Tricks for the wards: Can magic help us heal?
From wounded
soldiers learning card tricks to psychiatrists, occupational therapists and
modern clinical trials, the idea that magic might aid recovery has a
surprisingly long history.
They
cost threepence each. One taught tricks with the hands and string; the other
used matches, coins and playing cards. On their covers, a British soldier sits
with a magician’s wand across his knees. Published in 1915, Tricks for the Trenches & Wards
might look like another piece of First World War ephemera. Yet behind the
tricks was an idea that would later develop into the deliberate use of magic in
rehabilitation.
What
distinguished Folkard’s approach from ordinary hospital entertainment was that
the wounded man learnt the secret himself.
Even
a basic trick can require a surprising mixture of skills. Instructions have to
be understood and remembered; unfamiliar movements repeated until they become
reliable; and the finished effect communicated to somebody else. The repetition
also has an objective. A patient is not simply exercising a hand because he has
been told to do so. He is trying to make a coin disappear – and perhaps
eventually fool the man in the next bed.
One
of the great magicians of the twentieth century provides a First World War
parallel. Richard Valentine Pitchford, later famous as Cardini, was wounded at
the Somme and suffered shell shock. During his recovery he practised card
manipulation, later recalling that manipulating cards with his fingers amounted
to a form of occupational therapy. Pitchford became an exceptional manipulator,
his suave, slightly bewildered stage character apparently unable to prevent
cards, cigarettes and other objects materialising and vanishing around him. The
manual skills he developed during his wartime years became central to an
international career.
When conjuring became therapy
Twenty-five
years after Folkard, an American psychiatrist took the idea considerably
further.
Douglas Kelley was both a psychiatrist and an accomplished, prize-winning magician who later held national office in the Society of American Magicians. In 1940
he published a substantial paper, Conjuring as an Asset to Occupational
Therapy, describing his
use of magic with patients at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and
Hospital. Kelley argued that tricks were particularly suitable because they
could be learnt comparatively quickly, adapted to individual patients and
performed with inexpensive equipment. Mastering a simple effect could also
encourage the patient to try something more difficult.
Read Kelley’s full paper here.
Kelley joined the US Army and became chief psychiatrist at the 30th General Hospital in the European theatre. His work now involved servicemen suffering what was then described as combat exhaustion or battle neurosis, part of the considerable psychiatric burden created by prolonged fighting. There is no evidence that Kelley formally used conjuring in this Army work, but his pre-war interest in occupational therapy sat alongside a wartime career devoted to men whose ability to function had been damaged by combat.
After Germany’s defeat, Kelley was sent to assess senior Nazi prisoners awaiting trial, including Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess, and determine whether they were mentally fit to face proceedings at Nuremberg. Biographical accounts suggest that Kelley occasionally performed tricks during his encounters with the prisoners, apparently to relax them and establish rapport. He was assessing rather than treating these men, however, and this should not be confused with his earlier therapeutic work. His 1940 paper on conjuring therefore belongs to the early career of a psychiatrist who would soon move from civilian occupational therapy to combat psychiatry and the examination of some of the leading figures of the defeated Nazi regime.
And there were wartime examples of magic for physical rehabilitation. One came from Dr Zina Bennett, a Detroit physician and accomplished card magician who gave USO shows and repeatedly visited Percy Jones General Hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan, a major US Army centre for treating and rehabilitating wounded servicemen. In a June 1947 letter, he distinguished between performing magic for patients and teaching them tricks themselves, describing card and coin sleights that required repeated hand and finger movements and could help patients “regain the use of their hands”. Mastering a trick also gave them something to demonstrate to others and helped morale.
Another striking example was Jean Raymond Grandelaude, better known after the war as the French magician Jean Delaude. Before his arrest he had been involved with the Turma-Vengeance resistance network. Arrested in Paris in November 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he became prisoner 185688, and subsequently passed through Gross-Rosen, Nordhausen and Harzungen before surviving Bergen-Belsen. After liberation, Delaude recalled that practising the piano and the finger movements of magic helped him recover the use of his damaged hands. He went on to become a highly regarded professional manipulator, specialising in cards, billiard balls and thimbles — making his post-war career an unusually direct example of manual skill first being used for rehabilitation and then developed into an art.
