Harry Edwards and the Archbishops' Commission On
Divine Healing |
|---|
The healer in question, Mr Harry Edwards, was not an
Establishment figure by any stretch of the imagination;
despite this, he probably did more to permanently affect
Establishment attitudes, in the UK at least, towards a
particular type of mediumship (healing) than any other single
Spiritualist before or since.
Edwards was, easily, the most well known and best loved healer
of his generation, and over the course of his long career he
fought hard to win recognition for Spiritual Healing by the
medical profession. However, as he frequently pointed out, he
did not see healing as being a substitute for conventional
medicine, it was his greatest wish to see doctors and healers
working together in a common cause with the doctor remaining
firmly in charge of each case.(1) In this respect, Edwards began
an approach that has been continued since.
As far as the Church was concerned, Harry Edwards was outraged
that mainstream Christianity had abandoned healing. It was his
view that the Church was disobeying the instructions of its
founder by doing this and he often said so in public which, no
doubt, did little to endear him to the leaders of the Anglican
Church. He would answer Christian critics, some of whom accused
him of doing the 'Devil's work', by saying that people should be
able to have healing in church every Sunday, and that if this
were done then the problem of dwindling congregations would be
solved at a stroke. But, Edwards also warned all denominations
that healing was the property of no one, including
Spiritualists, because:-
'There is not one set of Divine laws for the Church of England
and another set for the Methodists, the Congregationalists, and
the Spiritualists. It is our common heritage. To try and
control it by ritual or set performances of any kind, or to
discipline, by set prayers, the healing efforts of healer
priests will likewise fail.'(2)
Ironically, this attitude would also cause Edwards some
unpopularity amongst Spiritualists but to the established
Church, which had probably stifled the healing gift in this very
way, it was a double insult, the other half of which was
Edwards' very public success at practising what he preached at
venues the length and breadth of the country. There was also
the fact that clergymen were turning to Edwards instead of the
Church authorities to ask how they could develop the healing
gift themselves. Parallel to this, many doctors, ignoring the
threat of disciplinary action, were covertly referring
'incurable' patients to Edwards.
It was inevitable that matters would come to a head and this
happened eventually in 1953 when the Church organised a
commission consisting of assorted Bishops and other clergymen,
doctors and a psychologist to look into the evidence for
'Divine' healing. However, before I relate how the Commission
subjected Edwards to some astonishingly shabby treatment,
despite his best efforts to co-operate, and of how the healer
eventually managed to humiliate the Church by guessing the true
purpose of its panel and successfully predicting its 'findings'
in public, a brief account of his career up to this point would
be in order.
Henry (Harry) James Edwards was born on May 29, 1893 in
Islington, North London, the eldest son of a print compositor.
As a child Edwards was described in the biography by colleague
Raymus Branch, Harry Edwards...The Life Story of the Great
Healer, as being 'a holy terror of the first order' whose most
notable achievements were the derailment of a number of railway
trucks from the line at the back of the Edwards home at Wood
Green, and the premature launching of a hot-air balloon one
evening at Alexandra Palace. Edwards' character underwent a
dramatic transformation, however, when he developed a crush on
the local butcher's daughter; in an effort to impress her he
even gave up swearing and joined the local Church Lads Brigade.
He also developed an interest in politics and became a youthful,
but avid, supporter of the Liberal party, gaining his first
experience of public speaking at political rallies.
During the First World War Edwards served in India and the
Middle East, eventually attaining the rank of Captain and it was
here that he showed the first signs of the extraordinary healing
gift that was to make him famous the world over. As 'Assistant
Director of Labour, Persian Lines of Communication' he found
himself, equipped with little more than bandages and iodine,
having to act as an unofficial doctor to the native workforce.
Edwards was surprised to observe an unusual rate of recovery
even amongst those with serious injuries but he thought nothing
more about this until many years later after his introduction to
Spiritualism.
