Читать книгу True Tales from the Edgar Cayce Archives - Sidney D. Kirkpatrick - Страница 23

As news of the success of the Tommy House reading circulated through Hopkinsville, ever greater numbers of ill and dying people turned to Edgar for help. Among them was Gordon Putnam paralyzed from the waist down. Cayce—in trance—recommended osteopathic treatments which were able to effect a cure. There followed successful readings for a woman suffering from glaucoma and a young girl with a throat inflammation. The only readings which were judged by Edgar to be a failure were those given to Joe Dickey who was intent on using trance advice to lay bets at the Latonia Race Track. Edgar correctly picked the winning horses but in the process suffered severe migraine headaches and temporarily lost his ability to go into trance. Only by trial and error would he discover how the readings were to be used or what, in fact, the rules were.

Just as more patients came to him for help, so did several Hopkinsville physicians. Among them was Dr. Wesley Ketchum, a short, thickly built, well-groomed thirty-one-year-old homeopath from Ohio. Ketchum was not only better educated than any others Cayce had worked with but despite the criticism and veiled threats he received from colleagues, was fearless in applying the recommended therapies. And while a few other physicians also consulted Cayce, Ketchum was the only one willing to admit it and seemed to actually enjoy the controversy this created. He told his patients that he was consulting Cayce and would deliver lectures at medical conferences in which he described the trance process in detail. It was one of these lectures, delivered to the American Association of Clinical Research that would result in a front page New York Times article which turned Cayce into an overnight sensation.

The New York Times, October 9, 1910.

The first reading Cayce provided to Ketchum was for a boy who had suffered a venomous bite from a brown recluse spider. The reading advised using “oil of smoke.” Thinking this was a commercial preparation, Ketchum did not ask where the product might be found. A search of the local drugstores didn’t turn it up, nor could it be found in pharmaceutical catalogs. A second reading was taken to determine where to find it. Cayce named a Louisville drugstore. But when Ketchum wired the drugstore, the manager informed him they did not know what he was talking about. In a third reading, Cayce described the back room of the same Louisville drugstore and identified the shelf where the product could be found. Ketchum wired the instructions to the manager of the drugstore. “Found it,” came the reply.

Wesley Ketchum was fearless in applying Cayce’s readings.

The reading that most convinced Ketchum of the potential of the Cayce readings was for George Dalton, the wealthy owner of Hopkinsville’s brickworks. Dalton—who weighed well over two hundred pounds—had broken his right leg both below and above the knee. Hopkinsville’s other doctors said that Dalton would never walk again and that amputation would be necessary. But Ketchum—on trance advice from Cayce—said that the knee could be healed.

The subsequent reading recommended that Ketchum bore holes in the kneecap and leg bones, insert nails into them, and put Dalton in traction. Ketchum was dubious, at best. Inserting metal screws or nails into bone was a procedure that had never before been performed in Kentucky or anywhere else in the United States. However, there was no harm in trying the procedure. The worst case scenario was that Dalton would lose his leg, which is what the other physicians anticipated from the start. Ketchum had nails made to Cayce’s specifications. Assisted by another doctor and two nurses, he bore holes in the knee and leg bones and then inserted the nails. Two months later Dalton was back on his feet. The nails were still in his leg seventeen years later when he died.

Ketchum described these and other radical procedures in his lectures. With the eventual front page article about their work in The New York Times, celebrities began to seek Edgar’s counsel. Among them was inventor Thomas Edison and electrical genius Nikola Tesla, who consulted Cayce in Bowling Green. Unfortunately this was years before Cayce had a dedicated stenographer to record the readings and save copies for later study. Like an eventual reading that was given for President Woodrow Wilson, documentation on what came through is scant, and hearsay at best. However, almost overnight, everyone wanted a Cayce reading. Ketchum and Cayce would have more patients than they could possibly accommodate.

