Charles Richet

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Charles Richet (1850–1935) was a French physiologist who, alongside a career that earned the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, became one of the most credentialed investigators ever to take up the study of mediums, hauntings, and the reported powers of the human mind. The two pursuits were, for him, a single inquiry: both asked what the living organism could be shown to do under controlled observation.

His standing in mainstream science was beyond question. Born in Paris on 25 August 1850 into a family of physicians, he qualified in medicine, took a doctorate in science, and in 1887 succeeded to a chair of physiology at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, which he would hold for some forty years before retiring in 1927. He edited the monumental Dictionnaire de physiologie — nine volumes appearing between 1895 and 1912 — and his early laboratory work ranged across gastric secretion, animal heat, muscular contraction, and the action of toxins. He was elected to the Académie de médecine and, in 1914, to the Académie des sciences. His curiosity overran the laboratory: he wrote on the history of medicine, agitated for international arbitration as a committed pacifist, served as president of the French Eugenics Society from 1920, and helped finance early aviation experiments, building gliders and a primitive helicopter with the engineer Victor Tatin.

The discovery that fixed his name in the textbooks came from the sea. On a 1901 oceanographic cruise aboard the yacht of Albert I, Prince of Monaco, Richet’s attention was caught by the violent stings of siphonophores and sea anemones. Back in Paris, working with Paul Portier, he injected dogs with extracts of the poison, expecting that a sub-lethal first dose would build tolerance — the logic of immunization. Instead the opposite happened: a second, smaller dose weeks later threw the sensitized animals into immediate, often fatal collapse. Where vaccination conferred phylaxis, protection, this was its inversion, and Richet named it anaphylaxis — against-protection. The two presented the finding to the Société de biologie on 15 February 1902, and it opened the modern study of allergy and hypersensitivity. The Nobel committee honored the discovery in 1913. None of this insulated his other work from controversy; much of it sharpened the controversy, since a man of his reputation could not be waved aside as a credulous amateur.

From the laboratory to the séance

Richet came to psychical research the way he came to everything — as a problem in physiology. He had begun in the 1870s with hypnotism, then a disreputable borderland that he, working in the years of Jean-Martin Charcot’s celebrated hysteria research at the Salpêtrière, helped pull back inside experimental medicine. His 1875 paper on induced somnambulism treated the trance not as charlatanry but as a reproducible nervous state, and the thread ran straight from the hypnotized somnambule — whose access to information seemed at times to exceed the waking subject’s — to the medium in the darkened room. The lineage was the same one that runs back through the mesmeric rapport of Franz Anton Mesmer and his successors to the whole magnetic substrate the nineteenth century bequeathed; Richet, characteristically, wanted it counted rather than narrated.

In 1884 he published, in the Revue philosophique, a paper that has a fair claim to be one of the first applications of the calculus of probabilities to a question of the mind: “La suggestion mentale et le calcul des probabilités.” He had subjects guess at cards and drawings held out of sight and asked whether their successes outran chance. Over more than a thousand card trials he reported a small surplus of hits — modest, but, he argued, too large to dismiss as accident. Edmund Gurney of the London society called the work a likely landmark even while warning that Richet had pressed the mathematics too hard; the American logician Christine Ladd-Franklin faulted his grasp of probability theory outright. The disputes were themselves a sign of seriousness: the method — randomize, count, compare against the chance baseline — anticipated by half a century the card-guessing statistics of J. B. Rhine at Duke, and the SPR’s thought-transference trials of the same decade are now credited as an early seedbed of randomization in experimental design.

