Category: S

A medical theory of conversion advanced by journalists Flo Conway and Jim Siegalman in their 1978 anticult book. Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change. In their volume, they claimed that certain religious groups, popularly called cults, had discovered a new technique of mind control. The cults, Conway and Siegalman suggested, used this technique on…

Magazines addressed to readers who are essentially skeptical about claims for scientific validity. The Skeptic, The Skeptical Inquirer, and Free Inquiry are just three of the several English language skeptical magazines. The Skeptic, published in Altadena, California, is the quarterly magazine of the skeptics society, published since 1993 under the editorship of Michael Shermer, who…

The concept that visual defects could be cured by throwing away one’s glasses and following a prescribed regimen of eye exercises. The idea was one of the most persuasive pieces of medical pseudoscience of the early part of the 20th century, and the treatment was followed by many thousands of people in Europe and the…

The linen cloth that reputedly enshrouded the body of Jesus Christ when it was taken down from the Cross. First brought to ecclesiastical attention in the 14th century, the cloth was discovered in a church in Lirey, France. More than 14 feet long and about four-and-a-half feet wide, the cloth is heavily stained with blood,…

A concept in parapsychology that explained some significant scoring effects on ESP tests. In 1942, when parapsychology was still less than a decade old, Gertrude Schmeidler suggested that scoring could be affected by the subjects’ belief system. Schmeidler concluded that those who believed in the possibility of ESP (whom she labeled “sheep”) would score higher…

The theory that human beings are of two different races, a male race and a female race. It was an idea put forward by British engineer, William H. Smyth in 1927 in Did Man and Woman Descend from Different Animals? It was picked up by an eccentric English antifeminist, Arabella Kenealy who developed it in…

Creatures of unknown species, usually having a serpentine or reptilian resemblance, that are said to inhabit the world’s seas, often threatening ships and humans. Sea serpents have populated myths for as long as people have known the seas. Additionally, there are documented reports of sailors seeing or being threatened by such creatures in nearly all…

The use of or appeal to the authority of science to legitimate some particular claim or policy. The Fontana Dictionary of Modem Thought defines scientism as “The view that the characteristic induction methods of the natural sciences are the only source of genuine factual knowledge and, in particular, that they alone can yield true knowledge…

The relationship between science fiction and science, which dates back to the 19th century. Works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), with its horrific picture of life created through the application of (then current) scientific principles running amuck, paved the way for later writers. Science fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was…

A new science of the relationship of the brain and the rest of the body, which was proposed by Joseph Rhodes Buchanan (1814-99). Working from phrenological theory, Buchanan proposed the idea that the body is basically expressive of character. He concluded that each part of the body’s surface had interesting psychological powers, as well as…