JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Well. The Scientific American (1913) delivered quite a blow against the current “craze” of spiritualisms and seances, which they characterize as a mixture of “self-deception and knavery”. They had no room for it whatsoever, and let their readers know it. These practices were “symptoms of mental degradation that will cast adrift principles…and elect to run riot in vain imaginings and idle conceits”. The editor also brought The Lancet on board in the condemnation of the Spiritualism racket, quoting the great medical journal saying that the talking-to-the-dead racket was “debilitating to the mind and so debauching to moral sense it needs to be stigmatized in terms at once trenchant and decisive”. An Edgar A. Poe vicious book review this is not, though they do communicate their displeasure with the whole racket in very forceful words.