In 1891 he founded the Annales des sciences psychiques, a journal to give the subject a serious organ. He moved among the field’s whole international circle: the English physicist William Crookes, the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick and his co-founders of the Society for Psychical Research, the American psychologist William James, the astronomer Camille Flammarion, the physicist Oliver Lodge. In 1905 the SPR — the most rigorous body in the field, founded in London in 1882 expressly to examine such claims without prejudice and without committing to a spiritist verdict — elected this French physiologist its president. His presidential address gave the discipline its Continental name. For the secular science he hoped to build, he proposed métapsychique — rendered in English as metapsychics — and the word named an ambition as much as a subject. (Richet acknowledged that the Polish philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski had used a cognate term before him.) A decade earlier, in 1894, he had supplied the field its most notorious noun, coining ectoplasme for the substance mediums were reported to exude — though he held, to the end, that whatever the stuff was, it had nothing to do with spirits of the dead.

Eusapia Palladino and the test of the hands

If one figure anchors Richet’s psychical career it is Eusapia Palladino, the illiterate Neapolitan medium whose darkened-room phenomena — tables that lifted, raps, touches from unseen hands, the fluidic pseudopod — became the great proving ground of European psychical research. Richet was present at the famous sittings in Milan in 1892, alongside the criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, where investigators brought balances and dynamometers to bear on the levitating table. In 1894 he hosted her himself for a series of sittings on his own island, the Île Roubaud off the Mediterranean coast, with Lodge, Frederic Myers, and the Polish psychologist Julian Ochorowicz in attendance. He recorded what he observed — effects he could not, under his own controls, reduce to trickery — without endorsing the spirit-control named John King to whom Palladino attributed them.

The case taught him the discipline’s central and humbling lesson, which he never disguised: the same medium could be both genuine and a cheat. Palladino was repeatedly caught freeing a hand or a foot when the watchers relaxed, and the SPR’s own investigators alternately credited and condemned her. Richet’s position was that fraud on some occasions did not, by itself, settle whether the unexplained residue on other occasions was also fraud — a stance that struck believers as too cold and skeptics as fatally indulgent.

His sharpest brush with deception came at the Villa Carmen, the Algiers home of General Noël, where in 1905 Richet conducted some twenty sittings with the young medium Marthe Béraud — later notorious under the stage name Eva C. There a turbaned figure, announced as a three-centuries-old Brahmin called Bien Boa, was held to materialize. Richet treated the apparition cautiously but did not dismiss it, and his report drew fire at once. Within a year the affair collapsed: a former servant, an Arab coachman named Areski, was named as the man who had played Bien Boa, and the Villa Carmen séances passed into the literature as a textbook exposure. Béraud’s later career under Albert von Schrenck-Notzing produced the photographed ectoplasms — chewed paper, cut-out faces, gauze — that did as much as anything to discredit physical mediumship.

What Richet held

What Richet held is easily misread. He did not conclude that the dead speak. He divided the field in two. Subjective metapsychics covered the mind’s apparent reach beyond the ordinary senses — what he came to call cryptesthésie, a hidden faculty of knowledge — taking in telepathy, lucidity, and premonition, the apparent foreknowledge of events. Objective metapsychics covered the alleged physical effects: movements of objects without contact, levitations, and the materializations. He believed the evidence for some of the subjective phenomena, telepathy above all, was real and demanded explanation, while insisting that the explanation was unknown and that the spirit hypothesis was unproven. The objective phenomena he held to far more loosely, conceding how thoroughly the séance lent itself to deceit.

His large Traité de métapsychique, published in Paris in 1922, gathered three decades of this work into a single systematic treatise — the most ambitious statement the Continental tradition produced — and appeared in English the following year, translated by Stanley De Brath, as Thirty Years of Psychical Research. The book is methodical to the point of dryness: definitions, classifications, a sober weighing of the probabilities, an insistence throughout that he was reporting facts in want of a theory, not a creed. Its conclusion was characteristic — that there exists in the human being a faculty of knowledge wholly unlike the recognized senses, a cryptesthesia whose reality he held to be established and whose nature he would not pretend to know.

