The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [128]
The twentieth-century personality was bright, loud, exhilarating, and, to fifty-eight-year-old William James, exhausting. He’d long fretted about his health, and now he felt depressingly old, a fragile man in robust times. Following a hiking vacation in the Adirondacks, he’d developed symptoms of heart disease. He could walk only a few feet before pain seared through his chest. On the recommendation of doctors—and given a new sabbatical leave by Harvard—James decided to seek medical treatment in Europe. Accompanied by his wife and daughter, he sailed from Boston in June 1900. Despite treatment at a renowned German spa, followed by bed rest at his brother’s home in England, James could not seem to recover.
Fred Myers also was stubbornly ill. He’d emerged from a nasty bout with influenza only to baffle his physician with a persistent lethargy. Myers didn’t have time to be sick, he told his doctors. He was writing a book on the subliminal self; one he hoped would forge a link between psychical and traditional research. He wanted to get back to it, if he could just find strength to put pen to paper.
Charles Richet, ever a generous friend, invited both the Jameses and the Myerses to make use of his chateau at Carquerainne, where he thought both men might benefit from the gentle climate of the French Riviera. He assured them that sunshine and sea breezes had been known to cure the most troublesome illness. The patients could recuperate together, Richet pointed out, and Myers could return to his writing as he grew stronger.
Myers felt a surge of enthusiasm at the prospect. While in France, he hoped to invite Rosina Thompson to conduct a few sittings. He liked the idea of getting James’s opinion of this young medium. It might give him some perspective on her warning that death drew near. Myers sometimes thought that he could hear it closing in, the soft beat of wings, the approach of the angel of death, stirring the air behind him.
THE FRUSTRATING, fantastical Eusapia Palladino had risen from the ashes of her experiences with the SPR, thanks to Richet’s continued championship. Again, she held court as the dominant medium on the European continent.
More than ever, she presented as an extraordinary specimen—uninhibited, tempestuous, erotic—a vision far removed from the sedate ways of the academic corridor, the neatly controlled setting of the laboratory.
Not only did Eusapia come out of trances charged with sexual energy, she sometimes seemed to shudder with pleasure while entranced. She claimed that, on occasion, the spirits brought her an invisible lover. A sly smile played across her face as she described, rather graphically, their encounters. She seemed to make the very air sparkle—and not just with figurative erotic energy. During one séance in Genoa, lights glittered overhead like dancing fireflies. One light settled on the palm of an observer, a German engineer; it was cool on his skin, he said, glinted briefly, and vanished even as he closed his hand about it.
The engineer—like physiologists, psychologists, and others from conventional academia—attended Eusapia’s performances because Charles Richet had made curiosity about her permissible. Richet lent legitimacy to the Italian medium—much as William James’s reputation had given Leonora Piper special status. His colleagues might deplore his interest in the supernatural, but geniuses were allowed their peculiarities, and Richet was a brilliant researcher.
His ongoing studies of the immune system were a case in point. The innovative French scientist would eventually find it necessary to invent a word for the allergic reactions that he had begun to study. He called the response “anaphylaxis,” from the Greek words ana, “the opposite of,” and phylaxis, “protection,” describing a state in which an organism becomes oversensitized.
For instance, if a person were exposed to a particular poison—say, a bee sting