Arigo - surgeon of the rusty knife

 

Author’s Note

In this story, so strange, so incredible, there are undisputed facts, facts that cannot be denied, cannot be altered even by the most obdurate skeptic.

It is an established fact that Ze Arigo, the peasant Brazilian surgeon-healer, could cut through the flesh and viscera with an unclean kitchen- or pocket-knife and there would be no pain, no hemostasis – the tying off of blood vessels – and no need for stitches. It is a fact that he could stop the flow of blood with a sharp verbal command. It is a fact that there would be no ensuing infection, even though no antisepsis was used.

It is a fact that he could write swiftly some of the most sophisticated prescriptions in modern pharmacology, yet he never went beyond third grade and never studied the subject. It is a fact that he could almost instantly make clear, accurate, and confirmable diagnoses or blood pressure readings with scarcely a glance at the patient.

It is a fact that both Brazilian and American doctors have verified Arigo’s healings and have taken explicit color motion pictures of his work and operations. It is a fact that Arigo treated over three hundred patients a day for nearly two decades and never charged for his services.

It is a fact that among his patients were leading executives, statesmen, lawyers, scientists, doctors, aristocrats from many countries, as well as the poor and desolate. It is a fact that Brazil’s former President, Juscelino Kubitschek, the creator of the capital city of Brasília and himself a physician, brought his daughter to Arigo for successful treatment. It is a fact that Arigo brought about medically confirmed cures in cases of cancer and other fatal diseases that had been given up as hopeless by leading doctors and hospitals in some of the most advanced countries in the Western world.

But none of these facts, all carefully brought together and examined, can add up to an explanation. And it is for this reason that this story is so difficult to write. The question keeps repeating itself in my mind: How am I going to write this story so that the reader will believe it – especially when I had so much trouble believing it myself until completing the research in Brazil?

Any understanding of the events here must arise from an understanding of the atmosphere and culture of Brazil itself. It is a country of contrasts, a country of vast wilderness and of bristling modern cities. São Paulo, for instance, is a city of nearly eight million, approximately twice as large as Chicago or Los Angeles. Belo Horizonte, in the plateau region northwest of Rio, is larger than Baltimore, Washington, or San Francisco. Yet it is a city little known to most people in the United States. Brazil is larger in area than the continental United States. Its population ranges from highly sophisticated intellectuals and scientists to primitive Amazon Indians.

Most important to understand in this story is the prevalence in Brazil of a willingness to accept paraphysical happenings as basic realities. This willingness cuts across all social and economic lines. In fact, it almost seems that the more sophisticated and educated the group, the more likeli- hood there is of acceptance of a philosophy known as Kardecism, springing from the writings of a nineteenth- century French mystic known as Allan Kardec, a French professor whose real name was Denizard Rivail.

The Kardecists flatly believe in the rational reality of the spirit world, and in communication with and effective use of it. They believe in reincarnation. The Kardecists are known as intellectual ‘spiritists’ who do not believe in ritual and paganism. They meet quietly, most often in private homes, and embrace most of the tenets of Christianity.

They believe, however, that they can draw on the power and knowledge of the spirit world through mediums who are carefully trained for this purpose.

Some Kardec theorists who are knowledgeable about every aspect of Freudian theory believe that ‘possession’ is a phenomenon that has been overlooked in the headlong development of modern psychotherapy, and that there is rational and viable evidence that many cases of psychosis from schizophrenia to dementia praecox could be ascribed to the phenomenon of ‘possession’ by an alleged spirit that refuses to accept the fact that he or she is dead. The spirit, whether good or bad, is said to be ‘incorporated’ in the living body of a receptive person.

This idea is mostly rejected by the modern pragmatic mind, and ‘possession’ has been summarily dismissed by medical science without either positive or negative evidence being examined until recently. Catholicism has long struggled with the problem, but remains ambivalent about it.
‘Possession’ is a very heady concept for the materialistic mind to accept or cope with. Modem parapsychology is beginning to reexamine the concept, although gingerly.

There are other signs on the horizon that foreshadow a reawakening of interest in this area, not only in Brazil but also in the United States. It may or may not have been an accident that the novel The Exorcist rode the best-seller lists for so many months. Many people do not realize that this story was based on an actual documented case of possession in the archives of the Catholic Church, and that there are many recorded cases similar to it.

