The Museum will virtually bring to your homes a selection of photographs coming from our archive. Every week you will discover new images.
A spiritualist séance, Wisla, Poland, 1909.
Julian Ochorowicz, gelatin silver print.
The medium Stanislawa Tomczyk is photographed whilst levitating a ball during one of several experiments conducted by the Polish scientist Julian Ochorowicz. He sent Lombroso this photograph along with two letters where he describes the different phenomena observed during the spiritualist seances he held in his countryside home in Wisla, Austrian Silesia, today Poland.
Fifty-one photographic recordings of spiritualist seances and materializations are preserved in the Archive of the Museum. Lombroso collected this material to illustrate his ideas on hypnotism, on the transmission of thought and the presence of spiritual forces concerning the mind and the human body. He published some of these photographs in the book Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici, written with his son-in-law Guglielmo Ferrero shortly before his death in 1909.