Description
Here is an unusual Roycroft item–a typed manuscript with handwritten corrections by Elbert Hubbard himself. The piece is titled “A Home Coming, or A Little Journey to the Temple of Health”, lauding Dr F M Planck at the Temple in Kansas City. Dr Planck was known for his holistic approach to medicine, and was the personal physician of Elbert and his family. To quote part of the manuscript: “We are strong only as we lay hold on Nature, as we ally ourselves with Nature, as we move with Nature”. The Temple of Health was where all diseases were supposedly treated successfully without drugs, medicines, electricity, or surgical operations.
I can find a record of “A Little Journey to the Temple of Health” on Google as published in 1913 (https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Little_Journey_to_the_Temple_of_Health/C9gAugEACAAJ?hl=en_), though no actual books online. There are 23 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ pages to the manuscript. From the Richard Blacher collection and guaranteed authentic.
Another Hubbard manuscript I sold came with a page by Elbert Hubbard II, where he said of Hubbard: “His habit came to be to dictate practically all of his writings to a secretary who transcribed them in typewriter leaving wide spacing in which Mr Hubbard could make corrections and inject any new ideas that might come to him.” The manuscript is a wonderful view into Hubbard’s creative process, as well as his opinions of medicine and medications at that time.
Planck was also into theosophical beliefs and inventions; below is a quote from a 1914 American Theosophist magazine that discusses one of his gadgets for measuring psi energy: “Dr. F. M. Planck, of Kansas City, recently exhibited a machine to which he has given the name of psychophanometer and for which he claims that it not only shows positively the existence of psychic emanations from the body but that it measures them. The device is attached to the person upon whom the test is to be made; a second person stands from six to eight feet behind him and points his hand to certain parts of the cervical and dorsal regions. When this is done a small electric light on the device is lighted or extinguished. Individuals used in the tests described by Dr. Planck gave out human energy and the light faithfully recorded the varying various degrees. The effect of various colors, temperatures, emotions and nervous and psychic states upon the subject are registered by the lighting and extinguishment of the electric lamps. “This”, says Dr. Planck, “opens the field for research as to the effects colors, of color harmonies, of the proper color of paints, wall paper, clothing, of music, discord and harmony of sound, and a thousand other things that have hitherto been problematical in psychoneurosis and psychotherapy.”
