Notice Of Removal

This marvelous palimpsest, from Paul Gaunt of Psypioneer, proving, I think, how powerful and evocative emphemera really is, and giving us a rare glimpse of Emma's handwriting.

Text One: Moving House

NOTICE OF REMOVAL
208 West 38th Street, New York
On and after April 21st (1876), DRS WM & EMMA HARDINGE BRITTAN (sic) will remove to their own residence, 118 West Chester Park, Boston, Mass., where they will resume practice as ELECTRIC PHYSICIANS, and continue to manufacture the HOME BATTERY. No other address will reach them.

This move, from the house in which some of the early organizing meetings of the Theosophical Society were held, and the announced intention to re-enter the galvanic medicine business. If, as the second text suggests, the Drs. Brittan (fascinating that EHB would allow the spelling, but perhaps the use of the removal card as notepaper indicates some enforced parsimony in the Britten household) were in residence in Boston in November of 1876. they were certainly back on the lecture circuit by mid-1877, Emma appearing (at least) in Salt Lake City and San Francisco before embarking for Sydney in January of 1878.

Text Two: I This Day

118 West Chester Park, Boston [Mas?] America
Nov 16 / 76
Dear W Coleman
I this day send you by mail a copy of Ghost Land of which I beg your acceptance from me, its Editor. The demand for it is so great that the first edition is exhausted and I have to prepare another immediately. Receive one to [...] to write a letter yet -- Let me know if this copy comes safely. In great haste yours ever sincerely
Emma H. Britten

(Will puzzle the rest out, I think, with some help from Paul)

W. Coleman may be William Coleman, a somewhat truculent spiritualist and member of the American Oriental Society, who wrote periodically for the Religio Philosophical Journal in Chicago, and who famously accused EPB of plagiarizing large sections of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, but the inclusion of "America" in the header of the text tends to suggest it was written to someone outside the country. A puzzlement.

The ways in which Emma created demand for Art Magic and Ghost Land, the size of the print runs, the number of editions and states of the text are, in my view, all questions that remain open. The texts of Art Magic and Ghost Land commonly in circulation today are those of the Progressive Thinker "premium" editions of 1897 and after, not those of the first (limited) editions. The mechanics of publication for Art Magic, with its illustrations, tend to suggest that the Progressive Thinker edition was printed from the first edition plates or forms of Art Magic, and there are several significant, glaring flaws in the 1897 Progressive Thinker text of Ghost Land that, if present in the first edition text, would establish clearly that it too is based on the original plates or forms.

The Tele-Gastrograph

Annotation of other people's texts is, I find, one of the most enjoyable things one can do.

Working on EHB's Spiritualism -- Is It A Savage Superstition? this evening, I find, in the columns of the Melbourne Age (as reprinted by the Brisbane Courier for 10 July 1878 and several other papers in Australia and New Zealand) a marvelous discussion of EHB's doings, as an experimenter testing a new invention: the electro-gastrograph, “a machine by which, through the aid of electric currents, the flavour of any food or liquor can be transmitted by wire to any distance, and the sensation of eating and drinking conveyed by merely placing the end of the wire between the teeth.” EHB was at one of the five points in a network set up to test the machine, in the offices of the Mebourne Age newspaper, with (among other people) the unjustly-not-famous Australian novelist Marcus Clarke (For The Term Of His Natural Life). The correspondent for the Age, who was clearly not a believer in the efficacy of the machine, intimates the EHB had too much sherry-and-bitters, and concludes that “the business of the ‘restauranteur’ promises to be severely injured if not abolished” by the tele-gastrograph.

Recalling the Vitapathy foray of a few days back, and looking up on the shelf above my monitor at my much-prized copy of The Electric Physician, I am suddenly reminded of the human battery scene in Ghost Land:

Let no sneering skeptic doubt the possibility...

Update: Must learn to be less opaque. This article is, of course, satirical. No such machine was ever made.

Vitapathy

In Volume 4, Number 9, The Psypioneer, in publishing a text of William Britten's in one of its issues, remarks that (according to his obituary) Britten was a graduate of the Vitapathic College in the US.

There was only one such Vitapathic institution, run under various names, including the American Health College, by John Bunyan Campbell, in Cincinnati.

