Miracle Mongers and Their Methods: A Complete Exposé of the Modus Operandi of Fire Eaters, Heat Resisters, Poison Eaters, Venomous Reptile Defiers, Sword Swallowers, Human Ostriches, Strong Men, Etc.Houdini, Harry
History
Miracle Mongers and Their Methods: A Complete Exposé of the Modus Operandi of Fire Eaters, Heat Resisters, Poison Eaters, Venomous Reptile Defiers, Sword Swallowers, Human Ostriches, Strong Men, Etc.
Houdini, Harry
Magic tricks -- History; Magicians -- Biography
After an absence of twenty minutes, he returned, dressed in a coarse
woolen coat, to enter the heated oven. Before he entered it, a medical
gentleman ascertained that his pulse was vibrating ninety-eight times a
minute. He remained in the oven five minutes, during which time he
sung Le Vaillant Troubadour, and superintended the cooking of two
dishes of beef steaks. At the end of that time he came out, perspiring
profusely, and with a pulse making one hundred and sixty-eight
vibrations in a minute. The thermometer, when brought out of the oven,
stood at three hundred and eighty degrees; within the oven he said it
was above six hundred.
Although he was suspected of trickery by many, was often challenged,
and had an army of rivals and imitators, all available records show
that Chabert was beyond a doubt the greatest fire and poison resister
that ever appeared in London.
Seeking new laurels, he came to America in 1832, and although he was
successful in New York, his subsequent tour of the States was
financially disastrous. He evidently saved enough from the wreck,
however, to start in business, and the declining years of his eventful
life were passed in the comparative obscurity of a little drug store in
Grand Street.
As his biographer I regret to be obliged to chronicle the fact that he
made and sold an alleged specific for the White Plague, thus enabling
his detractors to couple with his name the word Quack. The following
article, which appeared in the New York Herald of September 1st, 1859,
three days after Chabert's death, gives further details of his
activities in this country:
We published among the obituary notices in yesterday's Herald the death
of Dr. Julian Xavier Chabert, the "Fire King," aged 67 years, of
pulmonary consumption. Dr. C. was a native of France, and came to this
country in 1832, and was first introduced to the public at the lecture
room of the old Clinton Hall, in Nassau Street, where he gave
exhibitions by entering a hot oven of his own construction, and while
there gave evidence of his salamander qualities by cooking beef steaks,
to the surprise and astonishment of his audiences.
It was a question to many whether the Doctor's oven was red-hot or not,
as he never allowed any person to approach him during the exhibition or
take part in the proceedings. He made a tour of the United States in
giving these exhibitions, which resulted in financial bankruptcy. At
the breaking out of the cholera in 1832 he turned Doctor, and appended
M.D., to his name, and suddenly his newspaper advertisements claimed
for him the title of the celebrated Fire King, the curer of
consumption, the maker of Chinese Lotion, etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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