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iceboxes, and central heating. After such changes, anything could be believed. For those who could afford it, that is. Poor immigrants and blacks lived in crowded rat-infested wooden firetrap tenements, with stinking outdoor privies; human waste and horse manure mingled in open sewers that spread lethal diseases. Conditions in New York’s slums remained appalling for decades.
    Radicals among the young, such as the Claflin sisters, were ready for “any sort of millennium, religious or industrial, that should arrive.” The invention of the telegraph, which sent unseen messages long distance, floating by seeming magic through the air, bolstered the belief in the supernatural. One leading Spiritualist journal was even called The Spiritual Telegraph .
    Tennie believed she had the power, but not to the extent promised to the gullible by Buck. One newspaper carried a story about an injured Civil War soldier with a bullet embedded in his foot who sought her services. As she felt his toes, she blurted out, “Why Captain, you were not wounded in battle,” and announced that he had been shot by a rebel sniper. The astounded soldier swore that only he had known this.
    Spiritualism eventually withered after large-scale fraud was exposed in the 1880s. At that time, Maggie Fox—descending with her sister into alcoholism, drug addiction, and poverty—hastened the movement’s death when she told a large crowd at the New York Academy of Music in 1888 that she and Kate were frauds. They had started their rapping as a gag to rattle their superstitious mother, she admitted, achieving the sound by knocking their toes on wood. Despite such assaults on Spiritualism, the federal census in 1890 listed 334 Spiritualist churches in the United States.
    Tennie’s expertise, she always claimed, lay in her power to heal the sick magnetically by the laying on of hands. The concept of magnetic healing began in the 1770s, when the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer—whose name was the origin of the word mesmerized —articulated a “form of psychic healing that included both magnetic healing and hypnotism.” He believed that a force or magnetic fluid linked all beings. “This was not so different from Hindu prana or Chinese chi. His method of laying on of hands and giving suggestions to patients led to the development of therapeutic hypnotism.” Mesmer presciently believed that mental attitudes often accompanied physical illnesses and that it was vital for physicians and patients to be in sympathy with one another. He used the French word rapport —not then common in the United States—to connote “harmony” or “connection.”
    The prophetic Mesmer has modern-day psychoanalytic and magnetic healing followers. In his times, however, as with most medical pioneers, envious colleagues called him a fraud, and they persuaded the Viennese Medical Council to oust him. But in more liberal Paris, Mesmer treated the wealthy for large sums and the poor for free. He believed that the laying on of hands “had the power to make the fluid flow from themselves into the patient.” He claimed that water immersed in iron rods provided magnetic fields. Despite widespread skepticism in America, magnetic healing became popular among Spiritualists.
    Tennie believed in her power as a “clairvoyant physician”—saying that she passed positive and negative magnetic waves through her hands as she rubbed patients—and once bragged to America’s leading feminist, Susan B. Anthony, that “I was a very good doctor, I cured a much larger percentage than the regular M.D.’s.”
    Spiritualism became a nationwide craze and a form of solace throughout the sisters’ youth. The specter of death was everywhere then: women dying in childbirth; diseases taking infants, children, and adults. In the 1850s, children under five made up more than half the deaths in New York City. When Tennie was fifteen, Civil War slaughters began. Some 750,000 soldiers were butchered or died