Arigo,Jose Pedro de Freitas,psychic surgeon,
Medium Arigo
Jose Pedro de Freitas
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Arigo Medium
Jose Pedro de Freitas "aka" Arigo - Psychic Surgery
No License to
Heal
The story of the Brazilian healer Arigo, one of the
most mystifying figures in the history of occult medicine, began with
dreams, headaches, and a political campaign. It ended with a crowd of some
20,000 mourners and a controversy as unresolved today as it was when Arigo
was alive.
Arigo’s given name was Jose Pedro de Freitas. He was
a farmer’s son, born in the Belo Horizonte district of Brazil in 1918. His
nickname, Arigo, by which he was known, was given him while he was still a
child; it can be roughly translated as “country bumpkin.”
When he was at school, Arigo was occasionally
troubled by strange hallucinations. He would see a blinding light and
sometimes he would hear a voice speaking in a strange language. As a young
man, Arigo went to work in one of the nearby iron mines and by the time he
was 25 he had been elected president of the union local. After leading a
strike in protest against the brutal working conditions, he was fired. Arigo
next began to earn his living as the manager of a bar in the mining town of
Congonhas do Campo.
The dreams that now began to plague him nightly,
often leaving him with a severe headache, were more difficult to deal with
than those of his adolescence. In them he saw the operating room of a
hospital, where a stout, baldheaded man addressed a group of doctors and
nurses in the same guttural voice that he had first heard as a child. Deeply
disturbed by the insistence of the dreams and headaches, Arigo often went to
pray for help at the church of Bom Jesus do Matosinho.
Then the dream doctor revealed his identity. He was
Dr. Adolpho Fritz, he told Arigo, and he had died during World War I. His
own work had been cut short by his death, and he had chosen Arigo, who was,
he knew, a compassionate man, to continue it for him. Henceforward, he said,
Arigo would only find peace by helping the sick and distressed people around
him.
For several years the vivid nightmares and fierce
headaches continued. Then, in 1950, events passed out of Arigo’s control.
Elections were being held that year, and one of the
campaigners to visit Congonhas was Lúcio Bittencourt, a supporter of the
iron miners in their struggle for better conditions. In Congonhas he met
Arigo and was so impressed by his passionate advocacy of the miner’s cause
that he invited him to attend a political rally in Belo Horizonte, the
nearest city. When the rally was postponed, Bittencourt invited Arigo to
spend the night at the hotel where he was staying, the Hotel Financial.
Unknown to Arigo, Bittencourt was suffering from
lung cancer and his doctor had advised an immediate operation in the United
States.
As Bittencourt was about to fall asleep that night,
the door of his room opened and someone put on the light. It was Arigo; his
eyes were “glazed,” and he was holding a razor. Strangely enough,
Bittencourt was unafraid. Arigo began to speak in a thick German accent and
in a tone quite unlike his ordinary voice. There was an emergency, he said;
there would have to be an operation. Then Bittencourt lost consciousness.
When he came to, he found that his pajama jacket was
slashed and bloodstained and that a neat incision had been made toward the
back of his ribcage. He dressed and went into Arigo’s room.
At first Arigo thought Bittencourt was drunk. But in
Bittencourt’s room he saw the incision and bloodstained pajamas and realized
that an operation of some kind must have taken place. He had no memory,
however, of going to Bittencourt’s room and denied having had any part in
the bizarre affair. Shaken, Bittencourt caught the first available plane to
Rio de Janeiro to see his doctor.
Now Arigo was afraid. Perhaps he had performed the
operation while in some kind of trance; perhaps this was what the dreams and
voices had been leading to. He could only pray that Bittencourt had come to
no harm.
He did not have to wait long for news. The doctor
had taken X-rays and was highly satisfied with the result of what he
presumed was American surgery. The tumour had been removed, he explained to
an astonished Bittencourt, “by a technique unknown in Brazil,” and the
patient’s chances of recovery were now excellent. Then Bittencourt told his
doctor what had happened, and not only his doctor but anyone who would
listen. Newspapers all over Brazil carried the story.
In Congonhas, Arigo’s priest, Father Pernido, took
the story seriously enough to warn him to perform no more operations. But
how could he stop doing something he had no memory of having done, Arigo
asked. Local Spiritists hailed him as a Genuine Medium, but though he
rejected their acclaim, the persistent visions of Dr. Fritz continued.
During the next six years Arigo saw as many as 300
patients a day and, to contain the crowds, had to move his “clinic” from his
house to an empty church across the street. Then in 1956, under pressure
from the medical establishment and the Catholic Church, he was charged with
practicing “illegal medicine.”
“How do you go about your practice?” Judge Eleito
Soares asked him.
“I start to say the Lord’s Prayer,” Arigo answered.
“From that moment, I don’t see or know about anything else. The others tell
me I write out prescriptions, but I have no memory of this.” He spoke
earnestly.
“What about the operations?” the judge asked.
“It is the same with them. I am in a state I do not
understand. I just want to help the poor people.”