After returning to England Edwards married and set up his own
print business in Balham, South London. By now his early
interest in politics had turned into a burning ambition to right
the wrongs of society and he stood unsuccessfully as the Liberal
party candidate for North West Camberwell twice, in 1929 and
1935. It was after his second election defeat, in 1936, that
Edwards received a message that would change his life at a small
Spiritualist Church at Clousdale Road in Balham.
Up until then he had adopted the views of his father who, as a
religious rationalist, had no belief in an afterlife. Edwards
was also a keen amateur conjurer and 14 years previously he had
visited a Spiritualist Church for the first time with every
intention of exposing the medium's tricks. Instead he was given
a message that he could not account for and his interest was
aroused. So when, during his second exposure to Spiritualism at
Clousdale Road, the medium told him that he was 'born to heal'
and despite the fact he had no idea what a healer was, he joined
a development circle to see what would happen. Edwards quickly
developed trance mediumship and this was followed closely by his
first cautious attempts at absent healing.
One of these came after a distraught woman, a Mrs Newland, whose
husband had been sent home to die of lung cancer, wandered into
Edwards' print shop quite by chance and he offered to try absent
healing. Two days later, Mrs Newland returned to say that her
husband's condition had improved radically. Later, x-rays
showed no signs of the malignancy but a doctor at St Thomas'
Hospital who was unfamiliar with the case concluded that Mr
Newland had never had cancer in the first place.
Edwards soon found that his early self-conscious attempts at
contact healing often brought similar results, and soon his
reputation had spread to such an extent that his home was
regularly filled by people seeking his help. He eventually
found that many of the elaborate gestures employed by healers,
such as blowing on the patient and flicking away 'diseased'
energy from the fingers, were quite unnecessary and he developed
the simple, straightforward approach that became his trademark.
It was not long before his efforts were being reported in
Psychic News and the local papers.
In his autobiography, On The Side Of Angels, Gordon
Higginson remarked that some aspects of Edwards' healing bore
the hallmarks of physical mediumship and it was during this
early, pre-war phase of his career that the healer sponsored the
mediumship of Jack Webber. Edwards' photographs of seance-room
phenomena are some of the best ever obtained and his careful
documentation of Webber's mediumship was published as The
Mediumship of Jack Webber.(3) Edwards also ensured that some very
sceptical members of the press were able to report on some of
the Welsh ex-miner's remarkable seances. Montague Keen, writing
recently in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,
has remarked that the name of 'Webber' has been remarkable by
its absence from the sceptical literature and that 'The record
of his physical mediumship...constitutes a challenge that seems
to have been ignored even by our own society.'(4)
It was after World War Two that Edwards' career really took off,
with his public demonstrations of contact healing at venues
ranging from the humblest Spiritualist Church to the Albert
Hall. During these, Edwards would usually ask for those
suffering from conditions that he had found to respond most
rapidly to contact healing, but he was always careful to point
out that, in most cases, patients would require further
treatment and that a complete cure was not always to be
expected. Even so, he began to experience foretastes of the
treatment he would receive later at the hands of the medical
members of the Archbishops' Commission. One such case was
reported in the Cambridge Daily News in 1948. At a
demonstration at Cambridge Guild Hall Edwards had given healing
to four-year-old Phillip Goodliff who, being crippled by polio,
had to be carried onto the platform by his mother. A minute
after receiving healing, the child, after discarding his
leg-iron, was 'romping' around the front of the hall and
creating such a disturbance that his mother had to remove his
shoes. However, the orthopaedic surgeon who had treated the
boy, Mr Noel Smith, despite the fact that the child could now
walk, declared that Edwards had merely used 'an age-old
chiropractic stunt' and that the treatment for infantile
paralysis should be on 'scientific and proved lines'.(5)
Of course, the case of Phillip Goodliff represented the only the
tip of a very large iceberg of successful healings. By the time
that he received a request to submit evidence to the
Archbishops' Commission, Edwards was a national figure who was
answering thousands of requests for absent healing from around
the world each week at his Sanctuary, 'Burrows Lea' in Surrey,
which he had acquired in 1946. Edwards was also keeping records
of each patient's progress. Ostensibly, the task of the
Commission was to assess the evidence for Divine Healing with a
view to issuing guidelines to the clergy as to how requests for
healing should be handled and how healing should be given.(6) As
we shall see, however, the former aim somehow vanished from the
Commission's agenda once it became apparent that Edwards could
actually meet the criteria for evidence specified by the panel.