Any serious exploration into this field in the United States is bound to raise eyebrows. There are many good reasons why it should. Charlatans and irresponsible writers have created so much static and high noise level, without any reliable documentation, that they defeat their own cause. Anyone exploring a strange phenomenon has to assume that the burden of proof lies on his shoulders. The more strange it is, the greater the documentation needed, and the greater the need for understatement.

No other so-called ‘psychic surgeon’ in Brazil or the world has been confirmed and documented as thoroughly as Arigo. Many reports have come from the Philippines about feats of surgery by untutored and untrained psychics there, but there has been a constant exposure of trickery in their work. Further, their lack of cooperation with medical researchers has made their case untenable.

Arigo was unique. He cooperated in every possible way with medical science in the hope that he could discover for himself the strange mechanism that created his inexplicable powers. He defies classification. What he did was vividly real. How he did it remains a mystery and a challenge for science.

John G. Fuller Westport, Connecticut

***

Nor did they know quite what to expect as far as Arigo was concerned. He had entered the small room alone. But in moments, he came back out of it, briskly.

He seemed to be totally a different person. He held his head high, almost arrogantly. His eyes, very burning and penetrating before he entered the room, were now radiantly piercing, but at the same time withdrawn, almost as if they were out of focus. They glistened in the dim light of the room. Now he spoke sharply, like a Prussian officer. The interpreters noted a thick German accent in his Portu- guese, harsh and guttural.

Arigo pointed to another sign on the wall, which read:

NO ONE WILL BE TAKEN CARE OF TODAY WHO HAS TAKEN ANY ALCOHOLIC DRINK. COME BACK TOMORROW WITHOUT ANYTHING TO DRINK.

Then, imperiously, he walked over to Puharich and Belk.

‘Come’, he said, and led them through the now-open door of his treatment room. The attendants moved the line of patients up, along the wall of the big room and into the smaller one, where the first dozen patients took their positions. Arigo summarily ordered the two Americans to stand by the table. ‘There is nothing to hide here’, he said. ‘I am happy to have you watch. I must assure you that what I do is safe – and that the people who are ill become well’. He said this with the great confidence of a Prussian general, quite out of character with his former rural bearing.

Suddenly and without ceremony, he roughly took the first man in line – an elderly, well-dressed gentleman in an impeccable gray sharkskin suit, firmly grasped his shoulders, and held him against the wall, directly under the sign THINK OF JESUS. Puharich, standing next to the man, was startled by the action, wondered what to expect next. Then, without a word, Arigo picked up a four-inch stainless steel paring knife with a cocobolo-wood handle, and literally plunged it into the man’s left eye, under the lid and deep into the eye socket.

In spite of his years of medical practice and experience, Puharich was shocked and stunned. He was even more so when Arigo began violently scraping the knife between the ocular globe and the inside of the lid, pressing up into the sinus area with uninhibited force. The man was wide awake, fully conscious, and showed no fear whatever. He did not move or flinch. A woman in the background screamed. Another fainted. Then Arigo levered the eye so that it extruded from the socket. The patient, still utterly calm, seemed bothered by only one thing: a fly that had landed on his cheek. At the moment his eye was literally tilted out of its socket, he calmly brushed the fly away from his cheek.

As he made these motions, Arigo hardly looked at his subject, and at one point turned away to address an assistant while his hand continued to scrape and plunge without letup. In another moment, he turned away from the patient completely, letting the knife dangle half out of the eye.
Then he turned abruptly to Puharich and asked him to place his finger on the eyelid, so that he could feel the point of the knife under the skin. By this time, Puharich was almost in a state of shock, but he did so, clearly feeling the point of the knife through the skin. Quickly, Puharich asked one of the interpreters to ask the patient what he felt.

The patient spoke calmly and without excitement, merely stating that although he was well aware of the knife, he felt no pain or discomfort.

Arigo, still speaking in a harsh German accent, told them that he often used this technique as either a diagnostic tool or for eye operations. To Puharich, this violated every medical technique he had known in his twenty years of experience since studying medicine at Northwestern. For Belk, who had studied psychology at Duke, the procedure was simply inconceivable. He felt limp and slightly nauseated.

