Weltmer Institute of Suggestive Therapeutics

The Institute positively affected the town's economy, also attracting psychotherapists, clairvoyants and other practitioners to a community that became known as a wellness center.

Weltmer's healing method was strongly criticized by doctors in the early 1900s as ineffective voodoo and charlatanry, but the Institute continued to operate at high capacity, with a staff of more than 120, most of them stenographers and typists.

Sidney Abram Weltmer had begun his mind cure career by taking an associate on the lecture circuit and demonstrating the power of mesmerism, which he had taught himself to practice.

Crone wrote an account of his time at the institute; he claimed that he began work with scant instruction from Weltmer, who had been preoccupied.

H. Behncke wrote in his 1920 book, Pioneer Teachers, that the Weltmer Institute "may be called the foremost school for mental healing in America".

In his booklet of 1900, The Exposé of Weltmerism: Magnetic Healing De-magnetized, Prenton W. Pope described what he saw as errors in Welmer's practice and described it as "anti-Christian.

[8] In the 1910 issue of the British Medical Journal, Weltmerism was described as "one of the innumerable freaks of the charlatan fancy which flourished only on American soil.