Parsons

Continued......
In 1944, while the war was still on, George had married Margaret but sadness soon crossed their lives when their first child died after only 4 weeks. Now George was confronted by the big questions of Life. Why should a young and precious life be taken so cruelly? Was it possible there was an afterlife? Despite his ruminations, he came to no conclusion.

For firemen, waiting long hours before being called into action is part of the job. So George and his colleagues would fill time by sitting with an upturned glass and the alphabet spread around the table, like a ouija board. George was astounded by some of the answers from this ouija board - learning, for example, that his daughter Vivian was alive on the “Other Side” and was being looked after by his dead mother. So he looked further into spiritual issues and soon found that by meditating he could enter a trance and receive spirit communications which were witnessed by his workmates.

The most important of these was Dr William Lang, who said through George, that he would heal the sick and provide evidence that we live on after death. But it took some time for George and his mates to track down whether or not Dr Lang had ever really lived. They discovered he had. The British Medical Association confirmed that an ophthalmic surgeon of that name had worked between 1880 and 1914 at London’s Middlesex Hospital, later known as Moorfield’s Eye Hospital. Dr Lang qualified in 1874 as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons and later became a Fellow. But he had retired by the time George was in his teens and he died in 1937, when George was only 16. Neither of them had reason nor opportunity to know of each other while Lang was alive. In any case, they moved in very different circles.

When poorly-educated George with his Liverpool accent became entranced, the elderly Dr Lang with his cultured voice, wide medical experience, and extensive vocabulary took over. The two were completely unalike. It was Dr Lang who usually met the patients. He explained how he worked by saying that, in addition to the physical body, we also have a spirit body. He said he was able to operate on this spirit body - which in turn transferred benefits to the physical body. However this was not a story of instant miracles or guaranteed cures. George Chapman, as Dr Lang, would only ever offer to ‘do his best’.

In serious cases, Dr Lang required the attendance of the patient for months before improvements were achieved. But he seemed able to succeed where orthodox medicine was hopeless. And the successes were sufficiently frequent that eventually George Chapman was working full time with Dr Lang, with clinics established in Paris, Lausanne and New York, as well as in England. George came to realise that the folk who travelled across the world to see him in England were all comfortably off. By going abroad himself, he gave opportunities to the less well off to have healing through him.

One example of his success came from a dental surgeon, Mr Miron, whose wife had perforated the roof of her mouth while a tooth was being extracted. No surgical procedure Miron knew of could cure the problem but Dr Lang’s treatment caused the wound to heal over. Mr Miron thought this was a miracle and he wrote a book about George Chapman’s mediumship, entitled “The Return of William Lang’, outlining some of his remarkable cures. These included cataracts, glaucoma, arthritis, kidney disorders, brain tumours, heart trouble, cancer and other ailments. And as the years went by, numerous celebrities consulted the Chapman/Lang partnership, including the actors Laurence Harvey and Stanley Holloway; the writers Barbara Cartland and Roald Dahl, also Lady Barbirolli, and the exiled King and Queen of Romania.

But was 'Dr Lang' was who he said he was? Take the case of Dr Singer, who went to the Chapman’s home suffering from cancer. When he walked in, he was unaware that the Dr Lang working through George was the same Dr Lang who had taught him at the Middlesex Hospital many years previously. But Dr Singer was greeted with: “Hello my dear boy, I’m happy to see you again”. And there were similar cases of Lang’s old friends being convinced that it was the same Lang manifesting through George Chapman whom they had known when he was alive.

The most important of these people was Dr Lang’s own daughter, Marie Lyndon Lang. She was a well-educated and level-headed woman who made the following statement: “I can truthfully say that the William Lang who operates via the body of George Chapman is, without a doubt, my father”. As proof of this she received answers to questions from William Lang, that George himself could not possibly have known. Not surprisingly, George and Marie Lyndon Lang met regularly - together with some of Lang’s medical friends during his lifetime. They tested George as well as bringing some of their own difficult medical cases to him. In acknowledgement of her trust in George, Marie Lyndon Lang gave him many of Dr Lang’s old belongings, including his bed and his examination couch. And when she died, she left much of her estate to him. Not only that, but George finally moved from Aylesbury to Wales, to a place that was a favourite of Dr Lang when he was alive.

Dr Lang then foretold that George himself would also have a son, who would become a healer and that Basil would work through him just as William Lang was working through George. That partnership not only came about but is still in existence today, although Michael Chapman does not go into a trance as his father did, nor does he undertake the same spirit operations.

One important case for George’s future reputation was that of Bernard Hutton, a sceptical journalist who consulted him. After Bernard was informed in hospital that he was going blind from non-paralytic poliomyelitis, his wife told him about George’s mediumship and persuaded him, against his better judgement, to attend Lang’s clinic - since there was nothing to lose.

Bernard Hutton was surprised by the consultation. In the first place, Lang did not open his eyes during the whole session, yet still made diagnoses. For example, that the lenses in his glasses were ‘minus 18’ and that Bernard had had a splint operation on both eyes when he was a child. Then Lang said, “The virus that brought about your illness and which your doctor believed to be a non-paralytic-type of poliomyelitis has gone. But you have something which is very serious, a hepatitis virus that is upsetting your liver”. As Bernard later wrote in his book about George Chapman, “If I had been amazed before, I was speechless now. I had not told Chapman anything about my own doctor when I wrote to him, nor had I mentioned being ill. It was uncanny.”

Bernard was then told that Lang would operate on his eyes, and he gave this warning, “You may hear me talking, calling out names and asking for instruments. Don’t be alarmed. I shall be assisted in the operation by my son Basil and various other colleagues you won’t be able to see, because they too have passed into spirit. But you won’t feel any pain. Now I want you to lie on that couch”.

When the operation was underway, Dr Lang clicked his fingers just above Bernard’s open eyes while Lang’s own eyes stayed shut. As he later wrote in his book, “Incredible as it may seem, I began to experience the physical sensation of incisions being made. They were painless, but nonetheless capable of being felt. The man’s eyes never opened and he did not touch me. And yet a little later I felt as though he were stitching up the wounds.” Lang also did a spirit operation on his liver to dispose of the hepatitis virus.

Bernard Hutton sat up when it was all over and felt dazed and distressed. Worst of all, he felt a terrible alarm because he found he could not see at all! Only barely could he distinguish between light and dark. He was not placated by being told this was temporary. Back in the car, waiting for his wife’s return to drive him home, Bernard regretted having got into this. His body was shaking, he was dizzy. Then after ten minutes, he said, “I was gazing blindly in front of me when very slowly the shape of a tree started to materialise. At first I thought it was imagination, but it sharpened and came into focus and then I was able to distinguish the large branches, and then the smaller ones and finally the winter-naked twigs. I closed my eyes in disbelief. When I opened them again I noticed that the windscreen was dirty and needed wiping”. He exclaimed “The windscreen was dirty and I could see it!”

This was the beginning of a friendship which resulted in a book, entitled “Healing Hands”, in which Bernard took many case histories at random from the George Chapman/ Dr Lang records and with the permission of the patients he told their amazing stories. The book went into several editions and translations. George always insisted that providing proof of survival after death was more important, because it gave people new understanding and new hope; the healing itself was secondary.

It was because of the success of this partnership between a ‘spirit’ doctor and his medium that I found myself sitting on 12th August 2006 reading the extensive Obituary in the Daily Telegraph. Let's hope he had moved into the realm where he could finally shake hands with the doctor he had worked with for almost sixty years - without ever having seen or directly spoken to him before.

GEORGE CHAPMAN SCRIPT