Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [98]
I recall that some years back, when the book Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife by John Fuller was released in Britain, Dr. Chris Evans and I attended the soiree thrown by the publishers. As it turned out, we were the only rational people there. We watched a film, produced by Dr. A. Puharich (before his involvement with Uri Geller), about the miracle surgery performed by one Jose Pedro de Feitas, who took the stage name of Arigo in the jungles of Brazil and became one of the saints of the paranormal by doing primitive surgery and writing useless prescriptions. He was praised by Dr. Puharich and by Fuller, who gave us such priceless documents as Incident at Exeter and The Interrupted Journey, both classics of claptrap about UFOs. Fuller used to write for the TV show "Candid Camera" and has lost none of his inventiveness since.
At one point during the film, which was narrated in person by another dedicated believer, Dr. Ted Bastin of Cambridge, we saw a subcutaneous cyst being removed from a patient's scalp by Arigo. This is an operation I have seen performed several times by a missionary in Peru without any anesthetic at all. In fact, I performed the same operation on myself when I developed a cyst on my forehead that threatened to become a third eye. Such an affliction is simply a bit of harmless fatty substance under the skin that forms a lump. It often goes away without treatment, being absorbed into the system harmlessly.
Bastin referred to the thing as a cyst, and I agreed that it looked just like one. But when I pointed out to him that the very book we were discussing featured a frame from that same section of the motion picture and described the cyst as "a scalp tumor," my objection was met with dismissal as an overemphasis on detail. Again, hyperbole had been liberally applied to bolster the case. There is a vast difference between a scalp tumor and what was shown in the film. Later during the showing of the film Dr. Evans and I were in hysterics, to the dismay of the others there, when, as Bastin droned on about the "absence of any pain or discomfort" and "little or no bleeding," the screen showed a patient being treated for a dreadful boil on his back. At the moment that Arigo's scalpel hit the boil, a terrifying gush of blood and pus burst forth, and the patient was grabbed by attendants who held him on the operating table in his agony. Blood was everywhere, and the pain was quite evident.
Arigo was an amateur doctor, like hundreds of "healers" in remote parts of the world where medical care is difficult to come by except at their hands. He had picked up—as had my missionary friend in Peru, Joe Hocking—the rudiments of elementary surgery, basic dentistry, and good psychological manipulation. Often, the presence of someone who cares is more important to a patient than a man in a white coat. Arigo dressed up his act with some mumbo jumbo about a dead German doctor—Dr. Fritz—who whispered prescriptions into his left ear. The scribblings that resulted were filled by the local pharmacy. It is interesting and revealing to note that no one but his assistant could read these scribbles, which he reduced to typewritten prescriptions for useless and inapplicable combinations of drugs that nonetheless seemed to give relief in some cases. Arigo obviously knew of the placebo effect, too. And the only pharmacy in town was run by his brother.
Arigo was given his greatest support by just such books as Fuller's. As an example of this author's total disregard for fact, we may examine his description of an operation he saw in the Puharich film. Most of the rest of his book is based on data given him by Puharich, since Fuller never saw Arigo at all, except on film. The operation is the boil-lancing already mentioned, and Fuller's description of it is a total misrepresentation of the action as shown in the film. "As usual," writes Fuller, "he plunged the knife in brutally, cut deeply into the flesh