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The Life of a Sensitive – Madame Michael Bouissou

I scrutinised her closely.

What happened then? I shall probably never know.

Before my eyes appeared a kind of chart drawn in luminous, very deep green lines on a black ground. This chart showed a skeleton, or rather an anatomical drawing, such as can be found in medical books. A very slight palpitation ran through this luminous network, and as I stared at it certain of its features grew larger until they had increased to the size of my little finger. These were the sick regions which had caught my attention. At the same time a certain knowledge dawned within me and to my own amazement I explained quite clearly that a rather hypertrophied liver was in need of repose; that the bile duct had a tendency to swell; that I seemed to feel something there like sand; that a latent congestion had brought about certain phlebitic deformations in the left leg. There I halted my first clear picture, wondering for a moment what stupidities I could have uttered; but everything was correct, and I worked in the same way in future whenever a session of this nature was demanded of me.

I must stress the fact that my knowledge of anatomy is such as any layman interested in the subject might possess.

To a very great extent I am ignorant of the medical vocabulary and in my seances I endeavoured to give the clearest possible descriptions in the most everyday terms.

As a result of repeating these experiments I reached very great precision in this type of clairvoyance, but my method remained unchanged-there were always those green, luminous lines outlining bone formation, organs, nerves, etc. There was always the slight palpitation, the noticeable enlargement of the affected parts and the sort of mental contact which enabled me to explain what I saw and to give my reasons-illness, scars, operations, deformation or deviation. It was rarely that anything which had attacked or deformed the most hidden organs escaped me.

I must, however, remark that an operation involving the total and satisfactory removal of an organ (appendectomy, for example) prevented me from "feeling "or "seeing" the organ or the operation.

On the other hand, a lung healed by pneumothorax, a resected intestine, the mending of fractures and the callus never escaped me. I must add that even if my descriptions were somewhat fantastic in their terminology, their exactitude was admitted by doctors interested in my faculty. They asked me to make experiments of this nature on patients known to them but unknown to myself (the "testifying object" was usually a sheet of white paper which, under some pretext, they had made their patient touch). They were often highly satisfied.

Very soon the presence of the sick person was unnecessary. My clairvoyance was done with the same accuracy either by looking at a photograph or simply by holding in my left hand a sheet of paper, a handkerchief or a ribbon belonging to the patient. The only essential condition was that the consultant alone should have touched the object.

This method of clairvoyance, guaranteeing the incognito of the sick person, later allowed many doctors to use me for experiments. One of them, General C-, a friend of my father and at that moment surgeon at the Val-de-Grice, said to me pensively after one of these sessions:

"If you die before me, I should like you to leave me your brain. I should be very curious to see how it works."

I have not yet satisfied his desire, despite the great sympathy I feel for the idea of this ultimate experiment.