Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism

Frank Podmore was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, and this Methuen book is his own early twentieth century history and skeptical critique of the Spiritualist movement, covering seances, mediumship and table-turning from inside the psychical research community that studied them. Its strength is that Podmore combines firsthand familiarity with Spiritualist practice, gained through his own investigative work, with a genuinely critical stance toward fraudulent or unproven claims, unlike many contemporary accounts written by either committed believers or dismissive outsiders. Its limit is that it reflects Podmore's own early twentieth century skeptical framework and the state of psychical investigation at that time, so a claim about later developments in Spiritualist practice, or about more recent research into the same phenomena, needs a more current source.