Within a few moments, Arigo withdrew the paring knife from the eye, bringing out with it a smear of pus on the point. He noted it with satisfaction, then unceremoniously wiped the knife on his sport shirt and dismissed the patient.

‘You will be well, my friend’, he said. Then he called the next patient. The entire ‘examination’ had taken less than a minute.

The scene began moving so swiftly that neither Puharich nor Belk had time to collect his thoughts. Puharich was at least able to think fast enough to stop the first patient and made a quick examination of his eye. There was no laceration, no redness, no sign of irritation. The patient explained through the interpreter that he felt altogether normal, that he had had no anesthesia beforehand, and that he had complete faith in Arigo. By now the second patient had been passed through Arigo and was headed toward the assistant and his typewriter in the corner of the larger room, carrying a slip of paper with some sort of prescription scrawled on it.

Puharich and Belk watched incredulously as the people moved up in line to the table, rich and poor, of all ages.

Arigo would barely glance at them. For most, his hand began almost automatically scribbling a prescription at incredible speed, as if his pen were slipping across a sheet of ice. Occasionally he would rise, place a patient against the wall, wipe the paring knife on his shirt again, drive it brutally into a tumor or cyst or another eye or ear, and remove whatever the offending tissue was, in a matter of seconds.

There was no anesthesia, no hypnotic suggestion, no antisepsis – and practically no bleeding beyond a trickle.

They did not observe Arigo’s reported ability to make blood stop on verbal command. But they noted that he rarely asked a question of a patient; his diagnosis was wordless and immediate. In the speed and confusion of the first scores of patients on that morning, Puharich was content simply to watch and observe.

Obviously, there was much checking to be done. These prescriptions – what were they? How could Arigo write them so fast, barely looking at the paper, never taking time to analyze either the prescription or the patient? How could he possibly get the alleged miraculous results, when he spent so little time with each patient? How could the assistant read the hopeless scrawl on the plain sheet of paper to translate it for the pharmacist? Where had Arigo learned his pharmacology? How could he expect to arrive at a rational therapy without an examination of the patient or without even asking questions? How could a patient feel no pain when a paring knife was brutally pushed into one of the most sensitive and painful areas of the body – the eye? These questions would have to be suspended until full and incisive study could be made.

It seemed that Arigo averaged less than a minute for each patient. Arigo, obviously with tongue in cheek, insisted that whatever surgical work he would be doing at this time was merely an examination. He was actually under court injunction not to operate.

Recalling the scene later, Puharich said: ‘It was the first time in my life when I’ve seen a scene like this. Where, one minute from the time a patient steps up, until the time he leaves, he either receives a prescription or an actual operation, and walks out without any pain or disablement. Arigo never said much of anything. It was like a nightmare. Belk and I were looking at each other, speechless. We really felt we were in a science fiction atmosphere. Belk, who wasn’t a medical man, finally had to walk out of the room. I continued watching. It sort of piles in on you. These people step up – they’re all sick. One had a big goiter. Arigo just picked up the paring knife, cut it open, popped the goiter out, slapped it in her hand, wiped the opening with a piece of dirty cotton, and off she went. It hardly bled at all.

‘But there was no opportunity to follow up anything at this time. He was working so fast that it was impossible to catch a patient before they stepped up. You were afraid to talk to any of them immediately afterward, because you didn’t want to miss anything coming up. This first ex- posure to this man was almost too much to comprehend’.

By eleven that morning, Arigo had treated some two hundred patients. A dozen or so he sent away, summarily, gruffly telling them that any ordinary doctor could handle their complaints. Others he scolded or chided. There had already been about ten eye and ear surgery cases. Each operation averaged only half a minute.

The surgery routine was almost always the same. The swift, almost brutal plunge of the paring knife. The violent and apparently careless maneuvering of the blade under the eyelid, or whatever part of the body he was working on, the casual wiping of the blade on his shirt.

In no case was there any preoperative procedure – no anesthesia, no sterile precautions, no hypnotic suggestion whatever. The patients stood by the wall, fully conscious, and walked out of the room without assistance. Puharich was watching carefully for hypnosis; it could at least explain part of the procedure. But there was no evidence of it.

If anything, Arigo himself seemed to be in a trance state.

This, Puharich and Belk later surmised, might account for the strange explanation they had heard in their earlier inquiries about Arigo, before they left Rio. It was alleged that Arigo claimed he incorporated the spirit of a deceased German doctor, whom he identified as Dr Adolpho Fritz.