That cautious, evidentially committed agnosticism satisfied no one. It distanced him alike from the Spiritualists and the Spiritists of Allan Kardec’s school, who wanted his prestige enlisted for survival of the soul, and from his scientific colleagues, who wanted the whole subject abandoned. The dividing line he insisted on was a fine one. Telepathy and premonition, he argued, were facts in search of a mechanism, requiring no recourse to the dead; the survival of personality after death was a separate and far weaker hypothesis, and the materializations a weaker one still. To enlist him for the séance-room’s theology was therefore a category mistake — but so, in his view, was the colleague’s refusal to look.

The positivist temper of late-nineteenth-century French science — Richet was in most respects its product, an heir of the laboratory ideal of Claude Bernard — had no comfortable category for a Nobel physiologist who sat in dark rooms weighing the testimony of mediums. The period prided itself on the steady disenchantment of nature, the closing of the gaps in which spirits had once been lodged; Richet’s wager was that an honest naturalism must follow its instruments wherever the data led, even into territory the disenchanting program had marked closed. His peers in this were a small, distinguished company — Crookes, Lodge, the Sidgwicks, James across the Atlantic — and they were treated, on the whole, as great men with a regrettable hobby. Richet wore the judgment with a certain irony, noting that the same caution his colleagues praised in the laboratory they condemned the moment he turned it on a forbidden subject.

The reckoning and the second life

Later scrutiny was not kind to his subjects. Several of the mediums Richet studied were established as practiced deceivers, and the objective phenomena he cataloged — the materializations above all — have found no replication under conditions later science accepts. His investigations are now read as a cautionary chapter in the history of experimental psychology as much as a contribution to it: a demonstration of how far rigor in one domain fails to transfer to another, and of how the controls of the laboratory bend in the presence of a clever performer. The subjective line he defended fared differently; the statistical, card-guessing approach he pioneered in 1884 fed, by a long path, into the twentieth-century parapsychology of Rhine and his successors, with all the unresolved controversy that tradition carries.

He led, throughout, a parallel literary life. Under the name Charles Épheyre he wrote plays and fiction — the novel Sœur Marthe (1890), the tale Possession, and a clutch of stories that hover at the edge of science fiction, several turning on hypnosis, mental influence, and the dissolution of the self. The pseudonym let the physiologist write what the physiologist could not sign.

The figure who emerges across these labors is consistent: a working scientist who refused to rule a class of reported facts out of court simply because it was disreputable, and who paid, in standing, for the refusal.

Texts and scholarship

The primary record is largely public domain and accessible. Richet’s Traité de métapsychique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1922) is the gathered summa; its English abridgment, Thirty Years of Psychical Research, Being a Treatise on Metapsychics (New York: Macmillan, 1923), translated by Stanley De Brath, is surveyed with its full table of contents in the Society for Psychical Research’s article on the Traité. His foundational 1884 statistical paper, “La suggestion mentale et le calcul des probabilités,” appeared in the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, vol. 18 (1884), pp. 609–674. The medical side is documented in Paul Portier and Charles Richet, “De l’action anaphylactique de certains venins,” Comptes rendus des séances de la Société de biologie 54 (1902), and in Richet’s Nobel lecture of 11 December 1913, hosted by the Nobel Foundation. For the life as a whole, the standard medical reference is Stewart Wolf’s account of Richet’s career and the discovery of anaphylaxis; for the psychical work, the Society for Psychical Research’s own Psi Encyclopedia gives a full bibliographic survey. The wider story of mesmeric and Spiritualist antecedents that Richet inherited runs through Franz Anton Mesmer and the mesmerist tradition, while the institutional history of the French program he helped found belongs to métapsychique. The Victorian collectors of spontaneous cases whose data he weighed — Gurney and Frank Podmore among them — are treated under the Society for Psychical Research.

→ Related: Continental Metapsychique · Eusapia Palladino · Telepathy · Victorian Psychical Research Spr · Spiritualism · Spiritism · Psychokinesis · Precognition · William Crookes · Henry Sidgwick · Edmund Gurney · Frank Podmore · William James · J B Rhine · Positivism