost Whisperer. We should not forget the past success of the television programs Crossing Over with John Edward and Medium. The International Ghost Hunters Society, according to Mary Roach’s book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, boasts a membership of fourteen thousand, located in seventy-eight different countries. Roach details the furious and scientific search for proof of the existence of the soul going on today. She points to an abundance of amateur groups around the world investigating the paranormal.

  In the 1840s and 1850s, amateurs and professionals took photographs of ghosts and fairies and other elementals, and brought hundreds of collections of such photographs to market. Since some of the general public believed the camera had the power to catch images of the invisible and the ephemeral, photographers were able to doctor their photographs and sell them to Civil War widows as final and ghostly glimpses of their departed loved ones. The general public bought them in astonishing numbers.