Ketchum thus proposed a formal partnership. Cayce would provide trance counsel, Edgar’s father would conduct the readings, and Albert Noe, the manager and later owner of the Hopkinsville’s Latham Hotel, would provide the financing. The idea seemed to be a good one: patients would make an appointment to consult Ketchum, who would then charge a fee for his services. Along with those services would come a trance reading performed by Edgar. Half the income generated by the partnership was to go to the Cayces. The other half would go to Ketchum and Noe, who would pay the partnership’s overhead expenses. In addition, it would finance a move to bring Cayce and his family from Bowling Green and establish a photography studio in Hopkinsville. The only caveat, and one that was critically important to Edgar, was that Ketchum had to solemnly promise that readings were to be given “for sick people only” and that no one in desperate need would be turned away. The racetrack readings with Joe Dickey had taught him all he wanted to know about using his gifts otherwise.

Gertrude, a young mother at this point, wasn’t keen on the idea. She was dubious of any business in which Leslie was a partner, as Edgar’s father had proven himself to be unreliable. She was equally concerned about the freewheeling Ketchum, who had a reputation as a gambler and was rumored to be having an affair with his office receptionist. For all of Ketchum’s talk of unleashing Cayce’s incredible potential, the good doctor’s primary interest was in gaining social prominence and power, and as he himself later admitted, availing himself of personal information he had obtained through Cayce in trance to further his cause.

Knowing in advance that Gertrude would not approve, Edgar went ahead with the plan. He believed that in time Gertrude would come to realize that the business of giving psychic readings had to be accorded the same degree of professionalism as his photography business. He needed an established place patients could go to, preferably close to home in Hopkinsville. Moreover, after an unexplained fire had destroyed his Bowling Green photo studio in December 1906 and with the birth of his son Hugh Lynn the following year, he desperately needed the income that the partnership would provide. The arrangement permitted him to both earn a living as a photographer and give readings for people in need.

Gertrude with first born, Hugh Lynn Cayce, 1907.

Having increasingly learned to put his trust in the readings, he volunteered to let the Source itself make the decision if this partnership was a good idea or not. The message that came through was decidedly positive. The Source indicated that “the work” should be supported by those who benefited from the readings and the credibility that the readings generated. The more people believed in the value of the information, the more Cayce and his partners would gain materially from it. But the most important aspect of this reading was the suggestion that the ultimate purpose of the work was not to provide diagnostic insights. Rather, as Carrie House had long ago said, they were to help people “open” their minds and accept the truth of the “ethereal” or “spiritual world.” The Source would then offer an important clue to the future success or failure of the work. “The minute we gain credence and give credit to ourselves,” came the message, “we lose it.”

Edgar, Leslie, Noe, and Ketchum chose to make their headquarters in a suite of rooms on the top floor of Hopkinsville’s Thompson Building, a large redbrick building adjacent to the Hopper Brothers Bookstore. A long-running joke was that Edgar Cayce had finally moved up in the world since leaving the Hopper Brothers Bookstore. Upstairs, that is.

A sign reading the Cayce Photo Studio was posted outside on the street. In the hallway at the top of the stairs, another sign marked the entrance to Edgar’s three-room photo studio, which was outfitted with the most modern photographic equipment. A few yards further down the hall was a third sign, written in smaller letters, reading: “Psychic Diagnostician.” Here the door opened into a suite of offices that were connected through the back to the photo studio. However, patients were not normally invited into these offices and rarely got to meet Edgar Cayce in person. Those who desired to come to Hopkinsville for a reading and be examined by a physician would meet with Ketchum at his office. Personal contact between Edgar and his patients was viewed as an unnecessary interference in Edgar’s personal life and unnecessary to the business of conducting daily trance sessions. It didn’t matter where a patient resided for Cayce to give an accurate reading.

Due to the unique nature of their proposed partnership and before their formal five-year contract was signed, several prominent Hopkinsville judges, among them John T. Hanberry, were invited to witness a reading to give their honest opinion as to whether or not laws would be broken by conducting their business. Judge Hanberry, who had previously received his own medical reading, concurred with the others in giving his blessing. He was so impressed by the demonstration that he offered to purchase Cayce’s contract from Noe and Ketchum, which they declined.

