David and Lucille Kahn’s enthusiasm and love for, and dedication to, Edgar Cayce and his healing work became a lifelong commitment for this wonderful couple that began in the early 1900s, when David first met Cayce, and continued, in partnership, after David and Lucille married in 1927.
In turn Cayce regarded them as members of his own family. In a letter to Case 1294, Cayce wrote: “We had a lovely visit with Lucille and David [Kahn], Just hope we did not wear out our welcome, but I think of—and feel toward them—as if they were my own people, know I couldn’t love them any better were they my own blood kin.”
Since hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the readings were given in the Kahn home, David had firsthand knowledge of the many cures brought about by Cayce’s unorthodox diagnostic technique and subsequent treatments.
—H.J.R.
David Kahn Meets Edgar Cayce
One day, stretched out on the massage table, David described his first encounter with Cayce, who had come to Lexington to help a paralyzed neighbor. David was selected to give the instructions that Cayce needed to receive as he went into a trance and to bring him out of it. David was only fifteen years old at that time, but he said the incident changed his life and influenced him to dedicate a good portion of his efforts to the Cayce work.
The neighbor, Mrs. William De Laney, was remarkably improved after Cayce diagnosed the source of her trouble as an old injury to the spine from a long-forgotten accident. Osteopathic treatment and a specially compounded medication were recommended and administered and Mrs. De Laney made a remarkable recovery. This “miracle” made a deep impression on the young, impressionable David.
Since hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the readings were given in the Kahn home, David had firsthand knowledge of the many cures brought about by Cayce’s unorthodox diagnostic technique and subsequent treatments. It must be remembered that at that time (1931-’32), when I was developing such a strong interest in Cayce, none of the bestselling books about the psychic and “sleeping prophet of Virginia Beach” had been written and the readings had not yet been coded and indexed to become such a rich storehouse of material for writers, students, scientists, and the faithful to study. Except for occasional newspaper stories, the chief source of information was word of mouth. In David Kahn, Cayce had a powerful clarion trumpeting to anyone who would stop and listen for five minutes the wonders of Cayce and his cures.
At the time I had David Kahn on the massage table, trying to relax him, he was a bustling and successful businessman, whose faith in Cayce’s diagnosis, treatment, prophecies, philosophy, and spirituality were the cornerstones of his life.
It did not take much encouragement to get David Kahn to tell me Cayce’s life story—a story told so well and so often that I shall not repeat it here. If, however, there are any among you who have not read Cayce’s biography, I refer you to David’s My Life with Edgar Cayce and Mary Ellen Carter’s My Years with Edgar Cayce: The Personal Story of Gladys Davis Turner, as well as to those written by two other friends and patients: Tom Sugrue and Jess Stearn.
I learned that Cayce had cured his wife, Gertrude, of tuberculosis by having her inhale brandy fumes from an old charred oak keg and by the administration of a certain narcotic given in unorthodox dosage; how he had saved his son Hugh Lynn’s eyes, burned by a photographer’s exploding flash powder, with poultices of tannic acid.
Biographies of Edgar Cayce
There Is a River by Thomas Sugrue (A.R.E. Press, 1997).
Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet by Sydney Kirkpatrick (Riverhead Books, 2001).
Edgar Cayce—The Sleeping Prophet by Jess Stearn (A.R.E. Press, 1997).
Hugh Lynn Cayce: About My Father’s Business by A. Robert Smith (The Donning Company, 1988).
A Prophet in His Own Country by Jess Stearn (Bantam Books, 1989).
My Life with Edgar Cayce by David Kahn and Will Oursler (Doubleday & Co., 1970).
The Lost Memoirs of Edgar Cayce: My Life as a Seer by A. Robert Smith (St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
My Years with Edgar Cayce: The Personal Story of Gladys Davis Turner by Mary Ellen Carter (Harper & Row, 1972).
I learned that Cayce had cured his wife, Gertrude, of tuberculosis by having her inhale brandy fumes from an old charred oak keg and by the administration of a certain narcotic given in unorthodox dosage; how he had saved his son Hugh Lynn’s eyes, burned by a photographer’s exploding flash powder, with poultices of tannic acid. —H.J.R.
The more I heard, the more anxious I was to meet the man who—without education or training—had helped thousands of people since he began giving physical readings in 1901. I envisioned Cayce as a person of commanding presence with piercing eyes, majestic gestures, and turban-draped head. But the Edgar Cayce I finally met in 1932 was a tall, slightly stooped man with wide eyes, an open face, an extremely soft-spoken manner. He looked like a minister of some quiet country church or like the Sunday school teacher he was all his life.
We met for lunch and as soon as we were seated at the table he took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and drew deeply on it, obviously inhaling. He must have caught my look of disapproval and surprise, for he said, a little apologetically, “It’s the natural leaf.” (The readings say that the natural leaf is less harmful than the combinations ordinarily put on the market in packaged tobacco.) He added, “Besides, I just can’t give up smoking.”
It was the only point of real difference between us. I do not approve of smoking.
Then we ordered the meal. I noticed he did not pay much attention to the rules of diet that he himself prescribed in the readings. Cayce confessed he was not a nutritional specialist. “In fact, I have no medical knowledge at all. I am just a channel for the information that comes through in the readings.”
—H.J.R.
Then we ordered the meal. I noticed he did not pay much attention to the rules of diet that he himself prescribed in the readings. Cayce confessed he was not a nutritional specialist. “In fact, I have no medical knowledge at all. I am just a channel for the information that comes through in the readings.”— H.J.R.
Cayce’s Successful Treatments
Cayce treated incurable psoriasis successfully with osteopathic adjustments and a simple mixture of sulfur, cream of tartar, and Rochelle salts, plus liberal dosages of mullein and saffron teas and elm water. A mysterious disease sweeping the South—later identified as pellagra—was corrected with a diet of “turnip greens”; heart disease was rediagnosed as toxemia and miraculously disappeared when the subject was given a series of colonics, sweat baths, massage, and hydrotherapy; tumors were melted away on a diet of grapes and daily applications of grape poultices; castor oil packs healed broken bones, cured liver and gallbladder ailments, and soothed epileptics; peanut oil relieved arthritis; three almonds a day were given to prevent tumors and cancer; an apple diet for three days was a Cayce cleansing routine that cleared up more sins of the body than the Garden of Eden’s serpent whispered to Eve. Stony scleroderma softened and healed under the Cayce treatment. The stories of healing seemed really miracle cures.
Actually, he was being modest. Although he had never been formally trained, he had studied the readings for thirty-odd years, and by the time I met him he was no longer the uninformed country boy he had been in his youth, when he started using his remarkable gift of clairvoyance. He had learned and had come to know a great deal. So began a working partnership that has lasted now for forty-five years—fifteen wonderful years while Edgar Cayce lived on this plane—and another thirty years posthumously in my daily practice of natural, drugless therapy, from which thousands of people say they have benefited.
In