And, tragically, the 'guidelines' that were eventually issued
were little better than an insult to the sick.
As Raymus Branch has noted, if it had not been for Harry Edwards
then the Archbishops' Commission on Divine Healing would
probably never have been formed.(7) It was, after all, Edwards'
public demonstrations of contact healing that had made the
subject a matter of public debate in post-war Britain. So,
although Edwards was not the only healer to be asked to
co-operate with the Commission it was inevitable that, in the
public mind, he would be seen as its chief subject of
investigation. As the most famous healer of the day, it was
Harry Edwards, a Spiritualist, who bore the burden of
responsibility for proving the worth of spiritual healing to the
bishops and their panel of medical advisers.
The panel formed to investigate healing was formidable indeed,
including five bishops and an array of senior doctors and
academics.(8) The most notable and hostile of these was Dr. David
Stafford-Clark (later to become known as 'the television
psychiatrist'). Ironically, the panel also included the Rev.
Maurice Elliot who had long campaigned for a liaison between
Spiritualism and the Church. Elliot had been one of the prime
movers behind an earlier Church Commission, formed by Archbishop
Cosmo Lang, to investigate Spiritualism itself. It was Elliot
who had courageously spoken out after Lang had tried to suppress
the resulting 'majority report' which was favourable to
Spiritualism, and the nature of the Healing Commission may be
judged by the fact that the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr.
Fisher, reacted with dismay at Elliot's participation. Upon
finding him present at the first meeting of the Commission,
Fisher had demanded of Elliot 'And what are you doing here
today?' closely followed by 'Who sent you?' upon which Elliot
merely pointed upwards and walked away.(9)
Edwards was later to comment that Elliot was the only friend
amongst a panel that was otherwise 'horse-faced'.(10) However, if
the healer's account of his interview by the Commission is to be
believed, there must be some doubt as to the fitness of at least
one panel member to have participated in such an inquiry.
Although the Commission had been announced in 1953 it was not
until July 7 1954 that Edwards (accompanied by his assistant,
Olive Burton), arrived at Lambeth Palace to present his evidence
for healing. The Commission had requested details of six cases
for investigation by the medical panel. Edwards, who by this
time was dealing with thousands of requests for absent healing
every week, had little trouble in forwarding seventy such cases
from the previous three months, the details of which could all be
checked by the panel with the doctors concerned via the patients
themselves.(11)
After a talk, during which he invited the panel to witness a
contact healing session at Burrows Lea, Edwards faced a
barrage of hostile, critical questions.(12) He related later how
one doctor had stood up and contemptuously cast the papers
relating to the healings to one side declaring 'There is no
evidence of spiritual healing here for they could all have been
spontaneous (natural) healings'. When Edwards pointed out the
absurdity of this suggestion (that seventy patients who had been
declared by their doctors to be 'incurable' just happened to
recover 'spontaneously' after being given healing), the doctor
retorted that 'Too many doctors are declaring people to be
incurable when they are not'.(13) When, at another stage in the
proceedings, Edwards attempted to give details concerning the
healing of a 'blue baby', this brought a shout of 'impossible'
from Dr. Stafford-Clark. When the healer persisted in trying to
give an account of this case, Stafford-Clark swung his chair
round and Edwards found himself addressing the doctor's
back!(14)
After their in-depth, minutes-long 'investigation' of the
seventy cases presented by Edwards the panel then asked him to
provide a further six 'case histories' for scrutiny, perhaps
knowing that, owing to the confidentiality of such information,
the healer would be denied access to official medical histories.
