Medicine: Magnetic Mago

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Even more impressive than the number of patients who daily crowd Achille d'Angelo's waiting room in Rome are the names of some of the privileged ones who come by special appointment. For a bad left knee, Arturo Toscanini took ten treatments last summer from D'Angelo, self-styled Mago di Napoli (Wizard of Naples), and pronounced the man formidabile. Tenor Beniamino Gigli went in to be lifted from his nervous depression. Italy's Queen Maria José once sought D'Angelo's aid for her "weakened optic nerves."

No less an intellectual than the late Carlo Sforza yielded this testimonial after treatment for phlebitis: "D'Angelo has proved to me that there are greater forces in the world than we think." Said the Pope's personal physician, Dr. Riccardo Galeazzi-Lisi: "I am struck by his power."

With Waving Arms. Most patients sit in D'Angelo's waiting room (the "Chamber of Hope," he calls it) for hours, exposed to the hypnotic influence of dramatically lit photographs of the pudgy, 45-year-old wizard. When he feels good & ready, D'Angelo bounds into the room and arbitrarily picks the patient he will treat first. The patient faces the wizard across a table, closes his eyes and stretches out his hands, palms down.

D'Angelo stiffens and begins to wave his arms and hands like a Stokowski working over the climax of Death and Transfiguration, while the patient describes his sensations. This lasts from ten minutes to half an hour. Then the wizard slumps back in a sweat and pulls himself together to collect a fee of $16 (but only, he insists, from those who can afford it). With identical treatments, D'Angelo claims to be able to cure "all psychic or nervous disorders," such as paralysis, phobias, migraine, insomnia and loss of sight, hearing or speech. Since most such cases are hysterical in origin, he can often help patients who have enough faith in his powers.

D'Angelo himself did not even suspect his powers until he was well into manhood. A poor boy who never got beyond the third grade, he was an acrobat and stilt-walker in a circus until one day in 1934, when he fell off his stilts and broke his skull. When he came to, as he tells it now, he amazed both himself and his nurse by his clairvoyant ability to recite her past. He set himself up in a back street as the Mago di Napoli and practiced clairvoyance.

With Outstretched Hand. One day a woman seemed about to faint when D'Angelo told her that her missing soldier son had been killed. He reached out a wizardly hand to steady her. Before he could touch her, he claims, she felt the strength of his proffered hand. "Let's try again," he said, and made another gesture. Again the woman felt an invisible but powerful force flowing from his fingertips. Thus, says D'Angelo, he discovered that he was a battery of healing "magnetic fluid."