“But you are doing what you are charged with, are
you not?”
“I am not the one who is doing this,” Arigo replied.
“I am just an intermediary between the people and the Spirit of Dr Fritz.”
The judge was unimpressed. Could Arigo make this Dr
Fritz appear in the courtroom for questioning? All over Brazil newspapers
carried reports of the trial and numerous testimonies on Arigo’s behalf.
According to J Herculano Pires, a professor of the history and philosophy of
education, it was “simply ridiculous to deny that the phenomenon of Arigo
exists. Medical specialists, famous journalists, intellectuals, prominent
statesmen have all witnessed the phenomena at Congonhas. We cannot possibly
deny the reality of his feats.”
Despite the favourable publicity, Arigo was
sentenced to 15 months in jail and fined 5,000 cruzeiros (approximately
$270). The court of appeals later reduced the sentence to eight months and
allowed Arigo a year of probation before beginning his imprisonment. During
this period he would be allowed to leave Congonhas only with the judge’s
permission and would have to stop his practice completely.
For a time he did stop his practice, and the
headaches began again. After a while, since the local police seemed to look
the other way, he began to see his patients covertly but, at least at first,
refrained from operating. In May 1958 President Juscelino Kubitschek granted
Arigo a presidential pardon.
In 1961 Kubitschek was no longer in office, and the
religious and medical authorities again pressed for legal action against
Arigo. But witnesses willing to testify on the prosecution’s behalf were
hard to find, and for months the new investigation made little headway.
Then, in August 1963, Arigo performed surgery on an American investigator,
Dr Andrija Puharich. The operation brought him back into the national
headlines.
Puharich, an investigator of psychic phenomena who
had a medical degree from Northwestern University in Illinois, had heard
stories of Arigo’s remarkable cures and had come to Congonhas to see for
himself. Arigo told him that he and his three companions were welcome to
observe him for as long as they wished and to interview any of his patients.
On the first day of their investigation Puharich and
his friends found a crowd of nearly 200 people waiting for Arigo to open his
clinic at 7 a.m. After they had all filed into the abandoned church, Arigo
told them that although it was Jesus who effected the cures he was credited
with, he had no interest in the religious beliefs of those present. “All
religions are good. Is this not true?” he said, then asked everyone to join
him in repeating the Lord’s Prayer. After this, he withdrew into a private
cubicle for a few moments.
When Arigo reappeared, Puharich was struck by the
change in his manner. His bearing was now formal and commanding and his
speech sharp. The interpreter noticed a heavy German accent in his
Portuguese and a “sprinkling” of simple German words and phrases. Arigo
summoned the investigators into his treatment room. “Come,” he said. “There
is nothing to hide here. I am happy to have you watch.”
What Puharich saw that day staggered him. The first
patient was an elderly man whom Arigo brusquely pushed against the wall. He
then took a four-inch-long stainless steel paring knife and inserted it
between the man’s left eyeball and eyelid, scraping and pressing upward into
the socket with a forcefulness that Puharich found shocking. But the patient
seemed quite unperturbed. At length Arigo withdrew the knife, noted a smear
of pus on the blade, and told the old man he would get well. Then he wiped
the blade on his shirt and summoned the next patient. Puharich examined the
eye. He found no bleeding and no wounds. The operation had taken less than a
minute.
Throughout the morning Arigo worked in this manner,
never using an anesthetic or taking any precautions against infection. As
far as the investigators could see, he employed no form of hypnotic
suggestion. Bleeding was invariably minimal, and the patients appeared to
feel no pain. More often than not, the treatment consisted only of the
writing of a prescription, which Arigo did at high speed and without
hesitation. At 11 a.m. he announced that the session was over and that he
would be back that afternoon after he finished working his regular job in
the government welfare office (so far as is known, Arigo never accepted
payment of any kind for his medical work). As soon as he left the clinic,
the German accent and imperious manner left him and his usual down-to-earth
amiable character emerged again.
That evening Puharich and a journalist from Sao
Paulo, Jorge Rizzini, set up a movie camera in the treatment room. If Arigo
was a sleight-of-hand expert, they would try to catch his deception on film.
That night Arigo worked until 1 a.m. In a single day he had treated some 200
people.
Puharich was completely baffled. He knew that a
convincingly thorough study of this amazing man’s work would require far
more time, money, and equipment than was presently available. What other
tests could he make before he returned to the United States? On the inside
of his right elbow was a small tumour, benign but annoying, known as a
lipoma. Tomorrow, he decided, he would ask Arigo to remove it. He would be
his own guinea pig.
Arigo unhesitatingly agreed to perform the
operation. “Of course,” he said. “Has anyone here got a good Brazilian
pocketknife to use on this Americano?” Several were offered, and Arigo
quickly chose one. Puharich felt a sudden chill of alarm, but there was no
way now for him to withdraw. He looked to see if Rizzini had the movie
camera ready.
“Just roll up your sleeve, Doctor.”