In 1950, Edwards had helped a doctor from St. Bartholomew's
Hospital who was conducting a private study of healing by
supplying ninety-five cases for examination. Even the doctor
himself had not been able to get access to the medical records
for fifty-eight of these cases but when Edwards pointed this out
to the panel he was told, incredibly, that 'he only had to ask'
for the details.(15)
Nevertheless, Edwards managed to meet the new criteria for eight
cases which were duly supplied to the Commission with a request
that he be allowed to see the medical panel's comments in
advance of publication. In view of the evasion tactics already
employed by the medical panel this was an understandable request
from Edwards who, by now, was beginning to suspect that even
these cases would not be investigated properly and that the
Commission was likely to be misled. Edwards simply wanted to be
able to correct any likely mis-statements or evasions concerning
the cases to prevent this from happening. As we shall see,
however, Edwards had to wait two years, despite repeated
requests, before he received an assurance that his plea to see
the findings in advance would be met and, even then, this proved
to be a waste of paper and ink.
In the meantime Edwards continued with his healing work.
Shortly after the fiasco of his interview at Lambeth Palace he
gave a healing demonstration at the Albert Hall, on September 25
1954, in front of an audience of 6,000 which included 17 members
of the Archbishops' Commission, representatives of the BMA and
members of the Church's Council of Healing. Accordingly,
Edwards made a point of asking for people with 'incurable'
conditions: a girl of eight who was spastic from birth raised
her arms above her head for the first time; a man crippled by
arthritis for 30 years walked away from the platform as did a
woman who had not walked for five years. During the
demonstration, Edwards made numerous asides that were obviously
intended for the ears of the Commission, such as 'Would it not
be a fine thing if this healing was taking place in Canterbury
Cathedral and in all our Parish Churches? It should be
happening there, for that is its rightful place!'(16)
During the coming months, Edwards voiced his increasing
frustration with the Commission more directly with a series of
letters to Lambeth Palace repeatedly asking, to no avail, that
he be allowed to comment on the medical panel's findings.
Gradually, he became so disillusioned with the Commission that
he started to complain publicly about his treatment in his own
magazine The Spiritual Healer, and this culminated in an open
accusation of 'conspiracy and negligence' when he found out that
the patient from one of the cases, a Mr William Olsen, had been
asked by the Commission to provide his own medical corroboration
and that five of the other patients and their doctors had not
even been contacted!(17)
By May 1956 Edwards had just completed a book, The Truth
About Spiritual Healing, in which he gave an account of the
Commission's behaviour. On May 8, after the book had gone to
press he received a letter from Lambeth palace signed by the
Bishop of Lincoln and the Secretary to the Commission, the Rev.
Eric Jay, saying that a Dr. Claxton of the BMA had no objections
to granting his request and would write to him shortly with the
medical panel's findings. Edwards was so pleased with this that
he suspended his book's publication immediately, only to find
that the conclusions of the medical panel (on which the
Commission's report was eventually to be based), were published
in the British Medical Journal on May 12 anyway.(18) And, to rub
salt into the wound, Edwards received Claxton's letter
containing the findings two days afterwards.(19)
As Edwards was to write later in an updated version of his
book...'the offer of co-operation was a sham - a case of "thank
you for nothing"', but what made matters much worse was the fact
that the BMA report amply confirmed his worst fears as it
contained evasions and downright errors concerning the eight
cases that were scarcely believable. This suggested that the
panel had either not bothered to conduct its investigation with
anything like the scientific detachment and thoroughness that
one would expect, or had actually chosen to lie rather than
admit that the cases presented evidence in favour of Spiritual
Healing.
Edwards wrote back to Rev. Eric Jay, to whom he had already
predicted this very outcome many times over the previous
months:-
'As I anticipated, and as I have told you several times, the BMA
findings are purposefully evasive, misleading and a distortion
of the truth...It is obvious that the doctors are hostile. To
ask them for an impartial judgement is asking them to agree that
spiritual healing can succeed when they have failed, and this
they do not want to do, whatever the evidence...If the
commission is willing to accept the BMA report at its face
value, that is its responsibility, but if, on the other hand, it
cares to question this report, I shall be prepared to
co-operate.'(20)
Edwards included details of the BMA's errors but, apparently,
the Commission was prepared to accept the report at face value
as he received no reply to his letter.
