A PSYCHOPATHIC INSTITUTION.
Reading my _Figaro_ the other day--as I hope I need not state it is my
custom devoutly to do--I came upon the following passage in the review
of a book called "Psychopathy; or, the True Healing Art. By Joseph
Ashman. London: Burns, Southampton Row. We have not the pleasure of
being personally acquainted with Joseph Ashman, and we fear that the
loss is ours. Judging him through the medium of his book, he must,
indeed, be a rara avis.... The one great thing," it went on to say,
"that Joseph Ashman wants the world to know is, that he cures disease by
very simple means. And all that the world wants to know from Joseph
Ashman is, Are these cures real--are his statements facts? Why, then,
does not Joseph content himself with his facts? He has plenty of them.
Here is one:--'Seeing one day a cabman with a swollen face standing by a
police-court ready to prosecute a man who had assaulted him, I asked if,
on condition I healed him, he would forgive his adversary. He replied
that he would, and we accordingly got into his cab together. Bringing
out the magnetized carte, I told him to look at it, and at the same
time made a few motions over the swelling with my hand. I then left him
feeling much better, and returned in an hour's time, when I found him
taking a glass of beer with his antagonist, whom he had forgiven.'"
Now as the one pursuit and end of my present existence is the discovery
of raræ aves, I need not say I at once took up the clue herein afforded,
and went in pursuit of Joseph Ashman. I found not only him but his
institution, for Mr. Ashman does not work single-handed. It is in the
Marylebone Road, almost opposite the Yorkshire Stingo; and is most
modest and unpretending in its outward semblance, being situated in one
of those semi-rustic houses so indicative of suburban London, down an
overstocked garden, into which you enter by means of a blistered iron
gate, painted violently green, and swinging heavily on its hinges. Down
a vista of decrepit dahlias one sped to the portal, alongside which was
a trio of bell-handles, one above the other, showing that the
Psychopathic Institution did not occupy the whole even of that modest
domicile. I always approach these manifold bells with considerable
diffidence, conscious that I must inevitably ring the wrong one; so, on
this occasion, I rang none at all, but knocked a faint double knock on
the knocker by way of compromise--very faint, indeed, lest I should
disturb any patients who were being "psychopathized." While I waited I
had leisure to observe that hidden among the dahlias, and thatched over
as it were with a superannuated costermonger's barrow, was a double
perambulator, which set me calculating the probabilities of Mr. Ashman
being a family man.
The door was opened before I had settled the point to my own mental
satisfaction, by a short, cheery-looking man, with long, straight flaxen
hair flowing down over the shoulders of his black frock-coat, a beard a
few shades lighter, and a merry twinkling eye, which looked more
sympathetic than psychopathic, and I should think was calculated to do
patients good directly it lighted on them. He looked as much as to ask
whether I was psychopathically wrong, when I informed him that I had not
come as a patient, but simply to inspect his institution if he would
permit me. The permission was at once accorded. "We are hard at work,"
he said, as he ushered me into the front parlour; "but come in and see
what we are about."
A man who looked like a respectable artisan was sitting at the table;
and a second, in his shirt sleeves, was astride of a chair in what
appeared to be rather an idiotic ride-a-cock-horse-to-Banbury-Cross
fashion, and Mr. Ashman was pinching him and prodding him as butchers do
fat animals at the Smithfield Show.
"That there gentleman," said Mr. Ashman, in a broad provincial dialect,
"couldn't get astride that chair when he come here half-an-hour ago. How
d'ye feel now, sir?"
"Feel as though I should like to race somebody twenty rods for five
pound a-side," answered the patient, getting up and walking about the
room as if it were a new sensation. He had been brought, it appeared, to
Mr. Ashman by his friend, who was sitting at the table, and who was an
old psychopathic patient. He assured me he had suffered from rheumatism
for twenty years, and was completely disabled without his stick until he
came into that room half-an-hour since. He walked up and down stickless
and incessantly as the carnivora at the Zoo all the time he was telling
me.
"Would you mind putting your ear to this man's back, sir?" said Mr.
Ashman to me. I did so; and when he bent, his backbone seemed to go off
with a lot of little cracks like the fog-signals of a railway. "That
there old rusty hinge we mean to grease." And away he went
psychopathizing him again. When he was done, Mr. Ashman explained to me
learnedly, and with copious illustrations from anatomical plates, his
theory of this disease, which was his favourite one for treatment,
because it yielded rapidly. Paralysis and that class of disease are much
slower. He had succeeded in acute rheumatism, and also in calculus. "I
like fat men--fighting men to heal," he said. "I leave the delicate ones
to others." The sturdy little psychopathist looked healthy enough to
heal a sick rhinoceros.
