BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS
Complete System of Personal Influence and Healing – Professor Elmer E Knowles
I suppose my love of the pamphlets and mail-order courses of yesteryear stems from one of my favourite childhood films: Disney’s 1971 classic, Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
Set in a British coastal town during World War II, Angela Lansbury stars as Miss Eglantine Price, who is learning witchcraft via a correspondence course.
When the course fails to deliver the final spell, she and three evacuee siblings she’s been lumbered with for this caper, magic themselves to London to track down her tutor.
Professor Emelius Browne, played by David Tomlinson, however, turns out to be a charlatan who created the course from an old book, from which the back pages are missing.
Cue a magical adventure tracking down the missing final spell, disrupting the deeply repressive cartoon-animal regime of Naboombu and, back in Blighty, kicking the butts of the Nazis with the spell of Substitutiary Locomotion.
The arrival, then, of a torn and tattered 1900s mail-order hypnosis course with at least its front page missing stirred my inner Eglantine. Perhaps, I wondered, Kev finally has bought an obscure book of true secrets and spells..?
DO I NEED TO BUY A BROOMSTICK AND A BLACK CAT?!
Professor Elmer E Knowles’ Complete System of Personal Influence and Healing is a course delivered in six ‘branches’ covering: “Hypnotism, Suggestion, Suggestive Therapeutics, Personal Magnetism and Personal Influence, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, Magnetic Healing, Character Reading and Character Building.”
I’m rueing that we don’t have a brass four-poster bed with unscrewable knob as I read through the opening pages… But, alas, this is a pedestrian and dull first ‘branch’ on hypnosis. :-(
As in, it’s mostly prescient and sensible: you can’t make anyone do anything against their will; Trilby is a nonsense and George du Maurier is irresponsible for fomenting such misinformation; it’s “mainly suggestion skilfully directed”, together with the will of the operator and the receptiveness of the subject; something-something electricity.
A passage on hypnotism’s history and the case against disapproving medical doctors mention some names I’ve not much come across before: Gassner, Greatrakes and Perkins – all worth a google for early linkages with exorcism and healing being just hypnosis/suggestion. Albert Moll is also mentioned alongside Hippolyte Bernheim.
I realise that Professor Elmer E Knowles is ringmaster of a travelling stage hypnosis demonstration; in making the argument that hypnosis isn’t dangerous, he cites the subjects that travel for years with such shows to no deleterious effects. This also explains his beefing with medical doctors who disapprove of hypnotism full stop, or stage hypnosis full stop, or stage hypnosis if only because it undermines medical usage.
But the main giveaway is the constant mention of the “Radio Hypnotic Crystal”, some sort of hypnosis-inducing device that looks like a baby’s rattle with a glass ball head.
As we work through the branches into the woo-woo, there are handy photos… And OMFG!!! LADY HYPNOTIST ALERT!!! (Below right.)
There are too, too many epic photos to squeeze into this post, but, in sum, as well as ladies, we have a child wielding the Radio Hypnotic Crystal, an illustration of how to hypnotise an imaginary subject (left), and some truly bizarre group hypnosis shots.
Further highlights include a handwritten section on interpreting handwriting that’s unreadable, and a branch on curing myriad ailments (hint: use the Radio Hypnotic Crystal) with some frank tips on Lady Problems. There are pages and pages of illustrations for physiognomy and phrenology, and similar for palmistry. (Though, to be fair, I do have a developed imagination, after matching my hand-lines to the guide.)
The final branch on “Hindoo and Oriental Methods” has been illustrated with what *appear* to be ‘authentic’ models, or at least costumes. Which is obviously awful, but is testament to the production values of this course.
(I also note with amusement that a past reader has marked in pencil wherever there is mention of cultivating willpower and controlling and resisting others.)
The course ends with an ad for “Suggestive Therapeutics and The Suggisti-Phone”, which is basically just a mouthpiece that goes directly into headphones that the subject wears while lying asleep and you talk to them. Yours for the sum of “£5 (or $25 USA)”.
I deduce from this, as well as from some US press references, that Professor Elmer E Knowles, together with his wife and their extensive troupe, must be a travelling hypnosis show from the US, with this course connected to a UK appearance. Time for my cursory google…
Well. Brace yourself for an even more niche-internet-blog-rabbit-hole, hypno-folks: ‘Professor Elmer E Knowles’ and his lovely lady-hypnotist wife Abigail were part of a massive mail-order course scam ring!
