The Heyday of Mental Mediumship 1880s-1930s

Alan Gauld examines the period from the 1880s to the 1930s, when mental mediumship became a sustained subject of investigation in Britain, Europe and the United States. The book follows the development of organised psychical research, including the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 and its American counterpart two years later.

Rather than treating sittings as collections of isolated evidential “hits”, Gauld considers extended sequences of communication involving mediums, investigators, sitters and purported communicators. He reconstructs the personal relationships and cultural circumstances surrounding this work, while weighing claims of communication from the dead against questions of fraud, information leakage and alternative explanations. The result is a historical account of a formative era in mediumship research.