A
wartime story about Slydini offers a different use of magic. According to a
later account, he encountered a wounded serviceman who had been unable to walk
for psychosomatic reasons.
The
man was reportedly walking within ten days, and Slydini later treasured a
letter of thanks from his doctors. The story cannot tell us whether the trick
contributed to the recovery, but Slydini appears to have deliberately recast a
familiar routine around the soldier’s condition. The disappearing knot became a
symbol of an obstacle that might itself disappear.
From experiment to organised therapy
After
the war, therapeutic magic began to acquire a more organised form. In the late
1950s a small group of American magicians established the National Committee
for Therapy Through Magic, encouraging performers to work with medical
professionals and teach tricks to patients. The initiative reached institutions
including the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Bellevue Hospital in New York and
Variety Children’s Hospital in Miami. Contemporary magic publications gave it
considerable coverage, although Wiseman and Watt found that it was unclear how
many magicians participated and that the initiative seems to have disappeared
by the early 1960s.
The
following two decades were not entirely empty, however. Wiseman and Watt
identify examples of healthcare professionals using performed magic rather than
teaching patients tricks. A 1971 report concerned magic being used to reinforce
positive health messages, while work published in 1973 and 1977 described its
use in psychotherapy to establish rapport. These were different from Folkard’s
and Kelley’s model of occupational therapy, but show that clinicians continued
experimenting with the unusual psychological properties of conjuring during the
1960s and 1970s.
The
larger-scale rehabilitation model returned prominently in 1981 when David
Copperfield and occupational therapist Julie DeJean developed Project Magic.
Magicians and occupational therapists taught effects selected to exercise
particular physical and cognitive skills. Depending on the trick, the patient
might work on dexterity, coordination, visual perception, spatial awareness,
memory or concentration. The American Occupational Therapy Association formally
supported the programme in 1982.
Magic
gave repetitive rehabilitation a clear objective. A pack of cards
or coin might require controlled finger movements, sequencing and speech, but
the patient was working towards an effect rather than completing an exercise
for its own sake.
Project
Magic also reached veterans’ healthcare. In 1985 Ed Forsythe was teaching magic
every week at the Veterans Administration hospital in San Diego. His pupils
included severely disabled veterans from the Second World War and other
conflicts, as well as patients with serious head and brain injuries. The tricks
were intended to develop hand and verbal skills. Forsythe himself had severe
arthritis in both hands, which gave his demonstrations particular force when
patients doubted whether their own disabilities would allow them to perform
magic.
At
Glendale Adventist Medical Center, magician Arlen Fuhrman likewise spent years
working with rehabilitation patients after therapists encouraged him to move
from performing for them to teaching them to participate themselves.
A related programme grew from magician Kevin Spencer’s own experience of rehabilitation after a serious car accident in 1988. His Healing of Magic initiative—subsequently developed as Magic Therapy—uses a structured selection of simple tricks to address motor, cognitive, communication and psychosocial goals. Whereas Project Magic traditionally brought magicians and therapists together, Spencer’s manualised approach placed greater emphasis on training rehabilitation professionals to teach the techniques themselves. The programme has since contributed to research involving children with conditions including hemiparesis and autism, although several of the published studies have been small pilot projects rather than definitive clinical trials.
Read more about Breathe Magic here.
Here
the resemblance to Folkard’s wartime idea is striking, although there is no
reason to claim a direct historical connection. The soldier manipulating a coin
in a hospital bed in 1915 and the child learning a specially selected trick a
century later belong to very different therapeutic worlds. What they share is
the transformation of repetitive activity into a task with an intelligible and
rewarding purpose. Research into Breathe Magic has reported improvements in
bimanual function and explored the physical, social and motivational mechanisms
through which the programme may work; the World Health Organization
subsequently featured it as a case study in its major review of arts and health.
Finding another way
Modern
professional magicians provide less formal examples of the same adaptability.