While he was lecturing me his hands were not idle. I should think they
seldom were. He was pouring salad oil from a flask on to flannel to give
to the other man who was sitting at the table, and had approached
convalescence from a chronic disease after one or two visits, and who
used this oiled flannel to keep up the influence. Both the men seemed
perfectly genuine; and the rheumatic gentleman, when he left, pronounced
the effect of his psychopathizing miraculous. The fee was five
shillings. "I shan't charge you nothin' for the flannel," he said to No.
2. I began to take quite a fancy to Joseph Ashman, and thanked _Figaro_
inwardly for directing me to the institution.
A working woman who was next in the little row of patients assembled in
the back room, came in with her wrists bound up in bits of flannel, and
her hands looking puffed and glazy. She, too, had lost the use of them
for six years, she told me, and had been pronounced incurable by the
doctors. This was her fourth visit to Mr. Ashman. "Take up the chair,
ma'am," he said to his patient; and she did carry it in rather a wobbly
fashion across the room. "Now the other hand," and she did it with the
other hand. "Now show the gentleman how you did it when you came to me.
She's rather hard o' hearin'," he explained to me; but after one or two
repetitions the poor old body comprehended, and carried it in her
crooked elbow. "Now I'll call my assistant," he said, and summoned a
ruddy, red-bearded man, who looked as though he might have just come in
from a brisk country walk. "When these cases require a good deal of
rubbing I let my assistants do the preliminary work, and then come in as
the Healing Medium myself." The rubbers, he informed me, like the
Medium, must be qualified, not only physically, but morally. Benevolence
was the great requisite; and certainly both these men seemed running
over with it, if looks meant anything. When Joseph Ashman took his turn,
working the poor old patient's stiff wrists, and pulling her fingers
till they cracked, like children playing "sweethearts," she never
winced, but actually seemed to like it, and trotted off well satisfied
with her fourth instalment of good health.
The next rubber who was introduced to me was not such a ruddy man,
being, in fact, somewhat saturnine in appearance; but I could quite
understand that he was, as he described himself, brimful of electricity.
His chevelure was like that on the little man we stick on the conductor
of an electrical machine and make each particular hair stand on end like
quills upon the fretful porcupine.
I could not for the life of me see the difference between this treatment
and simple mesmerism, except that it was much more rapid in its effects
than any magnetic treatment I have ever witnessed. Indeed, I frankly
confess I do not understand it now, though Mr. Ashman made me accept one
of his little books on Psychopathic healing, and told me I should see
the distinction when I had read it. I must be very dense, for I have
read it diligently through, and still fail to trace the distinction.
The man made a great impression on me. I felt he was just one of those
who would carry life into a sick room, and communicate vital
power--supposing it to be communicable--from the dumpy fingers of his
fat soft hand. The perambulator did not belie him. Numbers of pretty
black-eyed children were running about, and there was a Mrs. Ashman
somewhere among the poor patients in the back room. All the children
came to me except the eldest boy, who, his father told me in a
mysterious tone, had suffered some indignity at the hands of my cloth,
and dreaded a parson ever after. I believe my injudicious brother had
set him a long task (perhaps his Duty to his Neighbour), and the poor
lad was always afraid he should be dropped down upon to "say it." Mr.
Ashman's book is a little bewildering to an outsider who fails to
distinguish the _two_ vital forces. He says: "It is much rarer to find a
high development of a temperament in which the psychical element
prevails, than in which it is well blended with the vital-magnetic, or
than in which the latter excels. In nearly all popular public men there
is a blending of the two. We see it well exemplified in John Bright,
Spurgeon, and others. This is the secret of their drawing, magnetic
power. It is the secret, too, of many a physician's success: his genial
magnetism cures when his medicine is useless, although, of course, he
does not know it. As is the difference between these two forces, so is
the difference in the method of their employment for the purpose of
cure." However, when I left I promised--and I mean to keep my vow--that
if ever I am unfortunate enough to find my vertebræ creaking like "an
old hinge," I will come to Mr. Ashman and have it greased. The remark in
his book as to the success of medicine depending on the qualities of him
who administered it was, we may recollect, confirmed at the 1874 meeting
of the British Association in Belfast.
Joseph Ashman has had a chequered history. He has dwelt in the tents of
the Mormonites; has been one of the Peculiar People. In early life he
was in service in the country, where his master used to flog him until,
to use his own expression, he nearly cut him in two. His earliest
patients were cattle. "For a healer," he said, "give me a man as can
clean a window or scrub a floor. Christ himself, when He chose those who
were to be healers as well as preachers, chose fishermen, fine, deep
chested men, depend upon it, sir," and he rapped upon his own sonorous
lungs until they reverberated. He was certainly blessed with a
superabundance of good health, and looked benevolent enough to impart
all his surplus stock to anybody who wanted it.