It was Dr Fritz, Arigo claimed, who did the operating and the prescribing of the complex pharmaceutical agents he wrote so swiftly. It was Dr Fritz, a German physician who had died in 1918, who provided the instantaneous diagnoses.

Both Belk and Puharich, with their interest and experience in exploring the paranormal, were at least willing to examine this bizarre explanation with an open mind. On this day, not even the incredible objective evidence of Arigo’s prowess could be adequately assessed. The facts that were piling up in chaotic profusion revealed one certainty: that Arigo was violating every rational procedure of medicine and surgery. And it was becoming evident that only the most extensive, lengthy study and technical evaluation could create an intelligent appraisal of that. The exotic and ephemeral concept of some sort of benign possession by a deceased German physician was too incredible to even consider at this time.

Promptly at eleven, Arigo rose from his small chair by the wooden table and declared the session at an end. He would be returning, he explained in his rough German accent, at two until six that afternoon. For those patients he was unable to see at that time, he would start again at eight in the evening and continue until all patients were taken care of, regardless of the time.

He invited the two Americans and their interpreters to accompany him as he strode across the large room, washed his hands in a small basin, and put on a jacket. He would be going to his regular job, he explained, a job with the government and social-security office, known by the acronym IAPETC. If the Americans wished, he indicated, they could go there with him, and he’d be glad to give them further information.

Without ceremony, he led them around the corner and down the cobblestone street toward the state welfare office.

It was an omnibus health-and-welfare installation. There were pension records, small medical and dental offices, a line of people waiting for unemployment compensation, and the musty atmosphere of bureaucratic confusion. His jacket was unpressed and well-worn. He was still rough and unshaven, yet he carried himself with what seemed to be enormous energy and dignity. But now the German accent had left him. He spoke with the hearty, gusty crudeness of a First Avenue bus driver who affectionately caj- oles, curses, and jokes with his passengers on his daily run.

Arigo was the receptionist. He directed the people to the various departments of the office, verbally whipping them at one moment, comforting them in another. His paramedical self had left him completely, but he still remained an imposing man. The people in line, poor and subdued, seemed to find affection and warmth in him, in spite of his gruffness. To the Americans, he was more of a riddle than ever. His personality change, from the moment he had left the clinic and gone to his job, was startling. His Prussian stiffness had given way to an earthy amiability. His eyes had lost some of the strange luster that had marked him as he worked with the patients in his clinic. He invited the Americans and their interpreters to go through the welfare office, make themselves at home.

They did so. Puharich was particularly interested in getting a playback from the dentist and doctor on duty there.

Certainly, these professional men would have to have some sort of concrete opinions about this strange phenomenon who was in fact invading their professional field, and apparently attracting an avalanche of people into the village in direct competition with them.

The government dentist was most amiable about Arigo. He commented on how well liked he was around the town, how well he did his job for the welfare office, how much the people who came there enjoyed his kindness and jokes and good humor. He seemed indifferent to Arigo’s separate medical activity, shrugging it off with a gesture of puzzlement. The pension-department physician was not much more eloquent. He also shrugged, and indicated that Arigo did his thing, and he did his own. He did acknowledge that he knew of no one who had been harmed by Arigo, and that the number of people from all over South America who came to see him was phenomenal.

His office hours at the welfare office were strange in North American terms. He worked from eleven in the morning until one. Then he began again at four, and continued until six. Arigo invited all four of his visitors to have lunch with his family, an invitation quickly accepted.

His house, on the Rua Marechal Floriano, reflected a state of near-poverty, but in spite of flaking plaster and shoddy furniture, it was clean and neat. Arlete, his wife, was slim and smiling, rustling her five boys about the house, handsome boys all of them, with the same striking, deep-brown eyes of their father. She was wearing hair rollers, unselfconsciously.

Arigo kissed her affectionately, and they all sat down at a rough table, Arlete squeezing four extra places among the boys. The lunch was simple – beans and rice and some stringy chicken – but there was plenty of it. Arigo ate heartily, laughing, joking with the boys, clearing his plate in moments. Almost automatically, Arlete refilled it, and pressed more food on the visitors.

Studying the scene, Puharich could find nothing to sug- gest anything extraordinary about the man or his family.

