Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [126]
John Moodie embarked on his practice as a spiritual healer with some trepidation. The only advice that the spirits gave him was to be abstemious in his diet and refrain from drinking tea or coffee. He must have known all about “mesmeric passes” (perhaps from Kate Fox), because that was what he used in his first attempt. His guinea pig was his sister-in-law, Catharine Parr Trail, who had been complaining about pain in her knees resulting from gout that she thought she had inherited from her father. John made a few passes over her joints and down her lower legs. It must have been a little unsettling for both of them: Catharine would rarely have bared her knees, and John was not in the habit of stroking his sister-in-law’s limbs. Catharine claimed instant relief from the pain—perhaps through the power of John’s healing hands, perhaps through sheer embarrassment.
John was thrilled with the result. “This encouraged me to try my healing powers in other cases,” he wrote in the Spiritual Album, “and I have been successful beyond my most sanguine expectations.” Catharine must have enjoyed the sensation of spiritual healing because she was soon back for more. John next relieved the rheumatism in her shoulder and arm by laying his left hand on her bare shoulder while holding her hand in his right. John healed a neighbour’s chronic rheumatism by gentle manipulation of his arm, and cured his neuralgia and sore eyes through massaging his eye sockets. When his daughter Agnes Fitzgibbon arrived from Toronto with a streaming cold and congested lungs, he drew his hands “from her ears downward to her stomach, and passed them off outward several times. She felt as if warm water were running down one side of her lungs.” She was better in no time. “I can hardly tell how many cases of bilious and nervous headache I have relieved by similar means, in a few minutes,” John recorded with delight in his album.
What was going on? A large part of John’s effectiveness as a healer was probably psychological: his subjects believed that he could cure them, and every success reinforced their belief. He himself acknowledged, in one of his lengthy letters to the Spiritual Telegraph, that faith was an essential ingredient. It is also likely that, by promoting drainage of the sinuses or the lymph system (in the neighbour with sore eyes, for instance), John was doing some good. John himself took his role as a healer very seriously: he recorded different techniques, homeopathic remedies and accounts of his activities in his Spiritual Album. Nevertheless, news that the sheriff spent his afternoons in darkened drawing rooms, “healing” some of the town’s most respectable matrons, must have spread like wildfire through gossipy Belleville. It cannot have done John’s reputation much good amongst the stony-faced Tory lawyers who met on the first Monday of every month at the Orange Lodge.
John’s career as a spiritual healer didn’t last long. Soon after it was launched, the sisters’ interest in spiritualism began to nose-dive. Perhaps it was the local tittle-tattle. Perhaps it was because the claims of spiritualists were coming under increasingly rigorous scrutiny, and the pseudoscientific claptrap became too much for Susanna