To get us started down this interesting path, Dr. Otto Juettner's remarks, in his Historical and Biographical Sketches (1909), on Campbell are instructive:

There is only one individual whose memory ought to be preserved because he exemplifies the possibilities of schemes executed under the cloak of medicine. He is the type of an entire class and as such is necessarily of value to the medical historian. This man was the Cagliostro of Medical Cincinnati,
John Bunyan Campbell, who at one time did more to amuse the educated and mystify the ignorant than all the other charlatans put together.
Campbell was born in 1820 on Little Pine Creek, Lycoming Co., Pa. The sketch of his earnest efforts to find the truth in medicine, given by himself in the preface to his "Encyclopedia of Vitapathic Practice," reminds one of Faust's "Monologue." This preface and the book should be read by every physician who has the blues. The fact that this man ever found even one human being who took him seriously, is an unfathomable mystery. There were thousands in all parts of the country who were his devout followers, some of whom, when the spell was broken, entered medical colleges and graduated in medicine. Campbell called his system "vitapathy," a mongrel mixture of half-digested science, brazen assurance and medical and religious quackery. His graduates were "vitapathic physicians and ministers" who were empowered to heal the sick, to give the vitapathic breathing prayer, to administer the milk-sacrament, to receive and give forth higher spiritualization, etc., etc. Campbell wrote a book on practice and another on vitapathic materia medica, in which he included all the quack-nostrums and house-remedies of all ages and centuries. The principal therapeutic agent is "vita," the vital spirit which is everywhere and is introduced into the body, if handled by a properly qualified vitapathic physician. Campbell says : "The higher wisdom and spiritual power comes in at the top of the head and the hair must be parted there to let the spirit in, as hair is a non-conductor." Campbell did not sell any of his books, nor did he allow his students to divulge the contents. He made his students pronounce a terrible oath that they would not speak of the contents of his books or show the books to anyone.... Campbell charged a good fee for his "course of instruction" and drew large classes of males and females.... His citadel of infamy still stands in Fairmount, a mute witness of iniquity unspeakable. After following up this man's career, the only question remains whether he should have properly been confined in a State prison or in an insane asylum. His "graduates" some years ago could be found in every State in the Union.

Graduates of Campbell's school were, as noted, minister-doctors, denoted (unfortunately), V. D. (presumably Vitapathic Doctor) and were certified by the school both to practice medicine and to "perform the functions of a minister of the Gospel," as one practitioner explained to her state licensing board when haled up before it.

Campbell clearly understood the medical game -- indeed, the modern medical game -- and not only asserted his intellectual property rights aggressively, as the image above indicates, but took out patents on aspects of his practice.

No doubt one particular patent (US Patent # 606887, for the electric extraction of poisons) reflects a vitapathic practice that both William and Emma were subsequently to use to advantage.

The similarities between the machinery drawn in this patent illustration, and the machinery described in the Electric Physician are many, and close.

A History of the Schools of Cincinnati (1906), provides this summary of Campbell's American Health College:

"The American Health College and Vitapathic Sanitarium was organized in Cincinnati in 1876, and chartered in 1883. The society owns its own college building and sanitarium in Fairmount. To date, 400 doctors have been licensed. John Bunyan Campbell, president and founder. This college objects to much medicine, and uses few drugs. Electricity plays a prominent part." (p. 297)

The state of Illinois, in 1892, was less charitable:

Record held by the American Medical Association note, however, the existence of the American Health College in 1871, which seems more in keeping with our timelines, if we presume that William Britten studied galvanic medicine before practicing it, rather than, say, getting a degree as an afterthought.

Given the dating of Campbell's college (1871-1876, reorganized 1876, chartered [by what organization?] 1883) , Britten must have been an early student of Campbell's, after his marriage to EHB. That bit of their trajectory remains as yet unplotted.

Cincinnati, by the way, seems at the time to have been a positive gold mine of quackery and degree mills.

But I think we find the linkage we're looking for -- as no doubt the editor who selected the story to run did -- from this snippet from the New York Times of April 16, 1905:

The Electric Physician

The great lost work of EHB. Boston: Dr. William Britten, 1875. Green cloth boards, blank spine, 4.5 inches wide by 6 inches tall. (3) + 59pp. + 4 advertisements. Unobtainable by the general public, and scarce in its first edition.

It isn't a medical treatise. It's something between a piece of marketing collateral, and an instruction manual for a very specific piece of apparatus, which clearly shipped with a schematic diagram with alphabetized piece-parts.

Worth the price -- every penny -- for this:

Written by any old nobody, operating out of a three-story brownstone on West Brookline Street, it'd quickly be filed under quackery (as my copy obviously was by someone, doubled-over and used as a wedge of some kind) or just thrown out. But, with her by-line, we should see it for what it is: an artifact of the breathtakingly bold re-invention of herself that EHB attempted after the Boston fire of 1872 and the failure of The Western Star.

To be made available on the Archive in facsimile and machine-readable forms almost immediately. Contact me directly if you can't wait to get your hands on it.

Dr. Britten's Home Battery

Speaks for itself.

