Professed Healers and the Power to Heal

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 9 pages

First published in The Theosophist, Vol. IV, No. 7, April 1883, pages 158–60, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV pages 380–86. The frontispiece is Lorenzo Costa's Concert of about 1485–95, in the National Gallery, London.

The article is about professional conduct as much as about healing. It opens by calling the near-unanimous scepticism of physicians towards mesmeric healing a striking commentary on the imperfection of modern medicine: most declare the thing impossible and set down those who maintain its reality as little better than charlatans. What Blavatsky objects to is what follows the disagreement — that the majority are not satisfied with expressing scepticism but do their best to intimidate and ostracise the more candid minority. The alliance she identifies is the sharpest observation in the piece: that the physicians find willing allies in the theologians, who stand on their own prerogatives and, while claiming to heal by divine commission, denounce all lay mesmeric healers as either humbugs or sorcerers — two professions with nothing else in common closing ranks against a third. She records how saddening it is to read in the literature of mesmerism so many plaintive protests against the prejudiced injustice of the medical profession towards able scientists such as Gregory, Ashburner, Elliotson and von Reichenbach, and remarks on how an instinct of narrow selfishness carries professional men beyond all bounds and warps the moral sense. The case of Newton, the American healer, whose cures are recorded by the thousand, is then taken up as the test case.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.4 MB, 9 pages)