Beecher’s Mediumship.—It has been generally believed in spiritual circles that Henry Ward Beecher had the inspiration which belongs to mediumship. This quality appears to have been inherited from his mother. On one occasion she was suddenly impelled to leave her apartment and rush out to an old carriage house, where she arrived in time to save the life of her youngest child, which had fallen through a carriage top and was caught in such a way that if she had not arrived then he would have been strangled.
A Scientific Cataract.—The blindness of the old school medical profession to modern progress is due to what may be called a cataract formed by medical bigotry. It will require half a century to remove this cataract. We are reminded of its existence by a paragraph in the Boston Herald speaking of the cancer in the throat of the crown prince of Germany, which the faculty expect to prove fatal, which it calls “a physical disorder for which medical science has yet to discover a remedy; it is not at all likely that this fortunate discovery will occur soon enough to be of service to the heir-apparent.” This flat denial of the curability of cancer is in the same columns in which an enlightened correspondent gave ample proof of cures with names and dates. Such denials are published in a city where a diligent inquiry would reveal about three hundred cases of successful cure of cancer well attested. But alas! these cures were not made under the authority or by the disciplined followers of the old school American Medical Association and therefore they cannot be recognized or heard of. There is a dignity which cannot see or feel anything it does not wish to see or feel; which reminds us of a story of two ladies. Said Madam F., a Swiss lady, to Madam R., a French woman, “I was surprised to see you walking with Col. M. yesterday. Do you not know that he was publicly horsewhipped by Capt. D. of the Infantry?” “I do not mind such remarks at all (said Madam R.,) for I know that Col. M. is a man of honor and too dignified a gentleman to notice anything going on behind his back.”
Speaking of cancer, the press and the political world are greatly concerned at the probable fate of the crown prince of Germany, attacked with cancer in the larynx, and with little or no hope of surviving. They announce as the result of the great scientific investigation prompted by this fact, a “great discovery concerning cancer.” Is it a discovery of a cure—oh no, they think they have discovered the cancer bacillus. That is science, but as for destroying the cancer bacillus they leave that to the physicians whom they call quacks for curing what the professors cannot cure.
Obstreperous and Pragmatic Vulgarity.—The house of Knoedler & Co., leading art dealers in New York, has been arrested by Comstock for selling photographs of celebrated paintings from the art galleries of Paris. It is a foul mind which sees obscenity in that which cultivated people admire, and the Hoboken Evening News says very appropriately, “Of all the cranky Pharisees allowed to run at large, Anthony Comstock is the chief. He is a most unmitigated nuisance and requires most emphatic and summary suppression.”
The N. Y. Home Journal, in a well considered editorial, says:
“The need of a revision of the law regarding immoral publications in literature and art becomes every day more manifest. There is required especially a precise definition of what the statute is designed to prohibit. At present there is no uniform criterion. It is just what the local Dogberry and the scratch jury happen to find. Books that have had an established place in literature for generations and are found in all the great libraries of the world; pictures that represent the highest skill attained in the leading schools of Europe; reproductions of works that adorn the national and royal galleries cherished as monuments of genius to reflect the glory of the time,—these are quite likely to be brought up and solemnly condemned by our tribunals as unfit for the contemplation of our superior American virtue. But the real injustice of the proceeding follows in the infliction of fines or imprisonment on the unsuspecting vendors of the works, who naturally imagine that merchandise current in all the other markets of the civilized world would be current also here. The most respectable houses, known throughout the length and breadth of the country for their honorable dealings, are exposed to legal prosecution any moment that an officious fanatic or jealous rival pleases to bring a charge that certain works in their store have an immoral tendency.”
Judge Brady, of the Supreme Court, says, “If I had been a legislator I would never have voted for this law…. It is evident that mere nudity in painting and sculpture is not obscenity. It is a false delicacy and mere prudery which would condemn and banish from sight all such objects.” Public opinion should be directed against the vice society which employs and pays such a tool as Comstock. The prosecution which he instigated against Mrs. Elmina Slenker, of Virginia, resulted in her acquittal.
The N. Y. Evening Post says, “If there is to be a prosecution in this Knoedler case, and these prints should send some one to jail, we for our part think Anthony Comstock should be the man.”
Hygiene.—Sir Spencer Wells, in an address to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Nottingham, England, referred to sanitary improvements which had reduced the annual death rate from twenty-nine in a thousand to nineteen, and said that it ought to be reduced to fifteen or twelve. He then said, “And if we have—as we really have—seen the average duration of human life in Great Britain advance from thirty years (which it was half a century ago) to forty-nine years (which it is now, according to life tables), why may we not witness a still further advance? Why should seventy or eighty years remain as the usual limit of human life? Why should its natural duration under perfectly healthy surrounding conditions not be at least 100 years, with an occasional extension of some ten or fifteen years more?”
“When people are made to understand that at least nine-tenths of the deaths in England are premature, the representatives of the most parsimonious rate payers will be compelled by the criticism of the public to remember that they also represent the more sacred interests of human life and happiness, and that resistance to sanitary improvements is punished by preventable disease and premature death. High local mortality is largely due to want of local information. For the tens or hundreds who are killed by murder or manslaughter, or by accident, or in battles on land or sea, thousands and millions are victims of preventable disease. When this is fully understood, no imperial Government, no local authority, will dare to incur the responsibility of such a national disgrace.”