Looking up the rickety stairs of the run-down building on Melbourne's Pitt Street, Mrs Spinks was deeply afraid. She had been suffering near-uncontrollable vaginal bleeding for months, accompanied by dizzyingly painful cramps in her stomach. She had consulted a number of Melbourne's physicians – including the notorious Dr James Beaney, whom Melbourne society whispered had murdered a bar-maid when he had operated upon her blind-drunk – but none of these eminent male physicians had been able to help her. They had only prodded her painfully with terrifying metal implements and recommended grizzly sounding surgeries. She was left penniless and hopeless.
At the end of her tether (she had consulted – unsuccessfully – a mesmerist who boasted he could heal her through the power of electricity), Mrs Spinks had unexpectedly received a recommendation from her neighbour in the cramped building she lived in in Collingwood – one of Melbourne's new urban slums – who swore by a marvellous new ‘faith-healing' doctor. All of Collingwood was supposedly now seeing ‘the Dr Alexander Dowie', a charismatic Scot who had left the Presbyterian church to found his own ‘Free Christian Tabernacle'. Any Sunday, and on several evenings during the week, shabbily dressed invalids could be seen pouring into the Tabernacle on Pitt Street in order to experience what the tabloids breathlessly recounted: the electrifying experience of Dowie or his wife, Jane, laying hands on them and praying for their bodily healing in the name of ‘Zion', or the coming Kingdom of God.
This is the story of the international success of John Alexander Dowie's faith-healing church among the working-class residents of the newly industrialised cities of the late 19th-century. While Zionism is almost always connected to Jewish promotion of the state of Israel, the experience of individuals such as Mrs Spinks underscores that ‘Zion' could hold an entirely different meaning for urban Protestants of 100 or so years ago. By the turn of the last century, about 20,000 working-class women and men in worldwide urban centres such as Melbourne, Chicago and Johannesburg had discovered Zionism as a form of highly embodied, profoundly physical Christianity that offered powerful redemption for diseased bodies and their frequently difficult experience of city-living.
Melbourne – only declared a city in 1847 – had seen new slums sprout up almost overnight, over-crowded and with lamentable sanitation. Disease was a fact of life and Melbourne's churches and philanthropic associations were vocal in their sanctimonious ‘poor-shaming' recommendations about what would restore the working poor's health: abstention from drink and saloons, better hygiene and, above all, increased attendance at church. Dowie, however, founded one of a small group of religious organisations which positioned themselves as more populist alternatives for the city's working poor. Along with the rambunctious Salvation Army and its infamous street processions, Dowie's church was part of a broader interest in so-called ‘divine healing' among late 19th-century Protestants, aimed at saving the body as well as the soul, and specifically responding to contemporary anxieties regarding the perceived unhealthy effects of city life.
But by 1882, Dowie and his wife, accompanied by their two children, had set sail from Melbourne for San Francisco. In common with other Protestant divine healers, Dowie was inspired by missionary zeal; his ultimate goal was broader then merely establishing his movement in Australia and he sought to establish a chain of ‘Divine Healing Associations' throughout the world. After a brief sojourn in San Francisco (the hostility of the established churches drove him away) Dowie and his family settled in Chicago in 1892. In large part, their move was motivated by the city's status as the home of the World's Fair. Along with hundreds of Protestant clergymen who flocked to the city in search of souls among the visitors to the Fair, Dowie decided that the occasion offered an unmissable opportunity for divine healing to take root in the Midwest and North America. Unable to afford an actual site in the Fair, Dowie established the ‘Zion Tabernacle' in a rickety wooden structure on the Fair's perimeter, opposite Buffalo Bill's ‘Wild West Show'. One of his most famous successes was healing Buffalo Bill's niece, Sadie Cody, who visited the Zion Tabernacle and whose positive publicity in the Chicago Tribune attracted thousands of visitors.
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