This photo from the book shows Rubens Faria preparing to enter a trance and allow his body to become a 'channel.'
In this article, I am presenting excerpts from Masao Maki's autobiographical book In Search of Brazil's Quantum Surgeon: The Dr. Fritz Phenomenon (1998). Maki had first heard about Dr. Fritz on May 12, 1996. At a Miami Airport duty-free shop, a middle-aged woman asked him where he was going. He told her that he was going to Brazil on the midnight flight. She told him, "Oh yeah? So you're going to meet Dr. Fritz, eh?" She had learned (probably from a National Enquirer article published in January) about the possibility that Dr. Fritz was going to treat Christopher Reeve, the actor who was left paralyzed from a horseback riding accident.
A columnist for a Japanese New Age magazine, Maki was attending the International Transpersonal Psychology Conference in Manaus. On the first day of the conference, Dr. Stanislov Grof mentioned that a young Brazilian computer programmer was currently channeling the spirit of a German doctor who died in World War I. 'Dr. Fritz' was treating thousands of patients with an incredible success ratio.
On the final day of the conference, Maki was looking for a brochure when he found a note about a "Video showing of Dr. Fritz—Healing the Spirit" that was then taking place. After Maki watched for a short period, the video ended and the producer explained that he was in the middle of editing the video and had shown the first ten minutes as a sample. The following morning, Maki was having lunch in a hotel buffet restaurant when he saw the producer and invited him to sit at his table. Maki learned that the producer, David Sonnenschein, lived in Rio de Janeiro, where Maki was headed. Sonnenschein told him to telephone him a few days later: "If you get a chance, it might be a good idea to meet Dr. Fritz." He also said that the man who channels Dr. Fritz was a neighbor who lived in the next door apartment.
The following passage is from the chapter "Returned From World War I" of Maki's book with some inconsequential sentences omitted.
May 24
On the fourth night of my stay in Rio de Janeiro, I was able to reach David by telephone. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just got back, and I'm too busy to go with you tomorrow." But he gave me the address of Dr. Fritz's clinic.
Should I go meet this Dr. Fritz tomorrow? My inner skeptic argued, "What can you possibly hope to gain by meeting this doctor? He's probably bogus." But my curiosity won me over, and before going to sleep, I decided to seek out this miracle worker the next day.
May 25
After an exhausting search, we [Maki and the taxi driver] finally found the Penha district and Dr. Fritz's hospital. It was just past noon.
When I turned to look at the hospital across the street, I was very surprised. This big building, on the corner of Rua Quito and Rua Couto, looked nothing like any hospital I had ever seen. In fact, it was a dilapidated warehouse that had been abandoned many years before. The paint was peeling off the outside walls, and the windows that weren't broken were very dirty. It made me sad. How could this be the hospital that Dr. Stanislov Grof spoke so highly of?
Outside the front gates of the building, the scene reminded me of a festival at an Indian temple. Everywhere I looked there were people and vendors selling fruit juice and bread and incense to the crowd gathered there.
After taking the scene in for a few minutes, I decided to venture inside. Once through the gates, I was amazed to find even more people, packed wall to wall. Somehow I managed to make my way through them into another huge hall with a high ceiling covered in broken roof tiles. I couldn't believe my eyes! Inside this hall were another few hundred people. Most of the patients, dressed in cheap clothing, were obviously poor. Thirty or forty people sat in wheelchairs, and others leaned on crutches. Still others had bandages over their eyes.
"How the hell can Dr. Fritz treat all of these patients," I wondered with amazement. "There's no way one human being can fix all of these people. It's impossible."
I needed to calm down. To bring myself down to earth, I decided to count the number of patients. I divided the people into units of about one hundred and began to multiply. I counted once, then twice, then a third time. The number I got was about one thousand. How could one doctor single-handedly treat a thousand patients in one day? My curiosity was piqued, and I began to feel a sort of glimmering around my body.
About a dozen workers, wearing name tags, were organizing the patients. Another dozen or more nurses, in white uniforms, were busily preparing treatments. I searched their faces, but couldn't find anyone who looked like Dr. Fritz. Eventually, I saw what looked like a clinic room beyond the main room. As I started to go through the door, two young Brazilians, who had been organizing the patients, blocked the way. I explained to them in English that Dr. Fritz's neighbor, the movie director David Sonnenschein, had told me about Dr. Fritz, and assured them that it was okay for me to go inside. They didn't seem to understand me, but somehow I found myself inside the rather large clinic room. To my surprise, here were another 200 or so patients waiting very quietly in a dozen straight lines.
Beneath the windows along one side of the room sat about twenty obviously very ill patients in wheelchairs, attended by relatives who were looking after them. I could see the pain and anxiety in their faces.
