During the era of anything-goes medicine of the late 1800s, William D. Jones settled in Bloomington and established a practice in “magnetic healing.”
Although magnetic healing sounds like it has something to do with magnets and magnet-ism, it was instead a “therapeutical system” involving the supposed healing power of suggestion, often by way of hypnotism. Jones and other magnetic healers (including, at one time or another, sons Bennett E., Maurice B., and Alfred R.) promised to cure a panoply of diseases “without the use of poisonous drugs, or the merciless knife,” an attractive proposition back in the day when even well-intentioned physicians often did more harm than good.
The latter half of the 19th and early 20th century was a time of competing medical theories, treatments and schools, ranging from the rise of science-based medicine to out-and-out quackery.
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Jones followed the lead of patent medicine manufacturers and other purveyors of quackery who made grandiose, unsubstantiated claims as to the benefits offered by their products or regimens. Magnetic treatment, Jones said, would cure constipation, “general debility,” rheumatism, asthma, “nervous prostration,” paralysis, appendicitis, indigestion, tumors, “female trouble” and problems relating to the liver and kidney.
“Magnetic healing,” Jones’ son Bennett explained, “is a method of curing diseases through the vitalizing power which one person can impart to another, or of the healing power which one by the intelligent use of his will can generate within himself.” Thus for magnetic healers, medicine was merely a means (or even a purposeful ruse) to encourage positive thoughts.
Bennett Jones argued that magnetic healing and the power of suggestion were evident in the miracle cures performed by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science faith, as well as those by “divine healers” such as Chicago-based Scottish evangelist John Alexander Dowie.
Interestingly, magnetic healing was connected to the related fields of osteopathy and chiropractic care, both of which developed in the latter half of the 19th century. Andrew Still, the father of osteopathy, was a practitioner of magnetic healing, and D.D. Palmer, chiropractic’s founder, initially employed spinal manipulation as an extension of his magnetic healing practice.
Born in Erie, Penn. in 1849, Jones grew up on farms in southern Wisconsin and Iowa, and by 1880 he was married to Emma Stocking and farming in Buchanan County, Iowa. Emma passed away in 1881, and William quickly remarried, only to see his second wife die a few years later. Before coming to Bloomington in 1898 or 1899 (accounts differ) he lived in Nebraska and then briefly in Missouri.
After settling in Blooming-ton, Jones married Sadie B. Dickey, and when it was all said and done, Jones was father to six sons — four with Emma and one each from his second and third marriages.
Around 1899, “Professor” Jones (he later switched to “Doctor”) established the National School of Magnetic Healing from an office suite in the Eddy Building, located on the 400 block of North Main Street in downtown Blooming-ton.
Students were taught the “Jones Method” of magnetic healing in a six-week course. “Graduates are located in every state in the union. Their success is unequaled in the history of our modern times,” read one dubious boast. The school also said its graduates earned $20 to $30 per day (the equivalent of $550 to more than $800 in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars).
“No medicines are given, yet all forms of disease yield to this treatment,” claimed a 1902 advertisement for W.D. Jones & Son (the son in this case was Alfred R.). “They have cured more people in Bloomington within the last three years than any other school of remedies practiced in the world.”
Jones proselytized on behalf of magnetic healing, publishing a “journal” called the Magnetic Leader, which was chock full of testimonials from purportedly satisfied customers. (Such gripping first-hand accounts of revived health were a mainstay in the patent medicine business.) And Bennett Jones authored the hardbound book titled The Secrets of Magnetic Healing (“based upon purely scientific principles” and “free from exaggeration,” prospective readers were told), published by his father’s school.
For several years beginning around 1905 Jones repurposed a two-story federal-style residence at 402 E. Front St. as a private sanitarium “where magnetic and other kindred methods are used to cure acute and chronic cases.”
Yet for reasons lost to time, several years later Jones gave up his magnetic healing practice in favor of osteopathy, and he remained active in this profession for the remainder of his life.
William D. Jones passed away on March 30, 1920, at the age of 71. He was laid to rest at Park Hill Cemetery on Bloomington’s west side.