Steven
Frayne – Dynamo – spent lengthy periods in hospital with Crohn’s disease while
still young. Confined to bed, he used the time to practise and develop his card
skills, turning enforced inactivity into concentrated work on the craft that
would later define his career. Years later, serious illness and arthritis again
left him unable even to shuffle cards. This time he adapted differently: unable
to work physically as before, he began creating magic in his head, generating
more than 200 ideas for future effects.
Neither
Dynamo nor Dobson was receiving prescribed magic therapy. Their experiences
nevertheless show why an adaptable creative activity can remain important when
familiar physical abilities have been lost: magic could still offer
concentration, creativity, identity and the satisfaction of finding another way
to achieve an effect.
Does it actually work?
More
than a century after Folkard, researchers have begun to answer the obvious
question: does magic actually help?
In 2018 Richard Wiseman and Caroline Watt reviewed the available evidence. Studies had reported benefits ranging from physical dexterity and coordination to confidence, self-esteem and social skills. Magic also had practical advantages: elementary tricks could be learnt relatively quickly, apparatus was inexpensive, effects could be adapted to different abilities and many people were strongly motivated by the prospect of learning a secret. Much of the research, however, involved small samples or lacked adequate control groups.
By
2024 the evidence base had grown considerably. Kuan-Ting Lee and colleagues
searched six major scientific databases and identified 82 publications,
including eleven randomised controlled trials. The research encompassed
physical rehabilitation, cognitive training, psychotherapy, humour and
distraction therapy, social skills, health education, doctor-patient
relationships and even surgical techniques. The authors grouped these
applications into what they called the ‘Magicine Ennead’.
That
is a substantial advance on anecdote, although not a licence for extravagant
claims. Lee and colleagues found considerable variation in the methods and
quality of the studies and called for better-designed research with active
control groups.
More
focused evidence has followed. A systematic review and meta-analysis of
magic-themed motor training for children with unilateral spastic cerebral palsy
examined four studies involving 78 children and found a statistically
significant improvement in everyday tasks requiring both hands. Group-based
programmes and longer periods of training produced particularly encouraging
results.
The
findings do not suggest that conjuring possesses some special curative
property. A more plausible advantage is that magic combines movement,
concentration, memory, problem-solving and social interaction with an activity
many patients find intrinsically rewarding. When the coin vanishes or the
rubber band jumps, there is an immediate reason to repeat the movement and try
again.
The
relationship between magicians and wellbeing has also moved beyond formal
medicine. Wiseman has continued to explore magic and wellbeing, while Derren
Brown’s Happy: Why More or Less Everything is
Absolutely Fine approached
happiness from another direction, drawing on psychology and philosophy,
particularly Stoicism, and questioning simplistic ideas about positive
thinking. Brown was not advocating conjuring as therapy, but his work reflects
the wider interest magicians have developed in attention, belief, behaviour and
psychological wellbeing.
Back to the trenches
That
takes us back to Folkard’s two threepenny books.
He
could not have anticipated wartime psychiatry, veterans of the Second World War
learning magic in rehabilitation hospitals, professional magicians working
alongside occupational therapists or controlled clinical research. His
proposition was simpler. Give a convalescing soldier a coin, a piece of string
or a pack of cards, teach him the secret, and he has something to occupy his
mind and hands, something to practise and eventually something to perform.
Later
research has supplied names for some of what was happening: dexterity,
coordination, concentration, memory, motivation, mastery, confidence and social
interaction.
Folkard’s
own claim was more modest. He hoped that his tricks might provide ‘many a
bright moment in a tedious wait or dreary convalescence’.
A
century later, there is good evidence that the idea was worth taking seriously.
Read about millionaire magician Sir Julien Cahn and how his home at Stanford Hall was used as a World War Two hospital and is now the UK’s Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre.
If you have more stories about magic helping heal the wounded in war, comment below!
Sources
Charles Folkard (‘Draklof’), Tricks for the Trenches & Wards, Series I: Tricks with the Hands and String; Series II: Tricks with Matches, Coins, and Cards (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1915).
Douglas M. Kelley, ‘Conjuring as an Asset to Occupational Therapy’, Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation, vol. 19, no. 1 (1940), pp. 71–108.
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