Puharich did as he was told and braced himself to
watch Arigo make the incision. Arigo, however, told him to look the other
way.
Less than 10 seconds later Puharich felt Arigo slap
something wet and slippery into his hand. It was the excised lipoma.
Glancing down at his forearm, he saw a neat half-inch slit oozing the barest
trickle of blood. There had been no pain at all.
That afternoon the Americans left Congonhas.
Puharich kept a careful watch on the wound in his arm; Arigo had used no
antiseptics, and he was on the alert for the first signs of blood poisoning.
They never appeared. Despite the unhygienic conditions and the fact that no
stitches had been used to close the incision, it healed quickly and cleanly.
In Sao Paulo, Puharich and his friends watched the
movies Rizzini had taken. They could find no evidence of trickery in them.
Soon the newspapers were again buzzing with Arigo’s name and details of his
operation on the American doctor.
Now the courts were spurred into action, and on
November 20, 1964, Arigo was sentenced to 16 months in jail. He was allowed
to leave the courtroom only to say good-bye to his wife and children, for
the sentence was to begin immediately. He went home, made his farewells, and
waited for the police to come.
But not a single man in the Congonhas police force
was willing to take Arigo to jail, and the state police were reluctant to
drive through the crowd that had gathered outside his house. As the evening
wore on, Arigo became impatient and finally walked over to the prison by
himself.
Even in jail Arigo managed to carry on his work.
After he quelled a riot, the warden gave him the freedom to leave whenever
he wished. Arigo took advantage of this dispensation only rarely and always
to visit the sick. While the guards looked the other way he began treating
sick prisoners and then the crowds of people who waited in the alley
outside.
Arigo was released from jail in November 1965. Soon
afterward Puharich returned to Congonhas with a research assistant. His plan
was to test Arigo’s ability to diagnose his patients’ complaints, an
activity not likely to rouse the anger of the Brazilian Medical Society. In
the test Arigo gave an immediate verbal diagnosis of each patient who
stepped in front of him. Of 1,000 such patients, chosen at random, 545 had
brought their official medical records with them. In 518 of these cases
Arigo’s spontaneous diagnosis matched that of the patient’s own doctor.
How could he possibly make such diagnoses and state
them in modern medical terminology, Puharich asked. “That’s easy,” Arigo
said. “I just listen to what the voice of Dr. Fritz tells me and repeat it.
I always hear it in my left ear.”
More tests of Arigo’s ability followed, this time
employing a battery of instruments--an electroencephalograph, an
electrocardiogram, X-ray and blood typing equipment, a microscope, tape
recorders and cameras. Tests were made on the patients before, during, and
after their treatment, and Arigo’s surgical technique was demonstrated for
the cameras on a variety of tumours, cysts, cataracts, and other complaints.
The press discovered what was going on, and a horde
of reporters and cameramen descended on Congonhas. It was impossible to
continue the research. Puharich returned to São Paulo with his evidence and
showed it to a number of interested professionals, including an
ophthalmologist, a nuclear physicist, a medium, a psychiatrist, and a
cardiologist. They could only agree that Arigo’s cures were a fact.
When he returned to New York, Puharich showed colour
films of Arigo’s surgery to Dr. Robert Laidlaw, former director of
psychiatry at Roosevelt Hospital. Laidlaw observed that Arigo’s face assumed
a quite uncharacteristic expression when he operated, that his hands and
fingers moved with astonishing speed and dexterity when he worked, even when
he was looking elsewhere, and that the incisions he made seemed to “glue”
themselves together without stitches. Laidlaw could not explain how Arigo
had acquired surgical skills that were beyond the abilities of many trained
surgeons. He too was baffled.
Against the possibility that Arigo was a skilled
magician are the following facts: that he indisputably cured numerous people
(or, to be quite precise, that numerous people experienced cures immediately
or soon after his treatment); that he made real incisions, which bled little
and healed despite the unhygienic conditions attending them; that his
patients experienced little or no pain during or after his surgical
procedures, despite the lack of anesthetics; that he was able to diagnose
illnesses at a glance and write accurate prescriptions, despite having had
little formal and no medical education; and that, so far as is known, he
never accepted money for his medical work but supported his family by
working at an ordinary job.
Jose Pedro de Freitas, known to the world as Arigo,
died in a car accident on January 11, 1971.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze_Arigo
Part II of 8
mm film of Arigo's surgery made by Dr. Andrija Puharich.
http://www.anomalist.com/reports/healing.html
http://www.paranormal-encyclopedia.com/a/jose-arigo/
http://www.mysteriouspeople.com/Psychic-Healer.htm
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1974/jul/18/trick-or-treatment/
This eye operation was done with a kitchen knife and sometimes he did them with a penknife,
Click onto the links above to see some amazing operations done by him shown on youtube.