Slowly, I became aware of some familiar music playing faintly in the background, though the noise from the crowd in the big hall next door made it difficult to hear. At first I thought, "It can't be," but when I put my ear up to a small speaker hanging from a wall, I could hear the strains of a Hindu bhajan, a prayerful song to a Hindu god. Two years before, when I was on a pilgrimage to Indian temples, I heard the same song many times. It was a song of praise to the gods Rama and Krishna. I couldn't believe I was hearing the same bhajan in a place like this. I felt something like a sacred vibration and was in awe that this vibration could reach out and make connections beyond time and space. It was deeply moving.
I looked around again and noticed a picture of the Holy Mother and other saints on the opposite wall. Beneath these sacred pictures sat a simple wooden desk and a white metal folding chair. Atop the desk stood a small statue of Jesus Christ and a vase filled with pink roses. The beauty of the flowers drew me closer, and I breathed in their fragrance. All of a sudden, I thought, "This must be Dr. Fritz's desk!"
Just then, two middle-aged nurses appeared and began speaking to me in Portuguese. I could tell they weren't trying to chase me away, because they were very polite and friendly, but they spoke very rapidly, and I couldn't understand them at all. I struggled to think how I could communicate with them. It seemed no one in the clinic spoke English. Then a powerful looking older nurse came over. She seemed to be the chief nurse, and she said to me in broken English, "Here English-speaking person. Now I bring him." Five minutes later, she came back, accompanied by a young Brazilian man wearing thick eyeglasses. He was very friendly and lively, and wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans. He smiled animatedly and asked me what country I came from and if there was anything I needed. I was very happy to find someone I could talk with.
I told him I had come to learn about Dr. Fritz, and he smiled broadly and pointed to a simple black-and-white portrait, drawn in charcoal or pencil, hanging on the wall. "This is Dr. Fritz," he said. "He was a surgeon in the German army who died in World War I. But the spirit of Dr. Fritz comes here and miraculously cures people."
I supposed this young man was a worker in this place. I liked him immediately, and decided this was a good opportunity to ask some questions. But suddenly he put his hand on my mouth and said, "I'm sorry, I have other business to attend to. Please take your time and enjoy your visit here."
As I watched him walk into the back room, I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to learn more about Dr. Fritz, but I had that happy feeling around my chest that I get whenever I meet a wonderful person.
I stepped over to the framed portrait of Dr. Fritz hanging on the wall and examined it more closely. It was a simple copy made from an original. It depicted a fat European man with a humorous expression on a bespectacled bearded face. Written on the portrait were the words, "Dr. Adolph Fritz, died 1915." It was bizarre to think that Dr. Fritz had died more than eighty years ago, yet somehow was still alive in this hospital.
As I stood contemplating the portrait, the door to the back room opened and the same young man emerged, now dressed all in white. He walked to the little desk and slowly looked around at the people in the room, smiling as if to say good-bye. Then he sat down on the folding chair and several nurses gathered around him and closed their eyes. Then they raised their hands to about shoulder height and turned their palms outward toward the young man. It seemed as though they were sending some sort of prayer energy to him.
He took off his thick eyeglasses, gently laid them on the desk, gazed at the little statue of Jesus Christ for a few seconds, then put his right elbow on the desk. With his right hand, he covered both his eyes and became very quiet. It felt like time stood still, and I gazed at him with wonder and awe. Perhaps twenty seconds of silence had passed when his head and hand slipped from his eyes and his head dropped closer to the desk's surface. Slowly then, he raised his face, and I saw it was not the same friendly face I had seen only thirty seconds before. His entire complexion had become reddish, and his eyes, without the thick glasses now, were still open and had a sort of sleepy look. At that moment, I realized with some surprise that the friendly young man was really Dr. Fritz himself.
Though I had seen the video of Dr. Fritz at the conference in Manaus, the image had been so distorted that I hadn't recognized this young Brazilian as him. "Can this really be happening?" I wondered. "Can the spirit of a doctor who died nearly eighty years ago manifest himself again through the body of another?"
My mind was too Westernized to understand or accept this phenomenon, even though it had just happened right in front of me. I noticed the impatience of my rational mind, and realized that it didn't know what to do when faced with a situation it couldn't easily understand. I decided I didn't need to come to a rational conclusion just then. The only thing I could do was closely observe this phenomenon while trying to keep a cool researcher's eye. To calm down, I inhaled deeply three times. Then I focused all my attention on Dr. Fritz again.
The chief nurse brought in about two hundred forms, which had been filled out by first-time clients, and placed them on the desk in front of Dr. Fritz. Each piece of paper described the symptoms or illness of a different patient. Dr. Fritz began sorting the papers into two stacks, one for patients requiring immediate treatment and the other for patients whom he could see later. The speed with which he sorted the forms was beyond my imagination. He spent no more than one or two seconds on each, placing it to the right or left. That could only mean he was not reading the papers, I realized, but sorting them by feel.
