The Gift Of Healing

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30739, 1 May 1965, Page 4

The Gift Of Healing

The Nature of Healing. By Arthur Guirdham, Allen and Unwin, 181 pp. There are people who have a natural gift of healing, the author declares. It is an innate gift whereby its possessors are able to cure, disease without recourse to aids provided by the arts of medicine. Dr. Guirdham is a practising psychiatrist who has written a number of books of a medico-metaphysical nature. He describes the characteristics of four women with whom he is acquainted, who possess the gift of natural healing and discusses the problems raised in the attempt to make sense of their experiences. The four women were all clairvoyant, all rather hostile to organised religion, all possessed marked artistic ability and all believed in reincarnation. This is a slight basis for

generalisation, but Dr. Guirdham concludes that the gift of natural healing is an extrasensory phenomenon with which other psychic characteristics such as clairvoyance and telepathy are invariably associated.

The kind of phenomena dealt with by Dr. Guirdham do not fit into any conventional medical or religious system. This does not in itself make the phenomena described less real or less significant. One could have wished for more awareness on the part of the author of the fallibility that dogs the most sincere human testimony. Whether one shares Dr. Guirdham’s belief that man is passing rapidly into his next stage of evolution in which he will exist on a more psychic plane or whether one does not, there is much in the discussion to reward careful reading.