In Brazil in the late
1950s many ‘spiritual doctors’ were associated with the philosophical
doctrine of ‘Spiritism’, founded in the mid 19th Century by French school
teacher Leon Rivail, using the pseudonym Allan Kardec. One of the first and
most famous of these Brazilian psychic surgeons was an ex-miner known as
Arigo. Jose Pedro de Freitas (he took the name Arigo when he became famous
as a healer in 1950) was born in October 1921, on a farm 6km outside the
mining town of Congonhas do Campo, east-central Minas Gerais, in the
Brazilian Highlands. Arigo came from a poor family he left school at 14 to
begin work in the local mines.
When he was 30 years old Arigo began suffering from
depression, and experienced fierce headaches, nightmares, sleep-walking and
hallucinations.
Unable to get any relief from the town doctors the
distraught young man went to a local Spiritist named Olivera, who prayed for
him and told him that the cause of the problem was a Spirit attempting to
work through him. One dramatic event was to convince Arigo of the truth of
this statement.
Arigo’s Early Psychic Surgery
According to the story,
in 1950, state senator Bittencourt apparently invited Arigo along with some
other miners to attend a rally in the city of Belo Horizonte. Arigo was
staying at the same hotel as the senator, who had recently learned that he
was suffering from a cancerous tumour which required immediate treatment.
The senator was intending to travel to the US to undergo surgery after the
rally. That night Arigo entered Bittencourt’s room apparently in a state of
trance, carrying a razor.
The senator passed out only to awake the
next morning to find his pyjama top with splashed blood on his chest and a
neat incision on his ribcage.
In a state of profound shock the senator went to
find Arigo who remembered nothing of the incident but helped the dazed man
to a taxi which took him to his physician. After taking several x-rays
senator Bittencourt ‘s doctor informed him that the tumour had inexplicably
disappeared.
Overwhelmed by his seemingly miraculous cure
Bittencourt started talking about it to his friends and associates and even
included it in his political speeches, thus leading to instant fame for
Arigo.
Another spectacular case occurred some time in 1956.
Apparently, Arigo and his family were gathered round the bed of a female
relative dying from cancer of the uterus. With the priest about to
administer the last rites Arigo suddenly ran out of the room into the
kitchen, grabbed a knife came back and thrust it swiftly into the woman’s
vagina. Twisting the knife around for a few seconds he rapidly extracted the
bloody tumour which he threw, together with the kitchen knife, into the
sink. He then collapsed, and subsequently stated that he could remember
nothing of the operation. The understandably stunned relatives immediately
called a doctor, who confirmed that Arigo had indeed removed a tumour from
the woman, without apparent pain or haemorrhaging. The relative soon
recovered completely from the disease. The account of this miraculous cure
is, like the majority in the case of Arigo, anecdotal, so it is impossible
now to verify the truth of most of the stories.
The Spirit of Dr. Fritz
Arigo claimed that he performed his operations
whilst in a trance state possessed by (or channelling) the Spirit of a
German doctor called ‘Dr Adolphus Fritz’, who had apparently died in 1918,
during World War I. This was the Spirit that Olivera had said was trying to
work through him, and after Arigo began his work as a psychic surgeon his
severe headaches stopped and only returned when he later decided to
temporarily discontinue his surgery.
To perform his surgeries Arigo opened a small clinic
in his home town of Congonhas do Campo, where he would carry out his swift
operations free of charge. He possessed no medical knowledge whatsoever,
worked in unsanitary conditions, and used only his hands, a rusty knife or
occasionally a pair of scissors; his only concession to cleanliness was to
wipe his knife on his shirt before and after surgery. Despite these
apparently dangerous conditions he performed perhaps a million successful
operations over a twenty-year period, regularly treating hundreds of people
a day in his surgery. During the operations there would be little bleeding
and the patients would feel no pain. There was no need for stitches and
wounds would heal remarkably fast; there is also no record of a patient ever
having become infected, despite the non sterilised conditions.
Psychic Surgery
Carlos Paranhos da Costa Cruz, a dentist who worked
in Belo Horizonte, reported how his sister-in-law Sonja had been diagnosed
by several physicians, including her own father, with cancer of the liver.
The condition being inoperable, in desperation she, her father and Cruz
travelled to see Arigo at his primitive surgery. They waited in line with
everybody else and when Sonja’s turn came, before she could say anything,
Arigo informed her she had cancer of the liver and that he would perform a
quick operation. He lay her down on the newspaper covered floor and made a
quick incision, apparently into the girl’s liver, with his penknife.
Stunned, Cruz and the girl’s father waited for the expected haemorrhaging,
only to see a mere trickle of blood coming out of the wound.
According to Cruz, things then got even stranger, as
Arigo inserted a pair of scissors into the wound and immediately took away
his hand. The scissors appeared to move of their own accord. After a few
seconds Arigo pulled out the scissors, reached into the wound and removed
the tumourous growth, slapping it into Cruz’s hand when he was finished. He
wiped the incision with a piece of cotton, quickly placed a crucifix against
it, and without stitches it closed up. Sonja was dazed but not in any pain,
and was able to get up and walk around. She was cured. A biopsy of the
growth which Arigo had removed confirmed that the growth was indeed cancer.
