by Lydia Kang
Too busy to make it into Abrams’s office? No worries. Eventually, as radionics progressed, the patient’s presence was not even necessary, and a skilled practitioner could detect the illness just by running the hair or blood (or handwriting) sample through the Dynamizer.
The electronic reactions were notoriously fickle. When collecting a sample, a patient had to face west, of course, and be in dim lighting, without any orange-or red-colored material in the room. Conveniently, the presence of skeptical minds could also drive away the vibrational reactions.
Radionics could not only supposedly detect disease, but it could also determine a person’s sex, pregnancy stage, age, geographic location, and, of all things, the person’s religion. Abrams even had a chart printed in 1922 that showed the abdominal areas of dullness for the various Christian denominations.
What’s more, Abrams claimed to be able to use a handwriting sample from a dead person to identify what caused his or her demise. The Dynamizer was turned on the signatures of Samuel Pepys (syphilis), Dr. Samuel Johnson (syphilis), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (syphilis), Oscar Wilde (syphilis), and Edgar Allan Poe (“the common cold”—just kidding, “syphilis and a reaction of dipsomania”).
The Dynamizer was ready and willing to boldly declare that many of literary history’s luminaries died of sexually transmitted disease. If you’re shaking your head in total befuddlement, we don’t blame you. Don’t worry, though, because home courses in radionics were available for $200 cash, paid in advance.
Albert Abrams looking like a doctor as he manipulates a totally bullshit machine.
The Lie of a Cure and the Rise of a Cult
Okay, so you’ve got your diagnosis now, courtesy of the Dynamizer, and because it was the Dynamizer, you probably just found out that you have syphilis. What to do next? Enter the Oscilloclast, the name for the radionics machine that could cure your ills (and should also be the name of someone on WrestleMania). To cure your syphilis, you would need to lease an Oscilloclast from Abrams, for an initial payment of either $200 or $250 (it was higher if wired for direct current, rather than alternating), plus $5 per month in perpetuity. Eventually, the doctor was netting $1,500 per month from leasing fees paid to him by lesser quacks.
Oscilloclast machines claimed to operate by directing radio waves at the patient. These radio waves were tuned to specific frequencies that would apparently kill off the infection or disease. “Specific drugs must have the same vibratory rate as the diseases against which they are effective,” said Abrams. “That is why they cure.” Or so the doctor believed. By extension, Oscilloclast machines could be tuned to the same “vibratory rate,” that is, radio frequency, to cure disease as well.
Leased Oscilloclasts, however, had a particular condition, which the lessee had to agree to. You could not open the machine, which was “hermetically sealed.” Opening the device would disrupt its functioning (and totally void that awesome Oscilloclast warranty).
The real reason you couldn’t open the machine was that it contained nothing but a jumble of electrical parts wired together to no particular purpose. It was “the kind of device a ten-year-old boy would build to fool an eight-year-old boy,” wrote a physicist after breaking the sacred radionics oath.
That consumers were essentially playing with toys didn’t matter. Abrams struck gold with both the Oscilloclast and the Dynamizer. Their popularity largely stemmed from a simple psychological trick that was artfully exploited by Abrams and his followers: convince a person, through a quasi-religious medical ritual, that he has a disease such as cancer. Then offer to cure the person with the Oscilloclast. Soon, the patient is happily free of cancer, a disease he never had in the first place. The patient can then spread the word among his friends. “I was so close to dying, you wouldn’t believe it. But, thankfully, I heard about this new cure called radionics. They hooked me up to a machine, and poof, my cancer was gone!” That’s powerful stuff and quickly builds a word-of-mouth marketing campaign.
The cult of radionics catapulted into the national spotlight when Upton Sinclair became a believer. Sinclair, author of the classic novel exposé of the meatpacking industry The Jungle, was a household name when he lent his credibility to radionics by writing an article entitled “The House of Wonders” for Pearson’s Magazine in June 1922. In the article, Sinclair praises and promotes Abrams and his methods:
I decided to go to San Francisco and investigate. I planned to spend a day or two, but what I found there held me a couple of weeks, and it might have been months or even years, if urgent duties had not called me home… . This eager and excitable little Jewish doctor is either one of the greatest geniuses in the history of mankind, or else one of the greatest maniacs. But present him with a new idea, some way to verify or perfect his work, he pounces on it like a cat. He is a veritable incarnation of Nietzsche’s phrase about the human soul, which “hungers for knowledge as the lion for his food.” There is no experiment he will not try… . I speak the literal truth when I say that after a week in Abrams’s clinic I had lost all feeling of the horror of the three dread diseases, tuberculosis, syphilis, and cancer.
Sinclair’s piece led to a variety of articles in magazines across the country and in Britain. As radionics grew in popularity on both sides of the Atlantic, however, it also began to draw the critical eye of skeptics. Skeptics like the American Medical Association.
Either the Oscilloclast or a machine built by a ten-year-old boy to fool an eight-year-old boy.
