The sympathetic medium2010

"The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with seances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted - in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in seance parlors - by women." "In The Sympathetic Medium, Jill Galvan offers an analysis of the rise of the female medium in Great Britain and the United States during the Victorian era and through the turn of the...