Healers channeled by Mediums?

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Curious if anyone has heard more about this case of George Chapman serving as the medium for the healing spirit of Dr. William Lang?

The reported details are incredible:


Quote:Deceased doctor and medium began to achieve impressive cures, many involving patients whose conditions had been declared incurable. Both wished to prove that Lang was who he claimed to be: an initial search in library records failed, but the British Medical Association later confirmed his identity. This was further corroborated by former patients and other associates of the living Dr Lang, who were struck by the similarities in speaking and manner to those of the living Dr Lang. For his part, the trance personality remembered them and was able to have long conversations with them, reminiscing about matters known only to him and them. These witnesses included Dr Kildare Lawrence Singer, Lang’s student in ophthalmology, and Katherine Pickering, a patient of fifteen years suffering from measles-induced myopia.



Quote:In Surgeon From Another World (1978) – a collaboration with author and psychical researcher Roy Stemman – he announced that for three decades William Lang's daughter, Lyndon Lang, had been supporting her father’s healing work on the strict understanding that her involvement would not be publicised during her lifetime.

Miss Lang first heard of her dead father’s spirit return from friends – three sisters – in the Midlands. They had known the ophthalmic surgeon during his earthly life and had invited Chapman to Edgbaston, Birmingham, to treat a dozen people after reading about him in a newspaper, so that they could check if his claim to channel William Lang was true. 

During that visit, in 1946, they satisfied themselves that Lang had survived death and was now continuing to help the sick through Chapman’s mediumship. His speech and mannerisms when communicating through the entranced medium left them in no doubt about his identity, as did his answers to their penetrating questions.



Quote:The two-world healing mission came to an end in 2006 with Chapman's passing at the age of 85.  Towards the end of his life, Chapman started to hand his patients to his son, Michael, who now continues his mediumistic healing, with Lang’s son Basil, a renowned surgeon in his own right, as his control.11

Chapman's own healing success is featured in the revised and expanded version of Surgeon From Another World  (2017), in which the names of the doctors who communicated regularly with Lang at his daughter's séances with Chapman were revealed for the first time.
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(2020-07-28, 10:00 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: Curious if anyone has heard more about this case of George Chapman serving as the medium for the healing spirit of Dr. William Lang?

The reported details are incredible:

The Chapman/Lang partnership is fascinating. There are two or three books available and I also have a video of a healing session. I know someone who was treated successfully by him too. In addition to the healing evidence, it is also prima facie good evidence of survival IMHO. I preferred Stemman’s book myself. The books are one I always recommend when asked for worthwhile reading on survival.
(This post was last modified: 2020-07-29, 09:56 PM by Obiwan.)
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(2020-07-28, 10:00 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: Curious if anyone has heard more about this case of George Chapman serving as the medium for the healing spirit of Dr. William Lang?

The reported details are incredible:

It's interesting that the Wikipedia page on George Chapman/ Dr. William Lang is fairly even and unbiased; it is short and consists mainly of statements of facts. It isn't at all a pseudo-skeptic hatchet job, which is what you would expect from how Wikipedia treats Leonora Piper and other famous mediums. Like Wiki's opening remarks about Piper: "Researchers and scientists who studied Piper's mediumship have described mentalist techniques such as cold reading, muscle reading and "fishing", all techniques that she may have used to gather information about séance sitters, so she could appear to have unexplained insight. Science writer and mathematician Martin Gardner dismissed Piper as a "clever charlatan."

Maybe because this case is rather obscure and little known.

The Chapman/Lang case is incomparable and extraordinary. 

One thought - the whole purpose of proposing the super-Psi hypothesis has been to try to come up with a credible explanation for apparent communications from the dead via mediums that doesn't require a spiritual world, souls or an afterlife. 

All it takes to invalidate super-Psi as a blanket hypothesis for mediumistic communications with the dead is to find just one iron-bound case of apparent mediumistic contact with the dead where the spirit hypothesis and survival is simply the only credible explanation. 

Of course there are others, but maybe the Chapman/Lang case is also one. On the face of all the evidence, it seems beyond absurd to suggest that "Dr. Lang" was a sub-personality of Chapman's using Chapman's psi abilities to perfectly in detail impersonate an obscure opthalmic surgeon dead for years in the process of achieving many amazing cures.
(This post was last modified: 2020-07-29, 11:35 PM by nbtruthman.)
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(2020-07-29, 11:32 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: It's interesting that the Wikipedia page on George Chapman/ Dr. William Lang is fairly even and unbiased; it is short and consists mainly of statements of facts. It isn't at all a pseudo-skeptic hatchet job, which is what you would expect from how Wikipedia treats Leonora Piper and other famous mediums. Like Wiki's opening remarks about Piper: "Researchers and scientists who studied Piper's mediumship have described mentalist techniques such as cold reading, muscle reading and "fishing", all techniques that she may have used to gather information about séance sitters, so she could appear to have unexplained insight. Science writer and mathematician Martin Gardner dismissed Piper as a "clever charlatan."

Maybe because this case is rather obscure and little known.

The Chapman/Lang case is incomparable and extraordinary. 

One thought - the whole purpose of proposing the super-Psi hypothesis has been to try to come up with a credible explanation for apparent communications from the dead via mediums that doesn't require a spiritual world, souls or an afterlife. 

All it takes to invalidate super-Psi as a blanket hypothesis for mediumistic communications with the dead is to find just one iron-bound case of apparent mediumistic contact with the dead where the spirit hypothesis and survival is simply the only credible explanation. 

Of course there are others, but maybe the Chapman/Lang case is also one. On the face of all the evidence, it seems beyond absurd to suggest that "Dr. Lang" was a sub-personality of Chapman's using Chapman's psi abilities to perfectly in detail impersonate an obscure opthalmic surgeon dead for years in the process of achieving many amazing cures.

I agree nb. I don’t know which of the books you’ve read,  but as you probably know,  Lang’s identity was apparently confirmed by former patients and colleagues and by his own daughter.
(This post was last modified: 2020-07-30, 07:27 AM by Obiwan.)
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Quote:Roy Stemman, former editor of Psychic News, is author of Spirits and Spirit Worlds, Reincarnation: True Stories of Past Lives, Spirit Communication, One Soul Many Lives, Mysteries of the Universe, Healers and Healing, Medium Rare: The Psychic Life of Ena Twigg, and (with George Chapman) Surgeon From Another World.

Here he discusses the healing mediumship of George Chapman (1921 - 2006) under the spirit control of Dr William Lang (1851 - 1937) that lasted for six decades. The authenticity of Dr Lang's spirit was attested to by family members, former patients, and medical colleagues. Many miraculous cures were reported and endorsed by medical personnel. The case has attracted international attention – and is among the most evidential examples of human postmortem survival.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'

- Bertrand Russell


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