Readings were begun the same day that the documents were signed. Before the end of the first week, nine patients had received and paid for readings. Mrs. Eleanor Sledge, who received a reading three weeks later, came to Ketchum suffering from debilitating migraine headaches. Cayce—in trance—suggested that the problem was the result of a lesion that had grown on her spine, which could be removed through osteopathic manipulation. Her eventual cure, less than two months later, was considered nothing short of miraculous.

Waiting room in Dr. Ketchum’s office, c. 1910.

In the process of studying the larger body of readings, Ketchum became aware of the Source as a distinct personality or being with many human characteristics. However “all knowing” the Source might be, it could also be abrupt, disliked what it considered inane questions, and demonstrated what could only be characterized as a wry sense of humor. This became more evident in the years to come. Asked how a person should overcome worrying, the Source simply said, “Quit worrying!” A woman, wanting to know if wearing glasses, as Cayce had recommended, was really necessary, was told, “The body really needs glasses, else we wouldn’t have said it!” When a patient asked if a medication should be rubbed on the outside, he was simply told: “You can’t rub it on the inside!”

The Source sounded so “human” to Ketchum that the physician concluded that the voice speaking through Cayce was not a separate entity but Edgar’s higher unconscious self. He disputed what Carrie House believed—that a heavenly presence took over when Cayce went into trance—maintaining that Cayce’s spirit was free to communicate with other spirits when he lost consciousness. Although subsequent readings suggested that there was clearly much truth in this theory, Ketchum himself later admitted that whatever happened was far more complicated than Cayce’s spirit reaching out into the universe. This was, however, a good starting point.

Ketchum also suspected that Cayce’s subconscious mind could travel to the physical location of the patient. During one reading, Cayce remarked on the color of a patient’s pajamas and on another occasion mentioned a particularly handsome tree in her yard.

There were, however, limits to what Cayce could do. The Source, for example, would sometimes come right out and say that this information wasn’t to be shared, while at other times Cayce seemed to be able to peer at will right inside a person without interference. From this, Ketchum suspected that the individuals receiving the readings could somehow block Cayce’s examination of their bodies. Motivation on the part of the patient requesting the reading clearly factored into the equation, as Ketchum obtained the best results when a person genuinely wanted help for the reasons that he had stated. Moreover, information that would hurt or harm someone would simply not be given. Further, and all the more extraordinary, the Source would only make recommendations that a person was capable of undertaking given their logistical or financial means. If a trip to the Mayo Brothers Hospital in Minnesota was out of the question, the Source seemed to find a solution closer to home, even if it meant having to instruct a local physician on how to perform the treatment.

Just as the number of readings grew, Edgar himself was slowly beginning to understand some of the dynamics involved in giving them. He also began to take an interest in the medical side of the business. He seemed to genuinely want to know how the recommended treatments worked, though he and Ketchum, too, at times, were a long way from understanding them. However, as both Cayce and Ketchum discovered, the challenge was not obtaining helpful information from the Source but in finding medical practitioners willing to apply the treatments. All too often a patient’s personal physician simply dismissed a reading as beneath his consideration. Ketchum could treat the patients coming to Hopkinsville, but the vast majority lived outside of Kentucky and couldn’t reasonably be expected to take up residence in Hopkinsville while the treatments—sometimes lasting months—were conducted. This realization was foremost on his mind when Frank Mohr, a successful businessman whose three-and-a-half-year-old niece was cured of polio, offered to build a hospital where the treatments could be performed exactly as recommended.

Noe and Ketchum also liked the idea. However, they believed they should be compensated for “developing” and “publicizing” Edgar’s abilities. Their general understanding with Mohr, agreed to in principle, stipulated that Noe and Ketchum would receive a modest share of all proceeds from the hospital and that Noe would receive compensation from patients or their families taking long-term residence in the hotel.

Based on their verbal understanding, Mohr surveyed and cleared land in Nortonville, Kentucky, and a team of laborers poured the foundation for the hospital. Problems, however, soon arose. Noe and Ketchum kept coming up with one reason after another for not signing a formal contract. They had apparently decided to stall negotiations, holding out for a greater share of profits, or so it appeared to Mohr. Then, in the midst of heated arguments on the matter, Mohr injured his back. Edgar gave an emergency diagnosis. His health could be restored, the Source indicated, but unless certain corrective measures were taken, injury to his spine would gradually produce uric acid poisoning and would result in blindness.

