Edmund Gurney

Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886 under three names but written mostly by Gurney, was an attempt to do something nobody had tried: to treat a mass of ghost stories as a body of evidence with rules. Its subject was the crisis apparition, the report of seeing or hearing a person at approximately the moment of that person's distant death or serious injury. Gurney set conditions for admitting a case, requiring a first-hand account from the percipient, corroboration from someone told before the outcome was known, and documentary confirmation of the timing where it could be had, and he discarded a great many reports that failed them. He then argued statistically that coincidences of this kind occurred far more often than the death rate would allow.

The critical response was immediate and has not been improved on much since: the recruitment of cases was not random, memory reshapes an experience once the outcome is known, and the base rate against which coincidence was measured rested on assumptions that could be disputed. The book nonetheless established that the question could be posed in evidential terms at all, and the collection remains a substantial documentary record of what late Victorians reported.

Gurney's other main body of work is closer to ordinary psychology and is the part most likely to be read with profit today. He ran long series of experiments on hypnotic suggestion, including tests of whether a suggestion given under hypnosis could take effect later without the subject recalling that it had been given, and whether a hypnotised subject could respond to instructions the hypnotist had not spoken aloud. The first line of work belongs to the mainstream history of research on suggestion and post-hypnotic response. The second was intended as a test of telepathy under conditions Gurney thought controlled, and it was subsequently argued that his hired subjects had opportunities to communicate that he had not eliminated.

Gurney died in a Brighton hotel in June 1888 from an overdose of chloroform, which he had been using for neuralgia. The inquest returned accidental death. Suggestions of suicide, sometimes connected to doubts he was said to have developed about the reliability of those very subjects, have circulated since and have never been substantiated. He was forty-one, and the society lost the only person doing its detailed work full time. His work on suggestion was picked up by later experimental psychology in a way none of his case collection ever was.