The Resurrectionist The Lost Work of Dr. - By E. B. Hudspeth Page 0,15

wield, for this work no man should have wrought.

—William J. Getty, M.D., F.R.S.C.

(Professor of Surgery in the Anatomy Department of the

University of Medical Science, New York)

Some of the performers in the Human Renaissance were Dr. Black’s patients from Ward C; others were patients he’d met during his travels with the American Carnival. All their conditions were extreme. One young man was said to have had leg transplants; he bore the limbs of a much taller man with a darker complexion. Another patient was a formerly conjoined twin, a seventeen-year-old girl named Rose. Her surgical procedure was so elaborate that it involved a new heart, lung, kidney, spleen, and arm. The girl’s parents said that Black had even made her prettier than before. Her twin sister had died during the surgery.

To the malformed, the sick, or the diseased, Dr. Black had become something of a folk hero. He was ridiculed in the mainstream scientific community but revered by many, especially those afflicted with unusual illnesses. Black wrote this quip to the Chicago Journal of Science:

Newspaper clipping from the National Journal of Medicine and Science. Despite their claims of being a national publication, the Journal was based in Philadelphia and rarely covered events outside the immediate region. Its readership consisted largely of local residents, not medical professionals.

Your suspicions are acute and undoubtedly not without the prerequisite research on the nature of my work. Why, you’d think that we [doctors] were monsters the way some go on about their God and sanctimony and blasphemes. We are scientists, not demons.

The tradition of carnival performers providing food, medicine, and other charities to the needy and sick still carries on in Black’s name in many regions of the world. While he toured, his reputation for offering surgical help, sometimes called miracles, was widespread enough to warrant pilgrimages to see him. There are accounts of children suffering from life-threatening defects whose families traveled hundreds of miles, and sometimes even farther, to seek out his services. On one such occasion Black wrote in October 1891:

She was brought to us with neither arms nor legs, brought not only to our show, but here on Celestial Terra itself. When she was found, there were none to claim her. She was alone save the box and a letter that the poor child was abandoned with. Her family, ashamed of their daughter, failed to see what she really was––they saw only a monster. The condition of her birth and deformity was not a punishment or an omen or a hex cast upon her. She has lost blood, precious blood. I will give her back what was supposed to be hers.

The patient was a nine-year-old girl, Miriam Helmer. She was born with no arms (only hands) and very short legs, quite possibly a form of the condition known as Roberts syndrome. Dr. Black grafted wings onto the girl’s shoulders, and, after a brief healing period, she began performing in his show. Black presented her as the winged woman, claiming that her lack of arms was a genetic attempt to sprout wings; the failure could be attributed to the fact that her composition was largely human. Miriam performed in the show for several years before she died from unknown causes in 1899.

With Miriam Helmer, Black introduced his theory of self-resurrection—the idea that he could unlock the body’s natural memory of its ancestral past by giving it real physical reminders. Armed with these prompts, the body could rebuild on its ancient knowledge and then “self-resurrect.” He cites numerous references to self-resurrection in a book called The Book of Breath, but it is widely believed this book is one that Black himself was writing. To this day, no manuscript or volume with a similar title or description has ever been found.

The Human Renaissance show ran from 1892 to 1893 and attracted controversy with every new performance. Disturbances and fights were common, religious leaders protested Dr. Black’s creations, political leaders spoke out against him, and nearly the entire medical community decried his legitimacy. Even the American Eugenics Society found fault with Dr. Black, describing his work as regressive:

[It is] an abolition of modern efforts––an attack on the human form. These beasts are not natural, as Dr. Black says. They ought not be displayed for the public but rather driven back into extinction.

—Edward Stalts, Director of the American Eugenics Society

But as has been evidenced all along, Black was not easily discouraged; he was accustomed to arguing and fighting. He had grown into a different kind of showman, one