What does a scholar do who summed up his life's subject at fifty in the standard work "Mediumship and Survival"? He returns once more at nearly ninety – this time not as referee but as storyteller. "The Heyday of Mental Mediumship: 1880s–1930s" (2022), Alan Gauld's last book, tells the golden era of the trance mediums as a human story: the researchers and the women they studied as real people with friendships, doubts and stubbornnesses – and it recovers an entire American line of research that even connoisseurs of the field scarcely remember.
A late work at nearly ninety
When the book appeared with White Crow Books on 31 May 2022 (340 pages), its author was 89 years old – and the field's respect came promptly: Edward and Emily Kelly, Gauld's co-authors from Irreducible Mind, the philosopher Stephen Braude and the psychologist Callum E. Cooper wrote the endorsements; the tenor: no one is better qualified for this material. It was to remain Gauld's farewell work – he died in December 2024. Where Mediumship and Survival weighed the evidential question systematically, the late work takes the reverse approach: it shows how this research actually came into being – out of informal beginnings, living rooms and correspondence, long before there were protocol standards.
Six chapters for Mrs Piper
The centre – six of twelve chapters – is the Boston trance medium Leonora Piper: her discovery by William James, the years of surveillance by Richard Hodgson (who set detectives on her and read her mail without ever finding fraud), the sitting series of the philologist William Romaine Newbold – and the strange turn that after Hodgson's sudden death in 1905 a "Hodgson control" announced itself through the very medium he had been monitoring. Gauld tells this not as hagiography but with the historian's eye for the files: Piper had weak and strong phases, her controls contradicted one another, and precisely the friction between brilliant hits and banal filler is, for him, the real object of research. Where things went from here – to the cross-correspondences – we have already told.
The forgotten American line
The second part of the book is its real treasure, for it documents what happened on the American side after Hodgson's death – a line almost always missing from the standard accounts. Its engine was James Hervey Hyslop, professor of logic at Columbia University, who rebuilt the American Society for Psychical Research. His most important medium was Minnie Soule, carried in the reports under the pseudonym "Mrs Chenoweth". With her Hyslop investigated, among other things, the famous Doris case: Doris Fischer, a severely dissociated girl with multiple personalities whom Walter Franklin Prince had documented and adopted – in the Chenoweth sittings a communicator appeared claiming to be Doris's deceased mother, supplying material so accurate that Hyslop devoted a separate report to it. There follow the ASPR researcher Lydia Allison and finally John F. Thomas, who crowned the era methodologically: his extended sitting series – many conducted as proxy sittings with stand-ins who knew nothing about the deceased – earned him, at Duke University in 1933, the first doctorate ever awarded for a study of mediumship; his book "Beyond Normal Cognition" (1937) analysed the material quantitatively.
What made the heyday the heyday
Read in one sitting, the book reveals a development Gauld never has to spell out, because the material tells it itself: the evolution of control. At the beginning stand private séances; at the end stand pseudonyms for mediums, hired detectives, proxy protocols and quantitative hit analysis – a methodological screw tightening steadily over fifty years, leading in a straight line to the quintuple-blind Windbridge protocols of today. That the heyday ended around 1930 was owed less to any refutation than to a change of generation and fashion: the great trance mediums died, the young parapsychology around J. B. Rhine turned to countable card experiments, and patient single-case work fell out of fashion – the same fate that befell the Myers programme.
The honest counter-side
Two caveats belong on the table. First: the book presents no new primary data – it is historiography from the archives, as source-saturated as can be, but a retrospective nonetheless. Second, the admiring endorsements come from within the psychical research community itself; broad reception in mainstream history of science is still pending, as with almost everything in this field. But whoever objects that hundred-year-old records can teach nothing today should consider what present-day research lacks most: mediums willing to be studied continuously for decades, and researchers willing to devote decades to a single case. Exactly that material lies prepared here – by the man who knew it better than anyone else.
Context
The Heyday of Mental Mediumship is the late work of a researcher who outlived the heyday he describes by a whole lifetime – mediumship is still researched today, only at the margins of academic recognition – and who brings it to life once more: as a gallery of real people – sceptical watchers, patient recorders, enigmatic women in trance. After the standard work of 1982 and the theory chapter in Irreducible Mind, it is the third and final building block of Gauld's legacy, and perhaps the most accessible: one can read it as history of science, as a family history of the SPR and ASPR – or as a quiet reminder that the best answer to a difficult question is sometimes fifty years of patience.
Sources: Alan Gauld: The Heyday of Mental Mediumship: 1880s–1930s. Investigators, Mediums and Communicators, White Crow Books 2022, ISBN 978-1-78677-185-8, publisher page with table of contents and endorsements: whitecrowbooks.com; on Minnie Soule/"Mrs Chenoweth", Hyslop and the Doris case also the ASPR case literature (Hyslop's reports) and John F. Thomas: Beyond Normal Cognition, Boston Society for Psychic Research 1937; biographical: Psi Encyclopedia of the SPR, psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk; supplemented by our articles on "Mediumship and Survival", Leonora Piper/William James, the cross-correspondences, Irreducible Mind and Windbridge.
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