Suggestive Therapeutics.
Other titles: Journal of Suggestive Therapeutics
1898--1901
Chicago, IL. Publisher: Psychic Publishing Company; Psychic Research Co. (August 1899). Editor: Sydney Blanshard Flower, Ll.D..
Succeeds: Hypnotic Magazine (August 1896-December 1897)-->Journal of Medical Hypnotism (January to May 1898) Succeeded by: Journal of Magnetism (January-November 1901)-->New Thought (December 1901-October 1910)-->Neue Gedanken (1904-1907)-->Goldfield Gossip (1906-1908)-->Popular Therapeutics (New Thought merged into in 1910)-->The Yogi (1910-1911?)-->New Thought (1920-1922?)-->Rejuvenation (1921?-1922?)-->Will-Power (1922?)-->The Thinker (1924?-1925?)
1/1 (o.s. 5/1), June 1898-10/1, January 1901. $3.00-$1.00 a year, 48-96 pp.

This was another of the transformations undergone by Flower's Hypnotic Magazine on its path to becoming The New Thought. Flower's ideas moved over time from a more medical, clinical approach to hypnosis and healing to the more magical form of New Thought and mental healing--telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry, distant healing, fortune telling, etc.--that came to dominate the area--to a large extent through Flower's own efforts. As late as 1899, Flower tried to distance himself from "Bogus Mediums," "Bogus Healers," "mental healing," and the like by claiming to rest the journal on "facts" rather than on something "in the clouds," the journal came increasingly to carry articles like "Absent Treatment," written by "The Healer" (a pseudonym that almost certainly masks Flower himself) and "Perpetual Youth," a pseudonym Flower must have borrowed from Rider Haggard's popular King Solomon's Mines. Flower emphasized the journal's independence from any school or institute or purveyor of lessons on suggestion and hypnotism, but the claim, like most of Flower's claims, was false: he had been the publicist for Parkyn's School of Psychology in Chicago and then promoted his own Flower Schools of Suggestive Therapeutics, and beginning in mid-1898 when his own Psychic Research Company became publisher of the journal he had opened the floodgates to increasingly suspect lessons: Healer's lessons on "Distant Healing," "How to Hypnotize," "Mind Reading and Telepathy," "Mind and Muscle Reading," "Zoism" (building of the "spiritual body" and unfolding its innate powers through the preservation and utilization of sexual energy), and a great many more, all of which were reprinted by Flower beginning in 1900 as Series "A" through "D" and then sold throughout the United States and across Europe. This brought Flower and his then-partner Jay Van Tuyl Daniels and Psychic Research Company to the attention of competitors--and the postal authorities. The Star of the Magi in June 1900 noted Flower's lessons on "telepathy, mind reading, etc., on the well known 'something-for-nothing,' 'catch-'em-and-skin-'em' plan,'" and said of Flower that he had proven to be 'a degenerate cigarette fiend, whom the medical journals and the State Board of Health are after for his open and gross violations of the law, and we trust the postal authorities will soon stop his fraudulent use of the mails." The Post Office promptly denied the journal second-class postage privileges, effectively destroying it. Flower brought suit against Star of the Magi (and then abandoned it), Daniels fled the country (some said with the firms' money) to London and then Germany where he continued to publish Flower's lessons as Flowers Kollektion, and the journal was soon in the hands of a receiver and effectively defunct. The Journal of Magnetism, edited by Lloyd Jones, who had written for this journal, merged with the remnants of the journal in February 1901, assuming the volume number of Suggestive Therapeutics (vol. 10, no. 2), and Flower, with new financial backing, started The New Thought in December 1901, reassuming the volume numbering (vol. 10, no. 12).

Contributions by S.C. Greathead, a disciple of Levi Dowling and later editor of Breathe of Life and purveyor of his own lessons on "Zoism," Charles Dawburn, Mabel Gifford, Lloyd Kenyon Jones, W.H. Chaney (on astrology and "life readings by mail"), William Crookes (materialization); a review of Kenneth S.L. Guthrie's Regeneration: Gate of Heaven; and innumerable advertisements by the minor mages and "professors" on Life Science, palmistry, astrology, mental healing, clairvoyance, personal magnetism, magnetic power, etc., etc. The journal claimed in December 1898 that it was printing an average run of 5,100 copies a month. Lloyd [Kenyon] Jones had his own devious career in hypnotism, stock promotion and spiritualism, on which see the note under Communication (1920). New York Academy of Medicine; New York Historical Society; Harvard University; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Stanford University.

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