Toward Ecosophy

The transition from the investigations of Mesmer and Reichenbach to contemporary radionics began with Dr. Albert Abrams, the gentleman on the left. Born in San Francisco in 1863, he began his medical studies at a local college, got his M.D., then -- in the usual fashion in those days -- went abroad to get a second degree, which he received from the prestigious Heidelberg University medical school in Germany in 1882. After further study at medical schools in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, he returned to San Francisco and hung out his shingle. He became one of the most respected neurologists on the west coast, taught for fourteen years at the Cooper College medical school, and was elected vice-president of the California State Medical Society in 1889. 

You need to know three things about medicine at the end of the nineteenth century to understand what followed. The first is that the pharmaceutical industry didn't yet have the deathgrip over medicine that it has since achieved, and physicians were open to using things other than drugs and surgery to treat illness. The second is that medical experimentation wasn't yet restricted to big laboratories funded and controlled by big corporations; many physicians experimented in their own spare time. The third is that medicine in those days was still a hands-on practice, and palpation and percussion of the abdomen -- that is to say, probing and tapping the patient's belly with the fingers -- was a standard diagnostic method. 

So the learned and respected Dr. Abrams pursued a series of research projects in his spare time, like many of his colleagues. He was very interested in percussion of the abdomen as a diagnostic tool, and found that under certain very specific conditions -- the patient had to be standing, and facing a particular direction -- percussion would accurately diagnose a range of diseases.  The one problem was that patients who were very sick couldn't stand up for the prolonged session of percussion Abrams used. So, drawing on the theory that nerve impulses were electrical in nature -- standard medical opinion in his time -- Abrams decided to see if he could hook up a patient with a healthy volunteer using copper headbands, a copper plate under the feet, and wires connecting them. He did, and he found he could get the same diagnostic reactions in the volunteer. 

This was fascinating, and it became even more so when he hooked up rheostats (variable resistors) into the wires in an attempt to fine-tune the reaction. He found quite reliably that certain rheostat settings made the percussive response much louder, but only if the patient had some specific illness.  He proceeded to run more tests and build more machines, and got stranger and stranger results.  He found, for example, that he could take a blood sample from a patient, hook it up to his machines, and get a diagnostic reading from the volunteer's abdomen.  

He also started looking into possibilities for treatment using the same principle. The idea of using low-power radio waves for healing was common in the medical scene in those days -- one such method, short-wave diathermy, had already shown considerable promise -- and so he set out to build machines that would use his resistance settings to beam healing radio waves into patients. The sort of giddy mad-scientist hardware shown above soon gave way to elegant Victorian devices like the one on the right -- the first radionics machines, though the term hadn't been invented yet. 

So did other physicians and the scientific community in general respond to this by saying, "Good heavens, Abrams is a respected physician with a good track record, so we ought to investigate this ourselves"?  No, of course not. He got the same response from them that Mesmer and Reichenbach did. They pulled a Randi -- ad hominem attacks followed by strenuous efforts not to replicate his results, which got lots of publicity in the press and the medical journals. They recognized, as Abrams apparently never did, that the results he was getting could not be the product of ordinary electricity, but had to derive from something else -- the same "something else" that Mesmer and Reichenbach had been investigating, a "something else" that mainstream science insisted did not, could not, and must not exist. 

The medical industry was all but unregulated in his time, however, for reasons that today's physicians don't like to talk about.  Medicine had been heavily regulated in the US at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but that resulted in a very low quality of care at sky-high prices, and state legislatures responded by throwing out most legal restrictions on medical practice and allowing the market to do its job. That enabled Abrams to continue his work unhindered, and publish several detailed books on his methods until his death in 1934.  Later investigators weren't so lucky.