What Body? Investigations Into Mediumship

Undressed. Inspected. Restrained and bound. Measured. “Dissected”. The body of the self-styled medium Eusapia Palladino was constantly the focus of all the scientists who studied her, from the first to the last séance. This should come as no surprise, since it was an age of materialism, positivism, and evolutionism dominated psychiatry and, more generally, medicine. Eusapia seemed to epitomise a multitude of different bodies, as many as the explanations of her “powers” suggested by a number of (so-called) experts. This essay aims to explore some of these interpretations in an attempt to meld these fragments into a larger and more colourful framework.