Sometimes he would stop and turn his head a little. Then without looking at the page, he would place his finger on the surface and move it to the right or left. I guessed that he must be sensing how serious the patient's illness was through his fingertips. I couldn't understand how he did this. It just blew my mind.
In the middle of this work, he looked up and spoke to the chief nurse, and his voice was totally different from the voice I had heard before he channeled Dr. Fritz. The young man's soft, rather sweet voice had become husky and low.
In fewer than ten minutes, he finished sorting the papers, arose from the table, and walked into the back room, accompanied by a few nurses. As he did so, he passed right in front of me. I tried to read his facial expression, whether he noticed me or not. There was no sign he remembered me, even though we had met only fifteen minutes before.
After they were gone, another nurse came to me and began pointing toward the room where Dr. Fritz had gone, saying, "Dr. Fritz. Operação." She repeated this until I understood that Dr. Fritz was performing an operation in the other room. Next to the door of that room, I saw a poster of a nurse with a finger to her lips. Underneath the picture was printed the word "Silencio," or "Silence." I became very curious about what was going on behind that door, but it seemed to be a sacrosanct area that no one could enter without permission. So for the time being, I waited on the other side with two hundred others.
After about an hour, Dr. Fritz emerged with a more serious expression than before. Three nurses were waiting for him with a rolling cart full of hypodermic needles filled with a dark brown liquid. As soon as he came into the room, he picked up one of the needles and began injecting the patients at the front of the line.
He spoke one or two words to each patient, then injected the needle rather randomly into some part of his or her body, seemingly paying little intention to what he was doing. The speed at which he diagnosed and injected each patient was beyond my ability to comprehend. Some patients had brought an X-ray with them. Dr. Fritz would hold the X-ray up to the electric light for about five seconds, explain something to them, and then inject them very quickly. He used a new needle for each person, but it seemed as though all the fluid in the needles was the same. I wondered if the dark brown liquid was some kind of magical miracle wonder drug that was suitable for everyone.
There were many children and babies in the room, as well. I know children can be very sensitive to pain, especially injections, but not one child expressed any pain when injected. In fact, hardly any children in that room were crying. Dr. Fritz appeared very fond of them. He gave each one a big smile, sometimes pinching them affectionately or touching their head or body in a joyful friendly way.
Some patients he injected near the eyes, others near the nose, others in the back of the neck. The needles were quite long. I watched the people closely as they were injected. Most didn't change their facial expression at all. It seemed they felt no pain whatsoever. I saw one old man being injected in his spine, the long needle penetrating deeply into his body. All the while he smiled and talked with Dr. Fritz.
Dr. Fritz finished treating these two hundred or so patients in about two hours. Watching all this, I became so moved that I felt like crying. Perhaps some pure part of my mind was reacting to some kind of energy vibrations overflowing from Dr. Fritz.
All at once, I felt I understood the true meaning of my unexpected nine days in Rio de Janeiro. I had thought it was the tour company's mistake, but now I understood that the universe was giving me an opportunity to meet Dr. Fritz. I didn't know what would happen or what I would do, but I had at least five days left. "This will help my spiritual growth in some new and different way," I thought. "I must come back here as much as I can for the next five days." I stayed by Dr. Fritz's side until nine o'clock that evening, although I couldn't communicate in English with anyone.
Finally, Dr. Fritz finished treating all one thousand patients, and began injecting the remaining nurses and workers. Looking at his face, I could see that the many hours of non-stop treatment had made him very tired. His complexion reddened visibly as he went along, and became more and more severe. His voice deepened even further, and sometimes he yelled at people.
Finally, his work done, he sat down on the same white folding chair where he had started out eight hours before. The older members who remained raised their hands toward him. Then, in exactly the same manner as before, he covered his eyes with his right hand, his head dropped toward the desk, and Dr. Fritz disappeared. In a few seconds, the nice young Brazilian man was back.
It was a very dramatic transformation. His face changed completely, and he replaced his eyeglasses. Smiling softly, he looked around the room at everyone. He was young and friendly again. He stood up, walked over to me, shook my hand, and said in a cheerful voice, "So how was it? How did you like Dr. Fritz?"
"I was very moved," I said. "Is it okay for me to come back tomorrow?"
He smiled broadly and said, "Oh yes, yes please! You are very very welcome here." Then he walked out of the hospital with his wife, who had been tending to paperwork throughout the day.
During another trip to Rio de Janeiro later in 1996, Masao Maki reported discussing Dr. Fritz in relation to actor Christopher Reeve. Rubens Faria told him about a visit to New York in June: "Dr. Fritz did one simple operation, but during the operation even my wife, who I brought along as a helper, wasn't allowed to come inside the operating room." Faria was uncertain about accepting an invitation to return to New York: "When I think about the thousands of patients who are relying on Dr. Fritz every day at this clinic, then sometimes I feel it is better to treat the thousands of patients here . . . ."
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