A full commentary on the BMA report was included in the final
version of The Truth About Spiritual Healing.(21) Fairly
typical is the treatment the panel gave to the case of a
patient, Mr. 'B', whose son had sought absent healing from
Edwards on his father's behalf for bladder cancer which was
diagnosed after a biopsy. An operation was planned but,
according to the son, shortly after healing commenced his
father's 'appearance was transformed, pain ceased, and he
appeared to regain his perfect health'. No cancer was found
during a preliminary examination prior to the operation at the
Royal Masonic Hospital and so the actual surgery was not
performed and the patient was found to be cancer free on several
occasions up to December 1954. In 1955, the same patient became
very seriously ill with bronchitis but again, after healing,
recovered. Three months later, however, Mr. 'B' died suddenly
of a heart attack.
Doubtless, Edwards would not have objected if the BMA report had
told the truth concerning this patient's demise (after all he
was not claiming that, through healing, one could achieve
immortality) but it claimed that Mr 'B' had succumbed to the
original 'carcinoma of the bladder', completely ignoring the
actual medical evidence.
Another case concerned a Miss E. Wilson who had been suffering
from back pain for more than forty years and was diagnosed in
1950 at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary as having 'gross Kyphosis
deformity'. After one contact healing session with Edwards in
1951 her spine was straightened considerably, she became
completely pain-free and was able to discard her back-brace and
walking sticks...improvements that were acknowledged by her
consultant, a Mr. Ross. However, the BMA report stated wrongly,
without even calling Miss Wilson as a witness, that she had
'improved whilst receiving physiotherapy in addition to Mr.
Edwards's administrations' when she had, in fact, received no
further treatment because, as Edwards pointed out, she did not
need it.
There were similar inconsistencies with all of the other cases
and it would be no exaggeration to say that the report was
scientifically worthless. Yet, the panel still managed to
conclude from its non-investigation that... 'We can find no
evidence that organic diseases are cured by such means
[spiritual healing]'.
Edwards' immediate response was to issue a statement to the press in which he gave the true details of the eight cases and challenged the BMA to have them independently assessed.(22) Of course, this challenge was not taken up and, in the eyes of many, the BMA must have appeared rather foolish. The authors of the report also seemed to have been blissfully unaware that Edwards had many friends in the medical profession and he was particularly annoyed that they had reminded doctors that they were liable to disciplinary action if they co-operated with healers. In a speech made in Bloomsbury the following year, Edwards was able to produce a fistful of the 200 letters he had received from doctors requesting his assistance in the short time since the report's publication. He warned the BMA that if they should be 'ill-advised' enough to discipline even one of them that... 'we are in a position to provide a great amount of support to that doctor through the medical profession itself'.(23)
It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that, in 1958, Edwards
received a letter from the Chaplain of the Commission telling
him that none of the evidence he had supplied would be used in
the final report.(24) After all, the Commission had been totally
out-manoeuvred by the healer who had managed to publicly
discredit the 'findings' of their eminent medical panel; any
reference to this in the final report would have amounted to a
public admission of everything that Edwards had accused the
Commission of unless they had taken up his challenge to have the
evidence independently assessed.
The Commission had clearly decided to fudge the issue by not
mentioning Edwards' evidence at all. But, Edwards had
pre-empted the Church even here. Anticipating the likely
outcome years before, he had devoted a whole chapter in The
Truth About Spiritual Healing to predicting what the
Commission's recommendations to the clergy regarding healing
would be. He would now see just how accurate his predictions
had been. Today, nearly forty years after the Commission's
findings were published, we can see that the Healing Movement
has continued to flourish in the manner envisioned by Edwards,
albeit without the co-operation of the Church.