Neither Cruz nor the girl’s father had any explanation for what they had
witnessed.
Other eminent individuals taken to Arigo to be
treated were Brazilian President Kubitschek’s daughter, his pilot and the
head of his security police, all of whom reportedly came back cured from the
great healer. Arigo always operated in bright light, and allowed anyone who
was interested to come and watch his surgery, including doctors. One of the
many physicians who witnessed Arigo’s psychic surgery was Dr Ladeira Margues
of Rio.
During an operation on a Mrs. Maria Silveiro,
Margues saw Arigo remove a piece of tissue 78.7 cm (31 inches) long and 38
cm (15 inches) wide from her ovaries. During the brief operation Margues
also claimed he saw the scissors moving alone, as if being taken by another
hand, and described hearing ‘the sound of metals and tissues being cut.’
When Arigo saw that the wound had begun to bleed, he immediately stopped
what he was doing and said ‘Lord, let there be no more blood.’ From that
moment on there was no further haemorrhaging during the operation.
Unfortunately, the
publicity and fame which Arigo’s abilities attracted brought him the
unwanted attention of the Brazilian government, who, in the spring of 1957,
arrested him for practicing medicine without a license, despite pleas from
thousands of his patients.
Perhaps due to friends in high places
Arigó was subsequently pardoned and released without serving his sentence.
However, in 1964 he was arrested again, this time on charges connected with
witchcraft, and given 16 months in jail, despite the fact that the
authorities were unable to find anyone to testify against him amongst the
hundreds of thousands he had treated by that time. He was to serve seven
months of a 16-month prison sentence, though he was allowed to continue
treating people while held in jail.
One example of Arigo’s psychic surgery performed
whilst in prison was witnessed by a Roman Catholic Judge called Filippe
Immesi, who went to investigate the legendary psychic surgeon for himself.
He described an eye operation as follows -
I saw him pick up … a pair of nail scissors. He
wiped them on his shirt and used no disinfectant. I saw him then cut
straight into the cornea of the patient’s eye. She did not flinch, although
perfectly conscious. The cataract was out in seconds … Arigo said a prayer
and a few drops of liquid appeared on the cotton in his hand. He wiped the
women’s eye with it and she was cured.
Puharich’s Investigations into Psychic
Surgery
In 1963 American psychical researcher Henry
(Andrija) Puharich, M.D, and businessman Henry Belk visited Brazil to begin
a detailed 5-year-long investigation into Arigo’s alleged healing powers.
Puharich claimed to have witnessed thousands of Arigo’s operations during
the investigations and himself had a benign tumour removed from his arm in a
few seconds, completely without pain. This example of psychic surgery was
filmed, along with many of Arigo’s operations at this time, and showed Arigo
slitting Puharich’s arm with an un-sterilised penknife, removing the growth
and slapping it in Puharich’s hand. The whole operation had taken five
seconds, there was little bleeding and no infection afterwards. Puharich’s
research into the Arigo revealed that such operations as he had undergone
himself were commonplace.
Puharich’s studies included tests on the blood from
tissue Arigo had removed from patients, in order to ascertain that it did
indeed belong to the person who had been operated on. He also taped
interviews with numerous patients and observers, made audio tapes and films
of Arigo’s surgeries and diagnoses, and took numerous photographs, some of
which can be found in J.G. Fullers book about the case (see sources).
Puharich found that apart from his psychic surgery, Arigo was also able to
diagnose illnesses, advise appropriate treatment at a glance, and write out
complex prescriptions, often for dangerously high doses of drugs, or for
medicines that were obsolete or even illegal. Investigations showed that
Arigo’s prescriptions worked, even on terminal cases, although, as with his
surgery, there was no known medical reason why they should do so.
Some time in early January 1971 Arigo began telling
his friends and associates, including former President of Brazil Kubitschek,
that they would not see him again, as he would soon die a violent death. A
few days later on 11 January he was killed in a car crash. Arigo’s hometown
of Congonhas do Campo reportedly came to a standstill at the tragic news,
flags flew at half mast and the mayor declared two days of mourning for the
great healer.
Other Psychic Surgeons
Apparently the death of
Arigo did not mean the end of the shadowy Dr. Fritz, the Brazilian’s
supposed Spirit Guide. Other Brazilian psychic surgeons claimed to be
channelling the Spirit of the German doctor, including Oscar and Edivaldo
Wilde, and a gynaecologist from Recife called
Edson Queiroz. The Wilde brothers both
died violently in car crashes, while Queiroz was stabbed to death in 1991.
Currently, Rubens Farias Jr, a former Sao Paulo engineer and computer
programmer, claims to be the channel for the Spirit of Dr. Fritz,
who has chillingly predicted a violent
death for Farias.
