Epidemical Contagion in Spiritualism
305 Aim XI.?
Having just re-read the brochure by Dr Forbes Winslow on “? Spiritualistic Madness,” I cannot refrain from mentioning an instance where I quite believe that a distinct epidemical spiritualistic contagion was present in a room as decided as any miasma at times recognised by sensitive people as the cause of any given fever.
I was calling on a friend in Paris, whom I did not know to be a spiritualist. Several spiritualists were present at her after- noon reception ; she herself and her brother were both tracing in me a strong resemblance to a dead relative, and hoping and believing I might prove a powerful medium.
All this was quite unknown to me, but I have often related, as a curious psychological experience, which I have never before attempted to explain, how intense was the physical discomfort I went through. I could not describe it, but only compare it to some extent with the physical misery I always endure when in the same room or even in the same house with a corpse. ” Spirits ” played on a concertina ! ” Spirit drawings ” were exhibited, &c., but all that after I had been so strongly im- pressed by that intangible ” something ” in the air. To give any real force to this personal corroboration of Dr. Forbes Winslow’s theory on the epidemical contagion of spiritualistic madness, I ought to add that an unusually keen sense of smell enables me to detect odours which might well be regarded as altogether inappreciable. In London, during an epidemic of small-pox, I have recognised, the moment of entering within the radius of infection, a feeling of a dense atmospheric fog-wall, with small-pox odour. In Paris I have easily avoided it during a severe epidemic, by keeping in the middle of the road when there were infected houses on both sides of the street. Again, in the spring of this year, when suffering from an extremely severe attack of scarlet-fever, the smell of drain- poison (which, I believe, had chiefly caused the illness) was always present, until convalescence had fairly set in, and the poison was apparently entirely eliminated from the system. I have a little daughter who inherits this acute sense of smell, but with her it is more subtle and highly discriminating. At two months old she almost sprang out of her nurse’s arms in her determined efforts to smell a hyacinth. At twenty months old she smelt when there was milk in the room from a cow which had lately calved, and refused that which she had long been taking from an inferior cow, saying, ” You may have that, but I want that other.”
Nor is this highly-developed sense of smell connected with any lesser powers of sight or memory.
She will now point out at an immense distance a pheasant under cover or a hare. Her sight has been carefully trained from earliest infancy to counteract any possible hereditary tendencies to near-sightedness, but the acute sense of smell is altogether intuitive.
I need hardly say I have never felt tempted to have any- thing more to do with spiritualists or spiritualism. Wyma,
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