Mohr and his doctors believed the diagnosis to be absurd. Ketchum, either not wishing to appear foolish to his peers or secretly desiring to drive a wedge between Mohr and Cayce, laughed along with Mohr’s doctors. How could a curvature of the spine cause blindness? Mohr didn’t know whom to trust. Suspecting some kind of fraud, he went to court, and the hospital project never progressed beyond the foundation, still visible today. He also eventually went blind.

Adding to the stress weighing on Edgar and Gertrude’s shoulders, she gave birth to another child, Milton Porter, on March 28, 1911. Edgar was so preoccupied with Noe and Ketchum and two separate civil suits which would arise from the falling out between Mohr and Ketchum that he did not pay close enough attention to the situation at home. Milton Porter was not receiving enough nourishment from his mother’s milk. A wet nurse was brought in, but by this time the child was ill with whooping cough and then colitis. Edgar gave a reading as he had done for Tommy House Jr., but the Source held out no hope for a recovery. Milton Porter’s death certificate states that he died on May 17, one month and twenty days after his birth.

The stress nearly ended the Cayce marriage. Edgar faulted himself for not giving a reading sooner. Part of the reason was that he had indeed had been too preoccupied with his business affairs. However, it was also true that Gertrude was still upset with him giving readings, and as he also admitted, she hadn’t wanted him to give readings for their immediate family members. Gertrude, too, must have felt responsible for not having taken proper care of the child.

Gravestone of 1½ month old Milton Porter Cayce.

Just as had been the case when Edgar suffered from laryngitis, Gertrude stopped eating and took to bed. She might well have been suffering from depression similar to Edgar’s own mother on the birth and subsequent death of her second child. But also true, the following July, she began coughing up blood. The diagnosis was tuberculosis, which at that time was considered incurable.

Edgar volunteered to give a reading immediately, but Gertrude was still resisting. Despite the help Edgar had provided to her nephew Tommy House, Gertrude still didn’t like the business of his giving readings and didn’t want their lives to revolve around them. To her way of thinking, the only way to make her point was to stand her ground by asserting what little control she had over the situation.

Edgar tried and failed to convince her to have a reading. Ketchum, too, made an attempt, but his pleas for her to receive trance counsel were ineffectual, perhaps even aggravating an already tense situation. Gertrude may also have considered him one of the root causes to Milton Porter’s death. Had her husband not been preoccupied by the court battle with Mohr and the discord among the partners, her husband would have been on hand to help.

Edgar wasn’t about to sit back and watch Gertrude die as Milton Porter had. Who intervened is not clear. Edgar may have prevailed in speaking with her. Carrie may have demanded she have a reading. No doubt Dr. House also encouraged her, as he was one of two of her consulting physicians. All that is known is that she finally agreed to have a reading after both her physicians and a tuberculosis specialist brought in from Louisville declared her to be on her deathbed.

Edgar lay down in bed beside her and with Ketchum conducting, began the reading. Outside on the porch and in the street were gathered those who loved Gertrude and prayed for her recovery. Her pastor had called his congregation together, and hand in hand with others who loved and supported Gertrude, they formed what was described a human chain around the front of the house while the reading was given.

Cayce—in trance—outlined treatments that included osteopathic adjustments for her back, inhalation of spirits from a charred oak keg to relieve the congestion in her lungs, heroin to shock the her system, other drugs and laxatives to help cleanse the blood and various organs, and a diet high in iron supplements and raw vegetables. When Cayce woke up, Ketchum and the other doctors were pacing the room. As with the Tommy House reading, the diagnosis was considered excellent. The concern was the treatment.

The recommended osteopathic adjustments were judged not be harmful, nor the laxatives. What alarmed the physicians was the inhalation of apple brandy fumes from a charred oak keg, which might further congest or weaken her lung capacity. Then there were the drugs. Cayce had recommended that she take a combination of heroin, eucalyptol, turpentine, and creosote, which were to be mixed into a liquid and placed in a capsule made from crystallized phosphates of soda. The shock to her system might put her into a coma from which she would never regain consciousness.