Fake Psychic Surgery
Understandably, considering the startling nature of
the subject, there are those who believe that Arigo’s psychic operations
were a complete fraud, and that the wily Brazilian accomplished his
‘miracles’ by relatively basic conjuring tricks, combined with the
willingness of his patients to believe he was blessed with some kind of
divine healing power. Psychic surgery is admittedly fairly easy to
duplicate, at any rate for a trained stage magician like James Randi (who on
his website mistakenly attributes J.G. Fuller’s book Arigo: Surgeon of the
Rusty Knife to Puharich), so the theory goes that it must also have been
easy to fake for the uneducated Arigo. Debunkers have suggested that Arigo
never pierced the patient’s skin at all, but probably pinched or rolled it
back over the area to be operated on, placed his hand under the roll of skin
and ‘removed’ a piece of bloody animal tissue he had concealed in his
clenched fist, or perhaps under the operating table.
Whilst this is undoubtedly true of a host of fake
psychic surgeons, it is difficult to believe that Arigo was able to fool a
million or so patients, not to mention the numerous doctors and other
qualified observers who witnessed and verified his operations over a twenty
year period. It must be borne in mind that in all this time Arigo was never
detected in fraud; he was accused of it, but never by anybody who actually
saw him at work. How, for example could Arigo have faked the eye surgery
mentioned above, especially in front of other medical practitioners?
The evidence, in the form of thousands of
testimonies by patients and doctors, photographs and movie films, is
certainly impressive in the case of Arigo. But sceptics remain unconvinced
that an uneducated working man with no knowledge of medicine could perform
complex surgery, often on people given up as hopeless by physicians, whilst
in some sort of trance state, which resulted in the restoration to health of
the patients. More incredible perhaps is that Arigo apparently did these
operations usually in less than a minute, more often a few seconds, without
using sterilised instruments or antiseptics.
According to published accounts, there was little
bleeding, no infection and the wound never required stitches. It also must
be borne in mind that Arigo never at any time accepted payment for his
services, he had to maintain his day job in order to provide for his family.
While this does not seem to be the behaviour of a hoaxer, sceptics remain
unconvinced.
How Arigo accomplished his surgical feats is a
disputed point. If his healing abilities were faked, which is a distinct
possibility, he was still able in some way to remove all sense of fear and
pain from his patients, to affect their minds in an extremely powerful way.
Beyond this, all is conjecture. On one occasion, when Arigo was shown a film
of himself operating, he fainted. When asked for his own explanation of this
incredible ability his reply was disarmingly straight forward -- ‘I simply
listen to a voice in my right ear and repeat whatever it says. It is always
right.’
Doctor Fritz Healing
By Dennis Stacy
The Spirit of Dr. Fritz (aka Adolf Frederick
Yeperssoven) has allegedly possessed yet another medically illiterate
Brazilian, according to a January 12, 1996, article in The New York Times.
Dr. Fritz, a German doctor who reportedly died in a WW I field hospital in
1918, first gained notoriety as the Spirit who supposedly benignly (as
opposed to demonically) possessed the Brazilian peasant know as Ze Arigo,
the subject of John G. Fuller's Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife (Thomas Y.
Crowell, NY, 1974, Afterword by Henry K. Puharich, M.D.). Arigo died
violently in a 1971 automobile accident, as he had reportedly predicted.
Arigo conducted literally thousands of "operations"
while wielding an old pocketknife, a heavy German accent, and a pronounced
disregard of medical hygiene. After Arigo's death, the improbably named
Oscar Wilde claimed to be the next recipient of Dr. Fritz's Spirit. Like
Arigo, Wilde, too, died a violent death, although the Times doesn't say how.
He was succeeded by a gynaecologist from Recife, Dr. Edson Queiroz
(apparently the only one of Fritz's beneficiaries with any existing
pharmaceutical or medicinal knowledge), who was subsequently stabbed to
death in 1991.
The latest recipient, according to the article filed
from Rio de Janeiro by Times reporter Diana Jean Schemo, is 41-year-old
engineer Rubens Farias, Jr, who operates out of the poor suburb of Bom
Sucesso (Good Success). Hundreds of patients line up outside his office on
weekends, often waiting from early morning until almost midnight for
treatment, which may take as little as 30 seconds. Prior to these marathon
treatment sessions, Farias is said to enter into a trance from which he
emerges as the German-speaking Dr. Fritz. All patients are told to remain
silent and trust in God. Many are injected with a miracle brew reportedly
consisting of part alcohol, iodine, and turpentine. Knives, scissors and
dull hypodermic needles are also routinely employed. Anaesthesia and
sterilization are not. "Yes, if you or I did it, it would kill people, but
he does it and it cures them," says someone. It is not clear from the
article who this someone is, but it appears to be Farias' wife, Rita Costa.
According to the reporter, Costa doesn't necessarily accept the possession
theory, "but she does believe in the power of the imagination and personal
will to overcome illness."
Farias, who claims to have been possessed by Dr.
Fritz as early as 1986 (while Dr. Queiroz was still alive and making similar
use of the good German's spirit), has also predicted his own violent death
within a few years.