It must have seemed obvious to Edwards that the Commission, rather than take advice from a Spiritualist who was providing powerful evidence that genuine healing of organic and mental disease was possible without placing any religious preconditions on the act, would uselessly try to cram the healing gift into its own dogmas to avoid losing face. This belief that one can magically confer the gift of healing on someone by dressing them in priest's robes and asking them to perform set rituals and prayers was, as Edwards had maintained all along, how the Church had managed to mislay its healing ministry in the first place. Edwards' predictions of the Commission's recommendations may be summarised thus:(25) (i) It would admit that healers from outside the Church may be able to bring about healing but there would be references to evil spirits and the Devil; (ii) It would 'suggest that applicants for spiritual healing should receive devotional education', and it would also expect patients to become members of the Church, placing its own preconditions on 'Divine' healing; (iii) It would accept that healing may be possible with 'nervous diseases' but not with organic conditions; (iv) It would disparage public demonstrations of healing such as those given by Edwards.
This forecast was remarkable in its accuracy.(26) After the
report's publication in June 1958 Edwards gave his reaction to
it in his own magazine, The Spiritual Healer. There was,
indeed, an acknowledgement that Spiritualist healers 'may
be...gifted men' but, despite Edwards' efforts to give an
understanding of this they were 'gifted in ways which as yet we
do not understand'. There were references to 'demons' and how
churchmen should 'exorcise' patients.
There was the recommendation that 'Sickness...often presents a
unique opportunity for instruction' and that the patient be
'prepared', 'instructed' and encouraged to 'confess' to 'bring
the patient to a real sorrow for his sins' before healing. The
clergy were also advised that if they were asked to give healing
to a stranger they would 'need to discover whether the patient
is a Christian,...a churchman, whether he has been
baptised...confirmed and is a communicant'. In other words, the
report inferred that non-Anglicans should be left to suffer,
something which Edwards described as 'downright cruel'.
There was also the disingenuous comment that 'If the
investigation was sufficiently complete, there might arise
scientific evidence for unparalleled physical cures' followed by
a 15 paragraph dismissal of apparent healing successes as being
due to wrong diagnoses, 'spontaneous' remission etc. Edwards
remarked 'So illogical is the report that after ruling that any
investigation of Spiritualist healings were outside its
business, it devotes pages to explain them away'.
As far as public healing was concerned, the report, although not
ruling it out, recommended that it should only be held for the
'instructed', otherwise 'attendance at a healing service could
have disastrous results'. This prompted Edwards to retort that
'The only disastrous result will be that the patients may die
while they are waiting for all this "preparation" before they
are allowed to enter the Church to be healed'.
The popular press reacted with bewilderment and a certain amount
of outrage to the report. The Daily Express commented that its
'jungle of theological jargon' reached back to 'the dark
superstitious beginnings of man himself' and was a 'tremendous
attack' on other denominations including Spiritualists. The
Star, a leading evening newspaper of the time, obviously unaware
of the irony of the situation, asked in a leading article 'Why,
for instance, didn't the Commission probe and test the evidence
of a man like Harry Edwards...Because, they say, it was outside
their terms of reference.' Needless to say, Maurice Barbanell,
editor of Psychic News was also outraged, he wrote that
the report was a 'waste of the paper on which it was printed'.
Perhaps the most ridiculous of the report's recommendations had
been its suggestion that to induce healing the priest should
bless a bottle of olive oil, soak a piece of wool in this, draw
a cross on the patient's forehead and, after reciting a prayer,
burn the wool. Edwards commented that 'If Spiritualist healers
did this, they would be rightly laughed at'. He also predicted
that, until the Church came to its senses the sick would
continue to seek healing from Spiritualists. Which, indeed,
they did.
Barely a month after the report's publication Edwards held
another healing demonstration at the Albert Hall. He shared the
platform with 300 healers from the non-denominational National
Federation of Spiritual Healers (of which Edwards was President)
which had been formed in 1955 by John Britnell with Edwards'
help.(27) Also there to speak in support of healing was the MP
for Kensington, George Roger, but it was Edwards himself who
delivered the coupe de grace to the Archbishops' report. After
accusing the medical panel from the Commission of 'shameful
negligence' for not examining the evidence he had provided, he
declared... 'We present the evidence for the judgement of public
opinion'. Then two of the eight patients whose cases had been
misrepresented in the earlier BMA report, before being ignored
completely by the Commission, stepped up to the microphone.
