Straw for the Drowning

In a white frame building in Ashland (pop. 8,000), Ore. one afternoon last week, some 140 people packed into seats in a low-ceilinged, fetid room 30 ft. square. Many wore bandages or held to canes and crutches. Some bore the grimace of chronic pain. But all stood up when a thin, wrinkled woman in white nurse's uniform and fancy-print apron with prominent pockets came in.

Faith-Healer Susie Jessel raised her arms toward a picture of Christ on the wall and said: "I dedicate my hands to the Lord . . . The Lord give me the gift, and He did not give it in vain. If He chooses at times to make it so that they don't heal, we must remember that we cannot be a winner all the time."

Getting down on both knees, Susie Jessel led her visitors in the Lord's Prayer. Then she was ready to begin her long night's work. Striding energetically to the middle of the room, she washed her hands in a small basin, and summoned her first patient to sit on a low white hospital stool. As she passed her wavering hands over his limbs, the patient quietly slipped a $1 bill into her apron pocket.

Lady of Love. By the time she finished, 14 hours later, Mrs. Jessel had collected more than $500--an average night's take for "the lady of love with the healing hands." When she was a girl of 16 in North Carolina, Healer Jessel says, Jesus appeared to her "standing on a soft, fleecy cloud." bade her: "Go and heal the sick." Mrs. Jessel has no medical training, employs no physical therapy. She simply passes her hands over the patient. Says she: "The medical people do the operating, the cutting, the diagnosing, but with me it's His work."

"Susie," as her patients call her, moved to Ashland 23 years ago, and she has brought a boom to the town. Thousands of hopeful patients keep the cash registers ringing in motels, hotels, restaurants, drugstores and movie houses. Mrs. Jessel herself is the proprietor of 13 cabins where patients who need more than one treatment can put up for $35 a month. District doctors acknowledge that some patients may receive "psychological benefit"; beyond that they can only fume at the danger that ill people who need proper medical treatment may be persuaded, by a visit to Susie's, that they do not need it.

Happy Undertaker. Healer Jessel is within her legal rights (the customary $1 is a voluntary contribution). Says Clarence Litwiller, a local undertaker who claims that last year he buried 18 of Susie's patients: "She's the biggest business in town for everybody."

What draws patients to Ashland from as far away as Canada, Texas and Michigan? Among the people who crowded Susie Jessel's treatment room last week was a 53-year-old businessman afflicted with a crippling neuromuscular condition on which he had spent $7,000 in doctors' fees. This patient, who had driven with his wife in their '52 Buick from Santa Monica, Calif., waited all day for the privilege of sitting on Susie's little white stool. After she had passed her hands over his ailing limbs, he said he felt no improvement, but would come back, perhaps stay a week. "After all," he said, "a drowning man will grab at any kind of a straw."

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