The Times, whose front page motto is "All the News
That's Fit to Print," is actually surprisingly good at covering this sort of
thing, if by surprising we refer to the fact that they bother to cover it
all. For instance, the Tuesday, December 19, 1995, issue carries a similar
article about the faithful who flock to Nancy Fowler's Conyers, Georgia,
farm in hopes of glimpsing Mary and Jesus, who are said to visit the 13th of
every month. (Both articles are accompanied by excellent photographs.)
Even so, innuendo is usually at work. The Times just
happens to be more subtle at it than the professional debunkers. In the Dr.
Fritz article, for example, Farias slices open a patient's back and inserts
three pairs of scissors into the space between two vertebrae. "[Then] the
doctor told a reluctant stranger to feel the space by wiggling the
scissors," writes reporter Schemo. The "reluctant stranger" here, of course,
is Schemo herself, who must have been impressed, but is restrained from
saying so by so-called journalistic protocol, which holds that "thou shall
not insert thyself into the story," another way of saying report, don't
editorialize.
But sometimes you just can't help it. Later in the same story we find this clear example of editorial comment: "[Farias] seems to be concentrating, then rises as if groggy with a hangover and [speaks] in a German accent that makes you wonder whether "Hogan's Heroes" ever made it to Brazilian television..."
The following passage was in Brazilian Spanish but translated by 'Google Translate'.
Arigo, Ze (Jose Pedro de
Freitas)
Medium, "psychic surgeon". Brazil
The Brazilian Ze Arigo
was a famous psychic and "Spiritual Surgeon" in the '60s and early '70s,
followed closely by Filipinos Tony Agpoa, Virgilio Gutierrez, Jose Mercado
and Alex Orbito and Mexicans Pachita and Miguel Palentos.
Jose Pedro de Freitas, later known as Ze Arigo
("jovial countryman"), was born on October 18, 1922 in a poor hacienda de
Faria, a town located in Congonhas do Campo, a town in the interior of Minas
Antonio peasant Gerais.Hijo de Freitas
Sobrinho and Dona Maria Andre de Freitas,
was the eldest of a brood ten hermanos.Corpulento and temperamental, his
face adorned with a large black mustache, this rugged rural worker received
in Jesus of Nazareth Spirit Center 200 to 300 patients per day. Devout
Catholic and adept at kardecismo (common syncretism in Brazilian
idiosyncrasy), performed Arigo diagnoses, prescribed medications and
surgeries performed "bare hands" or by using a kitchen knife or a scissor
common (non-sterile and without anesthesia) to, in claimed, "remove benign
and malignant tumours throughout the body and operate cataracts.". When
attending, came "in a trance" and "joined" with the "Dr Fritz", a supposed
German physician who used his body as a means to make their
"operations"together. His "mental operations" never lasted more than a
minute. Quick visual inspection performed, which consisted of inserting a
four-inch blade in the patient's eye socket and pry the eyeball to ensure
that excelled in its basin. Then, working with the knife on the body. Not
always caused injury or bleeding.
Arigo claimed that his body embodied the Spirit of
"Dr. Adolpho Fritz", a supposed German physician who died in 1918. From his
childhood remembers "being chased by a very bright light that nearly blinds
him." Later, he says, he began to hear "a voice speaking in a foreign
language." Arigo not speak German. However, the Spirit of the doctor began
to instruct and guide you in the art of healing.
DR FRITZ
At age 25 Arlete Andre married and left the parental
home, going to work in an iron mine. As the children began to arrive (in
total had five), Arigo started having "severe headaches". In dreams, he
said, always the same guttural voice heard in a language they did not
understand. One night, he had a clear dream: I was in an operating room
around a patient. The who ran the operation was a familiar voice to Arigo
... Fritz, the German doctor had chosen to "complete his work on earth."
According to legend, when this revelation Arigo ran into the street
screaming. Relatives and neighbors took him back to the house and he would
not stop mourn. Clinicians who treated him found him well, despite the
headaches continued. His father thought he was demonized and called the
pastor of the town to exorcise it, apparently without results.
So, Arigo decided to hear the prayer of "German
doctor" (would it have begun to speak in Portuguese? Arigo have taken a
German course?) And began serving people. The first one, again according to
legend, was a friend who was on crutches. "It is time that dejeses those
crutches!" Arigo said. It's started, he ordered him to walk, and this one
did ... He rose to fame when he was visited by Senator Lucio Bittencourt
Brazilian, who was campaigning in that district. Bittencourt was suffering
from lung cancer and doctors had advised surgery immediately. But the
politician invited Arigo to your hotel in Belo Horizonte, where he operated
and "Senator healed completely." This story, and others like them, were
recounted Arigo among believers in many different ways. They found that many
of them were false. For example, the version that had operated for
congenital glaucoma Segundinho, son of famous singer Roberto Carlos.
According to "As memories of Roberto Carlos", the same singer clarified that
this was not true. (Quoted by Oscar Gonzalez Quevedo, magazine "Friend",
27/10/70).