The wife was devoted, the boys lively, intelligent, well-mannered. The atmosphere was confused, but congenial and affectionate. Arigo had shelved whatever mystical qualities he had demonstrated with his patients. Puharich’s thoughts kept going back to the inexplicable events of the morning: the surgery without anesthesia, bleeding, or pain; the incredible speed with which the man worked; the lack of fear in the patient as a sharp knife went into his eye.

Somehow, he was thinking, he would have to find a way to prove to both himself and his medical colleagues back in the States that the whole thing was not a hallucination.

When Jorge Rizzini, the journalist, arrived that evening, part of the problem would be solved, because he was bringing a motion picture camera. Belk was already preparing his own still camera equipment, a step he had postponed during the morning session until he got more used to the bizarre events that occurred in such swift succession.

But would film be enough to convince the skeptics? Still pictures could of course be easily rigged; they would not be able to persuade a hard-core skeptic. Motion pictures are almost impossible to fake convincingly, therefore they were most important. Puharich would have to count on Rizzini for that part of the process; he hoped he would do well.
***
‘There was one patient I remember’, Puharich recalls, ‘who was hanging around all day. He was barefoot and had been in a wheelchair, and it seemed that he had a job as an auto mechanic. He simply came there and hung around, although he no longer needed the wheelchair.

‘We asked him through the interpreters just why he was doing this, and he explained that he had been in the Brazilian brigade in the Allied army in Italy during World War II. He had been wounded, and received injuries to both knees. He couldn’t describe technically what happened, but his knees had locked up, frozen on him. He had had something like thirteen operations since the war. He said he had heard about Arigo and came to him.

‘Arigo had looked at him, and very roughly said: “What the hell are you doing in the wheelchair, you bum?” Arigo was never reluctant to swear at people when the occasion seemed to demand it. The man had said: “I can’t walk. My knees are locked.” Arigo answered: “You’re a rotten, lazy bum. Get up and walk!” The man protested that he couldn’t. Arigo repeated his demand. The guy had no choice. He got up and started walking across the room.

Arigo never touched him. The man couldn’t believe it had happened. But he was scared to death the condition might return, so he continued hanging around, just to play it safe.

‘I examined the knees, although this is the kind of case that would need intensive study to verify completely. They were still a little stiff, and you could see the multiple scars from the many operations he had had. But he was able to move with considerable freedom. This was the kind of case I would be looking for when we returned with full diagnostic equipment and personnel. But at the moment, it was convincing enough to indicate the need for further study’.

By the time Jorge Rizzini, the intense, thirty-five-year- old Brazilian journalist, arrived from São Paulo, Puharich had plotted the best possible way for shooting both stills and motion pictures the next day. Unlikely as it was, there was still the possibility of fakery or of simply an unconventional and indiscernible hypnotic technique that might have brought temporary relief to the hundreds of patients that were filing by Arigo each day.

Rizzini, however, was not inclined to go along with this theory. He had experienced two very definitive cases close to home: his wife, who had suffered hopeless arthritis and had been given up by medical doctors; and his daughter, who had been medically assessed as having incurable leukemia. Both had come to Arigo; both had been cured, and the cure confirmed by the same doctors who had given them up. He also told about the daughter of past Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek, who had been successfully treated by Arigo for a kidney disorder that had defied conventional treatment in both Europe and the United States.

Rizzini’s 8mm Kodak did not have a zoom lens, but it would be adequate to record some of the operations. Puharich and Belk were still concerned about getting enough raw evidence to persuade a representative group of other American doctors to join them in making a thorough study of Arigo. Even with motion pictures of the unconventional operations, there could be enough doubts left to make persuasion difficult. It seemed to be something that had to be seen directly on location to be believed.

**

Puharich had felt it himself on arriving in the village. He still had doubts, but they were fading in the light of Arigo’s indefatigable dedi- cation to his patients, most of whom had come miles to see him.

It was during these thoughts that he absentmindedly scratched his arm – perhaps for a mosquito or flea bite. As he did so, he was reminded of a large and rather annoying but benign tumor on the inside of his right elbow, known as a lipoma. It was not dangerous, and he had had it checked within the last two years by his own doctor, Sidney Krebs, M.D., of New York City.