William Olsen who had recovered from spinal collapse and
Elizabeth Wilson, a former hunchback, stepped up to the
microphone to testify to their recovery at Edwards' hands. A
Mrs Blowes whose eight month old daughter had been sent home to
die of a malignant growth told the audience that the girl was
now nine years old thanks to healing. The audience were also
told that the patient from one of the other cases, a boy who had
been crippled by a strange condition that had bent his body
'like a question mark', would have been present were it not for
the fact that he was taking his school exams.
The Archbishops' report was then finally laid to rest by none
other than the Rev. Maurice Elliot who, as a member of the
Commission, had been present when Edwards first presented his
evidence at Lambeth Palace. Elliot told the audience that he
was so disgusted by the report and the way it had been compiled
that he had refused to sign it.(28)
Many years before, during his army career in the Middle East, Edwards had been entrusted with the task of building a bridge over a wide, fast flowing river. As he only knew how to build bridges over roads Edwards simply ordered the bridge to be built to one side of the river which was then diverted underneath it with dynamite.(29) In retrospect it can be seen that Harry Edwards used a similar approach to paving the way for the increasing acceptance of healing by the medical establishment that we see today. Edwards already had considerable covert grass-roots support amongst doctors, indeed he recalled that after a lecture given to a division of the BMA several doctors had taken him to one side and told him how they were his 'best friend here', 'your strongest supporter' etc.(30)
In 1959 healers from the NFSH, of which Edwards was the first
president, were given permission to give healing in 1,500 NHS
hospitals,(31) but Edwards continued to fight for recognition of
healing by the BMA and the General Medical Council. During his
long presidency of the NFSH, whose early headquarters was
Edwards' own healing sanctuary at Burrows Lea, he was
responsible for the organisation's early training courses,(32) and
he continued to demonstrate healing internationally, even
touring Zimbabwe at the age of 82, shortly before his passing
in 1976.(33)
It has been estimated that, over the course of his 40 year
career, Edwards gave healing to around 14 million people, from
the most humble to members of the royal family, without ever
charging a penny for his services.(34) One year after his passing,
in 1977, the GMC issued a policy statement in which permission
was given for doctors to refer patients to accredited healers if
they saw fit.(35) 1981 saw the formation of the Confederation of
Healing Organisations, an umbrella organisation for healing
associations from all denominations who are prepared to accept a
common code of conduct prepared in consultation with the GMC,
BMA and Royal Colleges of Medicine.(36) In 1988, the Doctor
Healer Network was formed by psychiatrist Dr Daniel Benor for
Doctors who wished to employ healers at their surgeries and an
increasing number of Doctors, such as Dr Barbara King of
Birmingham have become healers themselves.(37)
Today Britain is the only European country to have a strongly
established healing movement and an attempt to make
complementary therapies such as healing available on the
National Health Service was defeated in the House of Lords by
only 4 votes in 1990.(38) It would seem that the realisation of
this central aim of the CHO is only a matter of time, especially
since an attempt by the Lannoye Committee of the European
Parliament to severely restrict complementary medicine in the UK
was met with a threat by the last government to use the
Maastricht treaty to veto any such move.(39)
It is difficult to imagine that any of the above would have been
possible without Harry Edwards although, of course, a great deal
of the credit belongs to many others also. Despite his own
Spiritualist interpretation of how healing is achieved by
attunement with 'God's Healing Ministers in Spirit', he wisely
recognised that this must take second place to the healing act
itself. His insistence that healing should be
non-denominational was an act of humility that ensured its wider
acceptance by an increasingly secular society and an
Establishment that is still largely hostile to the concept of
mediumship as such. Of course, such an approach would be vastly
more difficult with mediumship as a form of evidential
communication.
