Dr. Andrés Mateo, a Mexican doctor of philosophy, and a student of parapsychology, particularly of psychic healing, substantiated Andrija’s conviction that Pachita was “a marvelous gift that humanity cannot lose, and had to be spread all over the world.” This Dr. Mateo too had witnessed Pachita’s “breathtaking transplantations,” as he wrote to Andrija. “I have been not only a close witness, but actually an actor – or co-actor – to her surgical operations which were devoid of any kind of anesthesia or asepsia, or even basic cleanness, with no electric light – only a gloomy wax candle, with a dirty rusty knife (more so than Arigo’s), opening with her bare, dirty, bloody hands skin, flesh, tissues, bones, extracting tumors, exchanging whole femurs, or stomachs — and transplanting whole brains (!), both kidneys, or a whole uterus. I personally, with my own hands, have helped to keep open both sides of a woman’s skull while Pachita extirpated the woman’s whole brain, and put in its place a whole new one, with bulb hanging and all — Something Frankesteinian indeed.”