Can’t have a slam dunk every time

The library at Cambridge University has its very own admissions office. This is where you are sent should you be so daft as to try to walk in without a Cambridge ID. I’m waiting in the hallway outside, to apply for one-day admittance. Specifically, I’m trying to get into the hallowed Cambridge Manuscripts Reading Room, overseen by the Keeper of Manuscripts and University Archives, whom I picture standing guard at the door in anklelength robes with a massive key on a chain around his neck. I’m actually nervous about getting in.
While I wait, I read about the sacred texts on exhibit in the lobby. Amongst the many Buddhist works in the Cambridge University Library is this very important Sanskrit palm leaf manuscript, about 1,000 years old... Cambridge University has one of the most important collections of Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts in the world.
Meanwhile, yours truly is here for archive item SPR 197.1.6: Alleged Ectoplasm.
Ectoplasm lived during the table-tipping, spirit-communing, strange-goings-on-in-the-dark heyday of spiritualism. It was claimed to be a physical manifestation of spirit energy, something that certain mediums – called “materializing” mediums – exuded in a state of trance. (…)
The original ectoplasm medium was Eva C., whose emanations drew the attentions of French surgeon and medical researcher Charles Richet. Richet was the discoverer of human thermoregulation and cutaneous transpiration, a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for his work on anaphylactic shock, and the author of Gastric Juice in Man and Animals (can’t have a slam dunk every time). That a man of his stature spoke for the authenticity of ectoplasm made it difficult to dismiss. As did spiritualism’s roster of scientists, statesmen, and literary luminaries: William James, William Butler Yeats, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, chemist Sir William Crookes (inventor of the vacuum tube and sufferer of ridicule for his pronouncement that the luminous green gas inside his invention was ectoplasm), two prime ministers, and Queen Victoria.

Hard to swallow : the giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm [fragment]
uit: Spook : science tackles the afterlife - Mary Roach


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