So much for the medical establishment. The Church, for its
part, seems to have learned nothing from its encounter with
Harry Edwards. The Churches Council for Health and
Healing, unlike the NFSH, is not a member of the CHO, and
therefore is not bound by a code of conduct which forbids forcing the
belief system of the healer upon the patient. Consequently, the vacuum
left by the mainstream church's rejection of Harry Edwards' advice
has been filled, in part, to the dismay of many clergymen, by the rise
of the so-called 'Toronto Blessing': in this, people cavort around
like chickens in a disco, baying like animals while they exorcise
various imaginary demons. This practice has even been encouraged
in church by some of the more evangelically minded clergy and
some 'patients' who have been exposed to it have claimed that
they suffered long-term psychological damage as a result. Some
may remember a TV documentary about this phenomenon a few years
ago during which one man alleged that his 'healing' had involved
being forcibly held down whilst blackcurrant cordial was poured into
his underwear to purify him. One wonders whether the Archbishops'
Commission would have regarded this as a 'disastrous' result.
Naturally, one also wonders what Harry Edwards would have
thought of such antics. A number of years ago I was present at
a contact healing session at Burrows Lea, during which Ray and
Joan Branch gave healing to a lady whose neck, hips, and wrists
were chronically affected by arthritis. As she walked away from
Edwards' old healing chair (carrying her support collar) she
turned and asked Ray whether he ever heard anything from his
former mentor. He replied, with a smile, 'Oh, we never do
anything without him!'.
References
(1)Harry Edwards (a), A Guide to the Understanding and
Practice of Spiritual Healing (Guildford: Healer
Publishing, 1982), pp.111-112.
(2)And all other general biographical details, Raymus Branch,
Harry Edwards: The Life Story of the Great Healer
(Guildford: Healer Publishing, 1991), p.174.
(3)For an excellent account of Jack Webber's career see 'The
Mediumship of Jack Webber', The NAS Newsletter, December 1995.
(4)Montague Keen, 'A Sceptical View of Parapsychology',
JSPR, Vol. 61, No. 846, Jan. 1997, p.298.
(5)Raymus Branch, Ibid., pp.139-140.
(6)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.167.
(7)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.166.
(8)For full details see 6.
(9)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.168.
(10)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.170.
(11)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.169.
(12)Harry Edwards (b), The Truth About Spiritual Healing
(London: Spiritualist Press, 1956), pp.146-151.
(13)Harry Edwards (b), Ibid., pp.31-32.
(14)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.175.
(15)See 7.
(16)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.176.
(17)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.181.
(18)British Medical Journal Supplement, May 12 1956,
pp.269-273.
(19)Harry Edwards (b), Ibid., pp.33-39.
(20)See 12.
(21)Harry Edwards (b), Ibid., pp.40-84.
(22)Harry Edwards (b), Ibid., pp.152-153.
(23)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.188.
(24)Raymus Branch, Ibid., p.190.
(25)Harry Edwards (b), Ibid., pp.124-126.
(26)Ramus Branch, Ibid., pp.190-196.
(27)Don Copeland, 'Harry Edwards and Healing Training', NFSH
Region 14 Newsletter, Summer 1997, p.4.
(28)Ramus Branch, Ibid., p.198.
(29)Ramus Branch, Ibid., pp.41-40.
(30)Ramus Branch, Ibid., p.145.
(31)Anthea Courtenay, Healing Now (London: J.M. Dent &
Sons, 1991), p.112.
(32)Don Copeland, Ibid.
(33)Ramus Branch, Ibid., illustration facing p.227.
(34)Estimate given by Ramus Branch at seminar, Burrows Lea
1996.
(35)Ramus Branch, Ibid., p.147.
(36)Anthea Courtenay, Ibid., p.13.
(37)Jo Ind, writing in the Birmingham Post, July 6 1993.
(38)News and Views, Journal of the Surrey Spiritual Healers
Association, Autumn 1997, pp.30-31.
(39)See 14.
(40)Anthea Courtenay, Ibid., p.13.
