Cures; the story of the cures that fail / by James J. Walsh.

James Joseph Walsh

Date:: 1923

Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Cures; the story of the cures that fail / by James J. Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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Dowie’s success only goes to show how little humanity changes down the ages in spite of all we hear of evolu¬ tion and progress, and how there is something in human nature itself which makes all classes of people ready under certain circumstances to be cured by a healer of this kind. There is no incident of the Middle Ages, not even in that period usually supposed to be the darkest—the Tenth Century—that is any more redolent of what is sometimes called superstition or inability to appreciate realities than this of Dowie in the full light of the twentieth century. Shortly after Dowie’s death a rival of Dowie came into prominence for a time. His name was Schlatter and he announced that he, too, was a divine personage with special connections with heaven which gave him a wonderful power to heal. He climbed the mountain of the Holy Cross in Colorado and coming down unkempt, unshaven, and worn in body, declared that he had spent forty days in fasting up on the mountain and now was ready to heal mankind. The good people of Denver flocked to him in large numbers after he had demon¬ strated his power to heal chronic ills by curing a number of people who had made the rounds of physicians without success. The pains and the aches and the dis¬ abilities of mankind, these were the affections that he could particularly cure. As with Dowie, it was the lame and the halt and the blind who yielded to his heaven-sent ministrations. People who had not walked without a cane for twenty years and sometimes without a crutch for the same length of time, were able to dis¬ card these artificial helps and walk on for themselves. No wonder then that he attracted attention. The cures continued and people flocked to him in such large

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