Medically, a lipoma is a fatty tumor that rolls around freely under the skin when it is examined. While they do not tend to become malignant, lipomas can often be rather large and unsightly. What causes them is really not known.

Puharich’s tumor had been there for seven years, and measured about half an inch high, half an inch wide, and one and a half inches in length. His doctor had suggested he might have it surgically removed, which, while seldom risky, is rarely an office procedure. Full sterilization is necessary in an operating room, and the usual scrubbing, painting, and draping of the tumor area is practiced.

The surgical procedure involves incision over the fatty tissue, the spreading of the incision with two retractors, and the use of hemostats and cauterizing the blood vessels to check the flow of blood for clear visibility. Usually, another clamp is placed over the tumor itself, and the tumor is cut free with a scalpel. The opening is then sewn up with sutures. Antiseptics and antibiotics, of course, are utilized to prevent infection. Without these, septicemia – blood poisoning – could result.

The average surgeon requires about fifteen to twenty minutes to complete the job. In Puharich’s case, the tumor was directly over the ulnar nerve, which controls the movement of the hand. Also, the brachial artery lay nearby, another possible complication. It was for these reasons that Puharich had been hesitant about having the tumor re- moved, and since it was not incapacitating, he had learned to live with it.

But an inept operation could be incapacitating – permanently. The movement in the fingers could be restricted or totally disabled by damage to the ulnar nerve. A slip that would sever the brachial artery would bring obvious danger.

In other words, the tumor was nothing to take lightly, in spite of its benignity. Speaking of the experience later, Puharich said: ‘When I felt the lipoma on my arm, lying there in bed, I said to myself: Well, here is a legitimate thing that Arigo could work on. Because I could see by now that you couldn’t just play games with him. If he was going to do something, you had to be sick or have something real.

I said to myself: This is a good idea. I’ll see if he will operate on this, and I’ll see what happens. I know what the condition is; I’ll see if these people are faking the lack of pain. I’ll find out if he really hurts or not. I’ll find out first- hand how the process works. If I get infected, I can always be flown down to Rio. I simply could not believe what I was seeing and experiencing with Arigo. Here was one way I could prove to myself and my colleagues that we were not hallucinating’.

The decision did not come easily. But it was the one sure way to put Arigo’s skills to the test. Puharich would be able to discover just what the lack of anesthesia, antisepsis, and sutures meant firsthand – and whether indeed Arigo was capable of preventing the major flow of blood.

The decision made, he turned over on his side on the shaky iron cot and went to sleep.
**

‘We’ll do the arm first’, Arigo said. ‘Just roll up your sleeve, Doctor’. The action was moving so fast now that Puharich turned quickly to check the camera setup. Rizzini was already lining up his motion picture camera; Belk and the one interpreter seemed to be set with their still cameras.

All three were now considerably tense and nervous. The operation was a one-shot take. There could be no such thing as a retake, and Puharich was as apprehensive about this as he was about the operation. He instructed the other interpreter to bounce the battery light off the ceiling, to prevent burning the image in the lens. Then he turned back and prepared to watch Arigo make the incision.

But Arigo instructed him to look the other way, and, it had become obvious, when Arigo commanded, it was useless to argue with him. Puharich obliged, again checking and directing the cameras and lighting.

In considerably less than thirty seconds – some of the others said it was less than ten – Puharich felt something wet slapped in his hand, along with the pocketknife itself.

He looked down and saw the bloody form of the lipoma and the knife Arigo had used to extract it. On his arm, where the tumor had been, there was a small slit, with a trickle of blood dripping down from it, but very little, considerably less than two inches. The skin area was flat; there was no longer the bulge of the tumor.

Puharich was stunned. There had been no pain whatever in the arm. He had felt only a slight, vague sensation. The others had watched with incredulity. Just before the opera- tion, Rizzini had started his camera rolling. It continued to roll all through the process and afterward. Arigo had taken the knife, seemed to scrape it over the skin, and within 38 seconds, had pulled out the lipoma with his hands. It was totally alien to any surgical procedure.

Arigo smiled, and said to Puharich that Dr Fritz had told him to say: ‘This is a demonstration only – so that people will believe. I think every doctor in Brazil should come here and do what you have done. After the legal process against me, you must come back, Dr Puharich, and I will do major surgery for you.

Arigo - surgeon of the rusty knife by John G. Fullerton