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Croiset the Clairvoyant - Jack Harrison Pollack

Silent Spring in Holland

This clear-cut case was one Croiset worked on for a stranger, Mr. A.V. of Almelo who telephoned him in Enschede on June 12, 1954.

"My small son, who is eight years old, woke up sick ten days ago," he explained. "His lips were blue and so were his nails. He looked very pale even though he said he felt fine. I put him back in bed and called the doctor. At first the doctor thought it might be poisoning. But later he suspected that it was some type of heart trouble."

Croiset interrupted, "No, I see that it is definitely a poisoning. What did he eat? Some fruit? Maybe some apples or pears? I see a yellow substance. What can it be?"

Unimpressed by this speedy lay diagnosis, Mr. V. added, "My son was brought by ambulance to the Academic Hospital in Leiden. He was examined there by several staff doctors, including an internist and a heart specialist. They took a blood test. But they have not been able to diagnose his illness yet."

Now even more certain of his image, Croiset repeated, "It is definitely a case of poisoning. Come to my house this afternoon and bring your boy with you."

That afternoon in his home, Croiset told the sick boy to sit down. After walking around him and humming nervously, Croiset again declared, "It is absolutely a case of poisoning. The boy is perfectly healthy otherwise. He must have eaten something like an apple or a pear. I see some yellow substance. Please think hard about it."

Both father and son protested that this couldn't possibly be true. But the more they denied it, the more Croiset insisted that it was so.

Finally, the father recalled that a week before his son became ill on June 12th, the boy had played in a garden where apple and pear trees had been sprayed with insecticides. This jogged the boy into remembering that the hose of a spray had been disconnected, and that some of the liquid had dripped on his bare legs.

-That's it!" shouted Croiset. "That's where the poison comes from-the yellow liquid. It went in the pores of-his skin and caused the poisoning."

-I later checked this," the father reported to professor Tenhaeff on June 22, "and learned that a yellow liquid, indeed, had been used to spray the fruit trees, and that it probably was the cause of the poisoning. I took my boy back to the doctor who prepared an antidote, and he was soon in good health again."

Croiset himself recently reflected, "I don't mean to sound conceited, but I am used to such successes. But I was surprised that I did not see the spray when I examined the boy, even though I used to be a farm hand, and sold fruit and vegetables on the road where I saw a spray hundreds of times. I suppose Croiset the paragnost then saw something which Croiset the man could not see."

Professor Tenhaeff speculatively adds, "Croiset is of the opinion that his aversion to poisons, with which fruit trees and vegetables are sprayed, played a trick upon him, so that here we have a case of aversion-mechanism at work. Croiset derived this aversion from a friend who is bitterly opposed to sprayings, believing that many illnesses including cancer, which Croiset's mother died from, come from spraying fruits and vegetables with these poisons. Although it cannot be definitely said that this is a correct explanation, from Croiset's viewpoint it is a plausible one."

Thus, eight years before the publication in America of Rachel Carson's disturbing book, Silent Spring, which linked the death of birds and even a possible cause of cancer in human beings with the widespread use of chemical insecticides, Gerard Croiset, in this case, had a similar vision of a Silent Spring in the Netherlands.