In the spring of 1938, Vance Vanders lay upstairs in the rear of an old house that had been converted into a fifteen-bed hospital. The six beds back there had once belonged to a sleeping porch. Vanders, sixty years old, was in one of them, more than fifty pounds lighter than he had been, vomiting, sunken-eyed, and saying over and over that he was going to die.[1]
Dr. Drayton Doherty’s reported cure of Vance Vanders began where the hospital’s tests and feeding tube had failed: he staged the removal of a voodoo curse in a way Vanders could believe, and the dying man abruptly recovered.
Doherty knew Vanders and his wife personally. Both worked on the farm of one of the doctor’s acquaintances, according to physician Clifton K. Meador’s later account. In that era, a wasting illness like Vanders’s raised two obvious suspicions, tuberculosis or widespread cancer. Repeated tests, chest X-rays, and a physical examination did not support either diagnosis.[1]
The hospital tried a nasogastric feeding tube. Vanders still declined. He refused food and vomited what was put into him. Soon he was drifting in and out of consciousness, barely strong enough to speak.[1]
At that point, his wife asked to speak with Doherty privately. Meador wrote that she was so frightened she made the doctor swear to complete secrecy before she explained what had happened outside the hospital.[1]
The secret at the bedside
About four months earlier, she said, Vanders had been summoned late at night to a cemetery by a local man described in the account as a witch doctor or voodoo priest. The two men argued. The priest waved a bottle of foul-smelling liquid in Vanders’s face and told him he had been “voodoo’d,” that he would die soon, and that no medical doctor could save him.[1]
Vanders staggered home and stopped eating. His wife said they kept silent because the priest had threatened to curse their children and anyone else necessary if they talked. By the time she told Doherty, the warning seemed to be coming true in the bed upstairs.[1]
Doherty did not answer with another diagnostic procedure. In the later retelling, he answered with a counter-ritual. The next morning, he called Vanders’s family to the bedside and said he had forced the priest to reveal the mechanism of the curse. The priest, Doherty claimed, had put lizard eggs into Vanders’s stomach. One lizard remained inside him, eating him from within.[2]
A nurse had been prepared in advance. She brought a syringe filled with a strong emetic. Doherty inspected it with ceremony, injected Vanders, and waited. Within minutes, Vanders began gagging and vomiting. Then Doherty reached into his black bag and produced the object he had hidden there, a green lizard.[2]
“Look what has come out of you Vance,” Doherty cried, according to the account. “The voodoo curse is lifted.” Vanders saw the lizard, recoiled toward the head of the bed, and fell into a deep sleep.[2]
The limits of a strange cure
The next day, Vanders woke alert and hungry. He regained strength quickly and was discharged from the hospital about a week later.[2] Meador later wrote that a farmer who knew Doherty and the Vanders couple verified the story to him.[1]
The case is also full of gaps. One retelling says four medical professionals corroborated the facts, but it also notes that there were no medical records and no autopsy results to prove exactly what had been wrong with Vanders.[2] What remains is a sequence, not a clean experiment: a man believed he had been cursed, stopped eating, wasted away, failed the available care, and then recovered after a doctor made the cure believable in the same language as the fear.[1][2]
The syringe made Vanders vomit. The performance gave the vomiting a meaning. And when the moment came, the proof was not on a chart or in an X-ray. It was a green lizard, waiting in Dr. Doherty’s black bag.
