Absence of Imagination #1

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

It’s MIND before MEAT except in the MATRIX.

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George Sandby was a British Vicar.

He drew down heavy heat from the Mainstream Medical Matrix for his acceptance of Mesmerism.

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The 1840s Assassins in Black (before they became the Assassins in White in 1900, and prior to adopting the “White Coat Ceremony”) lambasted …

“We should think that Mr. Sandy would do much more good by praying with the sick of his vicarage than by pawing them over on the bed of suffering or death, and distracting their minds from the awful preparation for another world. Is there no bishop to watch the conduct of the Suffolk clergy!”

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George Sandby (Mesmerism and Its Opponents, Second Edition, 1844, 1848) wrote …

“H.B., aged 20 years, the daughter of a laborer in Flixton, was obliged to return from service last year on account of ill health, and early this spring was attacked with rheumatic inflammation and swelling in one of the knee-joints. She is of a scrofulous [tubercular] habit, and the family are constitutionally subject to rheumatism. Her sufferings were intense, and the inflammation and the pain increased almost daily. The usual remedies, leeches, cupping, blisters, were in vain applied. Opiates were administered, but with no effect. I often went to read and pray with her; and in my whole ministerial experience, have never seen a human being enduring such frightful and continued agony. The neighbours in the adjoining cottage were unable to sleep at night from the screams and cries of the poor girl. When she was moved in bed, her shrieks were as if she were stretched on the rack. Her miseries had now lasted for three or four weeks: she slept neither night nor day: and at last the able and kind surgeon who attended her began to think that amputation of the limb would be inevitable, to lessen the torture and save her life.

“One morning in April, I went to pay her my usual visit. As I drew near the garden gate I heard the fearful cries of the poor sufferer most audibly. A lodger who lived next door, said to me as I was walking in, ‘Sir, this has been going on all night, and we have not been able to close our eyes.’ I walked up stairs to the bed-side, and what a sight was before me! The miserable creature was writhing about under the intolerable agony, screaming and almost shrieking out, her face frightfully flushed by fever and distorted by the pain; and this, the mother said, had continued for several hours. Her daughter, she said, had not slept for a week; and the paroxysms of pain had been often as excruciating as what I was then witnessing. I attempted to address and comfort her, but of course fruitlessly. She was in too excruciating agony to heed what was said. I sat down by the bed-side in silent horror. The spectacle was oppressive. Here was a fellow-creature in a hopeless extremity of torture, and not a prospect of alleviation!

“Suddenly the thought struck me that I would try Mesmerism.”

(To Be Continued)
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