WIZARD OF GALLSPACH

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 951, 19 April 1930, Page 26

WIZARD OF GALLSPACH

A “HEALER” AND HIS MAGIC WAND Whether wizardry still exists, and if magic wands may be permitted by the medical profession to usurp the place of less romantic instruments in diagnosing disease are questions that have become suddenly so vital in Germany that relations between Vienna and Berlin may be affected by the answer. The opening of what is technically known as a Gallspach Institute in Berlin, following the success of a similar undertaking in Munich, had driven German doctors to rush in where their Austrian colleagues fear to tread. For the existence of an Austrian Lourdes and a modern Cagliostro has been stoutly maintained for some years past, and has loomed large in news from Vienna lately. The genuine Lourdes had 120,000 pilgrims last year. Gallspach, iu Upper Austria, boasted 140,000 visitors seeking advice and healing from the local celebrity, Valetin Zeileis. According to statements emanating from Gallspach, which w*as a village of no more beauty or interest than any other in the neighbourhood until the fame of Zeileis spread, requests for accommodation this year are now actually being refused. Rooms in new hotels and boardinghouses have been booked up months ahead. The campaign of Austrian scientists against the interests of the national tourist traffic has, as may be understood, its delicate aspects. “Justice here is blind indeed,” writes the Nobel prize winner, the physiologist, Dr. Wagner-Jauregg. But Germany has no such considerations. By a ferocious broadcast lecture, and by scores of other provocative attempts to draw the miraculous healer Zeileis to retaliate, one of the leading Berlin specialists in internal diseases, the university Professor Paul Lazarus, has at last provokec l a libel action. This will be fought out shortly in Berlin, and the result is awaited eagerly in the scientific world of both countries. Zeileis has devised a system of electrotherapeutics which would be the envy of his colleagues in still more credulous parts of the world. Provided with a magic wand, or phosphorescent rod containing twelve milligrams of radium and a little helium, he awaits his patients, 50 at a time, is a spacious hall hung with black, and provided with lighting effects any stage manager might envy. After payment of three Austrian shillings at a box office, men and women are segregated. Stripped ro the waist, the patients pass before him while he gazes deep into their eyes and passes the wand rapidly over their bodies. A snap, a spark, or a deeper glow of the wand, marks the spot of the disease. Lights, blue, violet, and white, appear in the hall. Diagnoses from the iris of people's cj'es have always enjoyed a certain amount of popularity in Germany, where, it is popularly asserted, the public laws governing the practice of the healing arts provide that doctors with accredited certificates may kill you with impunity, though others get imprisoned. It is understood, there-

fore, that Zeileis believes both in the eye and the electricity tests for diseases. According to his discoveries he orders treatment of so many healing rays from one or other of his appliances at five shillings a time. Hundreds of thousands of people believe that ’ they have benefited by this treatment. He sees them only in batches of from 50 to 100. Professor Lazarus, speaking for the German scientific world, agrees with the power of mass suggestion on nervous diseases. But after many vain attempts at Gallspach he succeeded in passing in among some forty others at the Munich Institute and was, it seems, both enraged and delighted to hear that he was himself suffering from consumption, an affliction of the gall-bladder, and one or two minor complaints. It is c-asy, he arugues, to cure where no disease exists. But w'hat of the real sufferers who fall victim to such methods? Zeileis, who has no medicai training, declares that he used high-fre-quency treatment, from his own special knowledge, thirty years ago with such results that people came flocking to him without any advertisement at all on. his part, is in a position to retort that incurable patients only come to him after being disheartened by treatment elsewhere. In the vast and formidable body of his enemies there are a number of genuine medical practitioners in both Austria and Germany who are working upon the theory that the healing properties of radium, of electricity, and certain of the elements have been hitherto far too much neglected by the medical world, and that elec-tro-therapeutics one of these days will come into their own as the great servants of sick mankind. But Zeiieis, of Gallspach, is in a category by himself. The consulting-rooms of these men are not crowded, they possess no mysterious apparatus, and their personalities are not crowned by a halo of romance. Zeileis, who is pleasant to look upon, corpulent, bearded and blueeyed, is able to state w-ith perfect truth that he was not in need of money when he began his healing on the grand scale since he married into a rich industrialist’s family and was free of minor cares. Those few ■who are neither his friends nor his enemies today declare him to be a born healer and an unconscious hypnotist. He himself relates with satisfaction that when he took a snuffbox out of his pocket containing radium and showed it to a physiologist investigating his methods, the man of science was horrified and wondered why he was not burnt. Theosophists will be interested to hear that he claims descent from an Indian rajah, who lived three hundred years before Christ. He explains his immunity to electric shocks in general by the fact that a fakir cured him of the effects of a cobra bite by treating the spot with his own spittle. Such, he asserts, are his powers, that he once, by thinking hard in Vienna, caused a log of wood to glow in India. It is because of such statements as these, and of perturbation at his phenomenal number of patients, and not because of any disbelief in mild electric treatment, that the doctors of Germany and Austria are iu no dilemma as to the proper attitude to- | ward him.