The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [57]
Oh, those transient moments of narcotic genius. He’d had them before; he suspected he’d have them again, given his particular habits. Gurney suffered from occasional bouts of neuralgia, sharp bursts of pain exploding along the nerves in his face. He’d taken to relieving the pain by inhaling chloroform or, during particularly miserable episodes, laudanum, a solution of opium and alcohol.
There was no stigma to it; self-medication was a stylish fact of the times, prescribed by doctors, practiced by the educated and the wealthy. William James also used chloroform to treat neuralgia, and he had once published an essay on the fleeting brilliance of nitrous oxide inhalation. Fred Myers and Dick Hodgson had both experimented with hashish, although Myers had simply fallen asleep, and Hodgson had disliked the giddy loss of control : “I’m not born to be hashish’d out of my organism.” Doctors widely prescribed laudanum for pain, stress, depression, and menstrual symptoms. In Europe, medical researchers experimented with cocaine as a therapeutic agent. In 1884 a young Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, had published a well-received research paper, “On Cocaine,” based partly on his own use of the drug as a stimulant and counterdepressant.
Insights imparted by narcotics, as James had ruefully written, always proved mere illusion—even if one could remember them. Once he carefully jotted down every thought that occurred to him under the influence of nitrous oxide. In the morning he had pages with single words written over and over—God, day, night, prayer—scribblings that “to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel but which, at the moment of transcribing, were fused in the fire of infinite rationality.”
Consistently, sadly, by the dry light of morning, by the time one returned from the dentist, there was nothing left but a tantalizing memory, ashes with not a phoenix in sight. Gurney regretted those ashes. If only there were such a fire that burned longer, with the sustained light to illuminate the hidden promise of his project.
GURNEY AND MYERS were building their studies of the everyday occult into a book. They’d given it the title Phantasms of the Living as a way of describing the supernatural events that they deemed credible—that 5 percent of all reports Gurney had mentioned to James. They wanted both to recount those stories and to put them in perspective, reinforcing their “evidence” with theories that might explain it and arguments to support those theories. They wanted the book to be so good, so compelling, that it would sway the world.
The intensity of that desire, the demands of the project, were so overwhelming that they’d recruited a third collaborator, thirty-year-old Oxford graduate Frank Podmore. Thin, perfectionistic, ever serious in outlook, Podmore had won honors in both classics and natural science at Oxford with his meticulous scholarship. He now supported himself as a postal inspector, which left him time for other interests. And he boasted a Hodgson-like flair for investigation that Gurney thought could only strengthen the evidence they would accumulate. The only problem was in making sure that Podmore and Myers didn’t quarrel throughout the entire project.
The two men—one obsessed with details, the other’s eyes on the philosophical horizon—had been at odds almost since the work began. It wasn’t just the book, although that most concerned Gurney at the moment. Sidgwick had also asked Podmore and Myers to investigate the mystery-cloaked life of Daniel Dunglas Home.