The snippet is from the Countess of Caithness' book, Old Truths In A New Light (1876). EHB and the Countess had a long association -- the Countess shows up as a 'friend' of the Two Worlds Publishing Company, established by EHB and William in Manchester in the 1880s, in a vanity book the press did in the 1890s (below).

Emma, Fibbing and Revealing (?)

Today's mud-encrusted sapphire comes from Elizabeth J. French's A New Path In Electrical Therapeutics, published in Philadelphia in 1873 by French herself, and subsequently republished by Lippincott.

French, as I mentioned in an earlier post, provided a home for EHB and her mother in New York City shortly after EHB's arrival from Europe, and probably introduced EHB to trance-speaking: a skill French advertised herself as possessing. It also seems clear, from the excerpt of EHB's writing published here, (and here, in flat text form) that whatever falling-out occurred between French and EHB occurred subsequent to March of 1873, for no miffed party would have written a puff piece for an adversary like the one below.

The archives of the Philadelphia Press aren't readily available to check the date and the accuracy of the text (I cannot at this point even verify the existence of such a paper), but assuming it to be an accurate transcription of an actual letter published in March of 1973 by EHB, the text is revealing in a number of ways, indicating that

• it places EHB in residence, at least temporarily, in the Philadelphia area in 1873, thus possibly putting a specific time-frame around the "Rose Cross"/Delanco "blue ink" stalker incident in her Autobiography, on which more another day


• EHB spent time in Milan, Italy, as well as in London and Paris, performing in opera companies


• EHB underwent some number of medical procedures at the hands of eminent London physicians just prior to her first trip to the US -- some time in the early 1850s, after she first became associated with the Haymarket Theatre (which places this any time after May of 1848, when EHB (as Emma Harding) made her debut at the Haymarket as Zepherine in a retitled version of Lola Montes)


• the proximate reason for her trip to the US was not a contract to appear on the stage at the Old Broadway theatre, but rather a doctor's directive that she take a "long sea voyage" or risk "pulmonary consumption."


• EHB was under the care of A. D. Wilson, a prominent and controversial homeopath connected with the French circle, while living in New York


• EHB was at least passingly familiar with the major works of homeopathy, including Samuel Hahnemann's Organon of Medicine (1810), and assumed her readers would be as well

Some of these statements are almost certainly false.

But perhaps most interestingly, though, the letter studiously avoids drawing the very close connection that undoubedly existed for several decades between French and EHB. The text of the letter is written in such a way as to suggest, very clearly, that EHB sought treatment from Mrs. French, and then did not see her again for a significant period of time.

Her Autobiography tells a significantly different story:

One of the most fortunate acquaintances that I was. privileged to make, as I then deemed, was with the family of Mrs. E. J. French, a very fine clairvoyant, physician, electrician, and one who from the first days of the modern movement had been gifted with extraordinary powers as a trance, writing, rapping, and physical medium. I had been introduced to this remarkable medium with a view of consulting her professionally as to the possibility of recovering my powers as an opera singer. Whilst giving me absolutely no hope in that direction, Mrs. French's spirits, the chief of whom professed to be the great electrical discoverer, Benjamin Franklin, strongly advised that my mother and I should make our home with Mrs. French and her family of three sweet young girls. Following this advice, we took rooms with Mrs. French, in a new house to which she was, removing, and for many years we boarded with her, forming an intimate part of her family, and constantly connected with her life and professional experiences.

Selective memory? Creative embellishment (Milan? Really?) Just good storyelling/marketing sense?

The Electric Physician

Go ahead: Google it.

Early on in her transition from actress to propagandist - while she was still serving as a test medium -- EHB and her mother lived, in New York, with Mrs. E. J. French, a Spiritualist who counted among her skills both trance-speaking and electro-medicine -- the use of electricity as a therapeutic mechanism.

(One doesn't need to know much about mesmerism to recognize the intellectual lineage here...)

I haven't looked yet to see how often EHB discussed electro-medicine in her published work, but she and William did, from 1872 until some time in late 1874 or early 1875, practice electro-medicine professionally in Boston.

(I believe, for what it's worth, that this is where the Dr. in Dr. William Britten comes from. When asked by officials about his occupation, in census-taking and elsewhere, Britten had a wide variety of answers, including "bricklayer", "accountant" and "gunsmith" (?!?), but never claimed a medical certification.)

In any case, the great lost (digital) work of EHB is her booklet on electro-medicine, The Electric Physician.

Hunted high and low (abebooks and alibris both failing to produce same), for some months....and I've found a copy. What a treat it will be to submit that book to the tender care of CanoScan and OmniPage, and release its digital (dare I say aetheric) double into the wild...