The 48 Laws Of Power (The Robert Greene Collection) by Robert Greene

Author:Robert Greene [Greene, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2010-09-02T14:00:00+00:00

THE POWER OF THE CHARLATAN, GRETE DE FRANCESCO, 1939

Observance II

In the mid-1700s, word spread in Europe’s fashionable society of a Swiss country doctor named Michael Schüppach who practiced a different kind of medicine: He used the healing powers of nature to perform miraculous cures. Soon well-to-do people from all over the Continent, their ailments both serious and mild, were making the trek to the alpine village of Lang-nau, where lived and worked. Trudging through the mountains, these visitors witnessed the most dramatic natural landscapes that Europe has to offer. By the time they reached Langnau, they were already feeling transformed and on their way to health.

Schüppach, who had become known as simply the “Mountain Doctor,” had a small pharmacy in town. This place became quite a scene: Crowds of people from many different countries would cram the small room, its walls lined with colorful bottles filled with herbal cures. Where most doctors of the time prescribed foul-tasting concoctions that bore incomprehensible Latin titles (as medicines often do still), Schüppach's cures had names such as “The Oil of Joy,” “Little Flower’s Heart,” or “Against the Monster,” and they tasted sweet and pleasing.

Visitors to Langnau would have to wait patiently for a visit with the Mountain Doctor, because every day some eighty messengers would arrive at the pharmacy bearing flasks of urine from all over Europe. Schüppach claimed he could diagnose what ailed you simply by looking at a sample of your urine and reading a written description of your ailment. (Naturally he read the description very carefully before prescribing a cure.) When he finally had a spare minute (the urine samples took up much of his time), he would call the visitor into his office in the pharmacy. He would then examine this person’s urine sample, explaining that its appearance would tell him everything he needed to know. Country people had a sense for these things, he would say—their wisdom came from living a simple, godly life with none of the complications of urban living. This personal consultation would also include a discussion as to how one might bring one’s soul more into harmony with nature.

Schüppach had devised many forms of treatment, each profoundly unlike the usual medical practices of the time. He was a believer, for instance, in electric shock therapy. To those who wondered whether this was in keeping with his belief in the healing power of nature, he would explain that electricity is a natural phenomenon; he was merely imitating the power of lightning. One of his patients claimed to be inhabited by seven devils. The doctor cured him with electrical shocks, and as he administered these he exclaimed that he could see the devils flying out of the man’s body, one by one. Another man claimed to have swallowed a hay wagon and its driver, which were causing him massive pains in the chest. The Mountain Doctor listened patiently, claimed to be able to hear the crack of a whip in the man’s belly, promised to cure him, and gave him a sedative and a purgative.

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