Edgar wouldn’t listen to their concerns. With Ketchum’s help, he was prepared to act immediately, which they did.

The effect on Gertrude was dramatic and made all the more miraculous because no one before—not in a trance reading or a laboratory—had ever come up with a cure for tuberculosis. There were treatments to prolong a person’s life, but no cure. After taking the first capsule, Gertrude stopped hemorrhaging. The fumes of the apple brandy reduced the congestion in her lungs. Days later her fever broke. A month into the treatments she was decidedly gaining strength.

Gertrude Cayce, c. 1921.

Ironically, it was in the midst of Gertrude’s recovery—in what might be viewed as Ketchum and Cayce’s most spectacular success—that the year-old partnership would come under the most intense scrutiny, criticism, and investigation by the medical profession. Such would be the case many more times in Cayce’s life to come, though in different cities and with other physicians. That Cayce’s trance readings recommended treatments which helped the patients who came to him was beside the point.

In November 1911, while Gertrude was still in bed recovering and Edgar had once again begun suffering from migraine headaches and throat problems, Ketchum was informed by a neighbor that he and Cayce were being investigated by the Christian County Medical Society. A resolution had been passed demanding that a committee of concerned physicians visit the governor and the attorney general to revoke Ketchum’s medical license, end the partnership, and put a stop to what they deemed to be a mockery of medical science.

Knowing that there would be upward of forty-five doctors in the county attending the next medical society meeting, Ketchum considered bringing eyewitnesses and patients whom he and Cayce had helped, along with affidavits. However, the resourceful and wily Ketchum concocted an altogether different scheme. He withdrew a thousand dollars from his bank account. This was all he took with him into the packed meeting which would decide his and in turn, Edgar’s future.

Ketchum entered the crowded meeting room and took a seat in the back. After the session was called to order and the names of the committee members were selected to go to Frankfort to see the governor and attorney general, Ketchum asked that he be permitted to briefly address fellow society members. He walked to the front of the room and put the cash on top of the secretary’s table, where everyone could see it. Then he delivered a short, previously prepared speech. Here, in his own words, is part of what he said:

I’m sorry to have brought this on the doctors of Christian County. But you were born and raised here [and] I came here on the encouragement of quite a number of your top citizens. If you gentlemen want to get the real meat of the bull, I want your help. Of course, if you’re just going to kick me out of the profession, that’s different. But I have a suggestion to offer you. I’d like you to appoint six men to choose one of his most complex cases, then have Cayce lie down and go to sleep and diagnose each of the six cases. If the diagnoses are not absolutely correct, I will turn this money over to any charity you name in Christian County.

A hush fell over the room after Ketchum sat down. Eventually, a physician in the back of the room made a motion that there should be further investigation before their committee visited the attorney general. Ketchum would hear nothing more from the medical society.

Ketchum did, however, engineer a meeting with the attorney general at a gathering of the regional bar association. The meeting was to be held at the Hotel Latham, and Cayce was scheduled to put on a demonstration of his psychic abilities. Ketchum never revealed whose idea the presentation was, but given the presence of the attorney general at the head table, Ketchum’s handiwork was much in evidence.

On the night of the event, Ketchum invited the assembled attorneys to write out questions which he would have Cayce answer. More than a dozen lawyers participated. Ketchum then had Cayce come into the room, lie down on a table, and guided him into trance. Cayce reportedly answered each question. In some cases he provided lengthy, comprehensive responses; in other instances said “yes” or “no.”

The performance made for quite a sensation as the attorneys marveled at Cayce’s uncanny abilities. As Ketchum anticipated, the attorney general pulled him aside after the performance. He had heard about the trouble that Ketchum and Cayce had had with the local medical society. He now understood why.

“I’ll tell you,” the attorney general said, gesturing with his hands. “It’s not far from here to over there. I think this fellow [Cayce] falls through.”

This was all the attorney general said, and all that Ketchum believed he needed to hear him say. “[In] some way and somehow,” Ketchum replied, “he does fall into another sphere about which we know nothing.”

Ketchum had artfully dodged a bullet—not once but twice. His third experience, however, would send him on a one-way cruise to Honolulu.