Interviewed by a Arigo "in trance", "Dr. Fritz" said
he was born in Munich. His father suffered from asthma and the doctor had
advised him to move to a place with better weather, why the Fritz traveled
to Poland when he was four. Forced to work from a young age because of the
untimely death of his parents, Fritz studied medicine on your own. A month
before graduation, became a general with his daughter in his arms and,
despite their best efforts, could not save. The military accused Fritz of
his death and sent him to jail, where he suffered all kinds of torture. He
escaped from prison and fled to Estonia, where he lived between 1914 and
1918, the year he died. "Before disembodied, receiving chamado Father,
Jesus, I promised myself that I would return to Earth to heal as long as he
could. And here I am. " After Arigo, hundreds of mediums and healers
incorporate the phantasmic assured Brazilians "Dr. Fritz".
SPONSORS OF THE CONTROVERSY
Contrary to what is published in books and trade
magazines esotetrico, Ze Arigo never had the support of the medical
community. To our knowledge, only Arigo was observed by Dr. Ary Lex, a
professor at the University of Sao Paulo and member of the State Medical
Academy, Dr. Oswaldo Lidger Conrado, a cardiologist and director of the Sao
Paulo State Hospital and physician American Andrija Puharich. All had strong
prior beliefs in spiritualism and unaware all about the tricks of magicians
and healers tricks. Puharich, famous for his biography of Uri Geller and
other works hipercrédulas regarding the existence of the paranormal, visited
him on several occasions since 1963. Arigo was already concido as a medium,
but his work, written in collaboration with journalist John G.
Fuller-"Arigo: surgeon of therusty Knife" ("Arigo: surgeon of the rusty
knife") - Quack popularized in the United States. Arigo Puahrich declaring
interviewed but not have a malignant tumor, "a lipoma, painless but it was
uncomfortable." To remove, Puharich said, "Normal surgery would take about
20 minutes." After an agonizing indecision, decided to ask Arigo Puahrich he
extirpated the lipoma. She took it off in a few seconds "without causing any
pain." The Brazilian healer apology was published after his death, in May
1974. Shortly before the start of the book, Puharich told the Brazilian
press: "Unfortunately we could not see any way of operation, because of
impediments such as injunctions" (Quoted by González Quevedo, "Journal of
Sao Paulo, June 2 1968).
LEGAL PROBLEMS
Puharich had failed to see work Arigo because they
had been imprisoned twice accused of quackery and illegal practice of
medicine by the Medical Association and the Regional Council of Medicine of
Minas Gerais. The first time I was in jail, in October 1957, said he would
not operate more and only going to "preach". When the October 11, 1963 again
fell prisoner claimed to have ceased operations in 1957. According to the
healer who analyzed films in action, it was true in almost all occasions
(before and even after those dates), Arigo was not operating but
"pretending" to. And when his knife entered the body, knew the terrain: it
was found that for years was an official of the National Social Security
Institute (IAPTC), which was in continuous contact with nurses and doctors
spiritualists. He also had a library with several volumes of scientific and
popular medicine. The expert magician James Randi debunk paranormal fraud
had occasion to see a movie where a cyst extracted Arigo subcutaneous scalp
of a patient. "In fact, writes Randi-I also did this operation on myself
when I had a cyst developing on his forehead that was in danger of becoming
a third eye. Said affliction is just some harmless fatty substance beneath
the skin that bulges. Often cysts disappear without treatment, as they are
absorbed into the system without causing any damage. " Moreover, an
investigation of the magazine "Veja" (1/20/71) found that Arigo, in cases of
malnutrition, always gave the same recipe, although the patients had
different symptoms.
The January 11, 1971, while returning to Congonhas
driving in heavy rain, Arigo lost control of the car that crossed hand
frontally ramming a truck and died as a result of brain trauma.
O MAGIC? MAFIA?
One of the promotional
claims surrounding Arigo, and on which settled much of his fame, indicated
that in his clinic spiritualist "did not charge anyone." When he died, he
left cruzeiro in banks 2,325,000 shares (a fortune, both at the time Comoa
hour), according to the inventory delivered to the Judge of the Chamber of
Congonhas and published by the Folha da Tarde March 25 1971. The largest
hotel in the city was in the name of his brother Walter, pharmacy San Jose,
opposite the spiritist, was his brother pharmacy Betinho and second in
importance of the city belonged to another family. Were those sites where
Arigo and his assistants sent to acquire the medications he prescribed.
Another brother owned a souvenir shop and many people's properties were in
the name of Freitas. The 95 percent of the visitors came to Congonhas
looking for Arigo, according to statistics by the Mayor of the city. Oscar
Gonzalez Quevedo, in his book "The Healers" (1977), collects testimonies
that reveal the existence of a true "Mafia Arigo" means an enthusiastic
claque or rented to endiosarlo, police arranged and a great economic machine
where Ze Arigo and his wife were on the cusp.
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