Sir William Barrett utters a word of grave import: “All excitable and unbalanced minds need to be warned away from a subject that may cause, and in many cases has caused, serious mental derangement.”[96] “Spiritualism,” says Father Bernard Vaughan, “only too often means loss of health, loss of morals and loss of faith. Consult not Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Mr. Vale Owen, but your family medical adviser, and he will tell you to keep away from the séance-room as you would from an opium den. In fact, the drug habit is not more fatal than the practice of Spiritualism in very many cases. Read the warning note sounded by Dr. Charles Mercier, or by Dr. G. H. Robertson or by Colonel R. H. Elliot, and be satisfied that yielding to Spiritualism is qualifying for an asylum. You may not get there but you deserve to be an inmate.”[97] The following letter written by Miss Mary G. Cardwell, M.B., Ch.B., from the Oldham Union Infirmary, speaks for itself: “One day recently I admitted a woman of thirty-five years to the hospital of which I have the honour to be resident medical officer. She was sent in as incapable of looking after herself or her family. She told me that she was a medium, having been introduced into Spiritualism by a man, also a medium, who said he could thereby help her over some family worries. As a direct result of this, she has neglected her children, so that the public authorities have removed them from her care, her home is ruined, and she herself is a mental and moral wreck. She had paid the other medium for his services by the sacrifice of her virtue.”[98] And this is no isolated, no exceptional, instance. I have myself known precisely similar cases. Occasionally some particularly shocking incident will find its way into the public Press and we have records such as the following, which was headed “Family of Eleven Mad. Burning Mania after Séance. Child to be Sacrificed. “The story of an entire family of eleven persons, in the village of Krucktenhofen, Bavaria, going out of their minds after a spiritualistic séance is sent by the Exchange Paris correspondent, quoting the _Berliner Tageblatt_. “Renouncing the goods of this world, the father, mother, three sons, two elder daughters, and subsequently the remaining four younger members of the family, joined in burning their furniture and bedding. “Finally, the three-months-old child of one of the daughters was about to be burnt when neighbours interfered. The whole family is now in an asylum.” (_Daily Mirror_, 19 May, 1921.)