Quotes from Barbara Weisberg

The seance room increasingly became a private retreat from the realities of the outside world rather than, as it had been in the past, a gathering place for mortals actively seeking to understand the relationship between the concerns of this world and the next.

Home's book, Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, a work that castigated a number of mediums for faking manifestations and duping clients out of their fortunes, said not a word that was disparaging of Kate or Maggie Fox.

A new field of study, neurotheology, explores the possibility that certain religious and visionary experiences—for example, a sense of oneness with the universe or union with a greater power—may originate within a particular part of the human brain. Curiously enough, a phrenologist named Joseph Rhodes Buchanan posited a not dissimilar theory in 1841: he identified a specific spot on the human head that when stimulated, he wrote, produced visions of spirits.

Rochester, at least among some segments of society, had become a more polite town, the Burned-over District, the region that surrounded it and that had been the scene of earlier revivals, continued to smolder with enthusiasms both religious and political.

Amy and Isaac Post

when they lived in Rochester, every newspaper, parlor, and street corner buzzed with talk about mesmerism and phrenology, abolition and suffrage.

Heightened emotion potentially posed another threat more serious than bad skin: hysteria. Doctors diagnosed the condition as a woman's disease, believed to originate in the womb and to demonstrate female frailty and fallibility. Girls around puberty were particularly susceptible, doctors worried, to the fits and seizures hysteria could induce. How important it was, then, for a young woman to exercise self-restraint and to remain in a limited arena: the home.