Radionics Loses the Signal
In a brilliant plot, the AMA sent the blood of a healthy male guinea pig to a radionics practitioner for testing, concocting a backstory for the blood sample, claiming it was from a “Miss Bell.” The test results came back saying that Miss Bell had cancer (“six ohms” worth of it), in addition to an infection of her left frontal sinus and a streptococcic infection of her left fallopian tube.
Scientific American followed suit, launching a yearlong investigation into radionics theories. The magazine published monthly updates between October 1923 and September 1924. The results:
This committee finds that the claims advanced on behalf of the electronic reactions of Abrams, and of electronic practice in general, are not substantiated; and it is our belief that they have no basis in fact. In our opinion, the so-called electronic treatments are without value.
Damning words from a respected publication, followed shortly by a similar report in 1924 from a British committee who found the practice “scientifically unsound” and “ethically unjustified.” The press also published a case of an elderly man who had visited the Mayo Clinic and was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer. The poor man turned to radionics and was told he was “completely cured” after the use of an Oscilloclast machine. He died a month later.
Sinclair, meanwhile, was quick to jump to Abrams’s defense, writing:
He has made the most revolutionary discovery of this or any other age. I venture to stake whatever reputation I ever hope to have that he has discovered the great secret of the diagnosis and cure of all major diseases.
Thankfully for Sinclair’s future reputation, he also wrote a social justice masterpiece, so we can all just shuffle uncomfortably and turn a blind eye while he unleashes his fervent support for unabashed quackery. Despite Sinclair leaping to its defense, radionics lost much of its credibility from the Scientific American reports. Its founder, however, was no longer alive to witness the demise.
By the time Abrams died of pneumonia at age sixty, shortly after radionics became enormously successful, he was a very wealthy man. The Abrams estate was worth $2 million in 1924, a sad commentary on humanity’s gullibility. In a curious postscript, Abrams claimed to be able to predict a person’s death date with the Dynamizer. He correctly predicted that he would die in January 1924.
Pests Be Gone!
T. Galen Hieronymus, an inventor in Kansas City, Missouri, built his own radionics device in 1949. The “Hieronymus machine” could allegedly detect “eloptic e
nergy,” which was said to emanate from all life. Hieronymus machines were used for agriculture, of all things, especially as alternatives to pesticides.
For fun times, ask your local organic farmer if he used a Hieronymous machine!
The Future of Radionics
In the vacuum created by Abrams’s death, various other quack imitators quickly arose to fight for a share of the “healing via radio waves” market. None was more successful than Ruth B. Drown of Hollywood, California, who created her own radionics machines supposedly capable of healing anyone no matter where they were in the world.
Drown also found a willing audience for her quackery, treated some thirty-five thousand patients in her time, and sold her machines widely, particularly to other practitioners of fringe medicine. She also would take on cases without prompting.
In the early 1950s, film star Tyrone Power and his wife were injured in a car accident in Italy. Drown used one of her long-distance radio machines (the Model 300, for the curious) to send healing radio waves their way. Because her machines, like Abrams’s Dynamizer, required some sort of sample from the patient, Drown used samples of the power couple’s blood that she claimed to already have in her “library.” (What? How? What?)
Tyrone and his wife recovered from the car accident and returned home to America. A bill for Drown’s radionics services awaited them.
Radionics has always had a mystical element to it and, despite all the scientific evidence condemning the theory, it has managed to retain some devotees. Today, you can find radionics practitioners scattered around the United States. The focus, however, has shifted to the amplification of your thoughts into the greater consciousness of the universe. By using radionics, you can supposedly force your will on the world. You might use that ability to better your health or to find a lover or to get a great stock tip and make a pile of money. You can even make your own radionics machine. A simple Google search will bring up some free schematics. Maybe someday there will even be a Boy Scouts badge in “radionics.”
Conventional medicine, meanwhile, obviously uses radio waves for communicating with dispatchers and paramedics. But many don’t realize that radio frequency–driven heat energy is used to ablate or burn away problematic tissues. It can cure some types of heart arrhythmias, tumors, and varicose veins.
Perhaps somewhere, poor Upton Sinclair is feeling a little vindicated for his enthusiasm over the radio wave craze.
28
The King’s Touch
Of Scrofula, Macbeth, Kingly Touching Ceremonies, a Miracle Horse, Medicinal Coins, and the Decayed Arm of Saint Louis
The medieval era was an ugly time to be alive. Without the benefit of modern medicine, all sorts of gruesome and disfiguring diseases rampaged their way through the European populace. Goiters, tumors, skin rashes, edema, cleft lips. But one of the worst of the skin diseases in Britain and France was scrofula, better known in its time as the “king’s evil.”
Scrofula (derived from the Latin word scrofa, meaning a breeding sow, because sows were thought to be susceptible to the disease) is a form of tuberculosis that infects the lymph nodes in your neck, producing large, unseemly growths that continue to expand with time. Rarely fatal, it is, however, quite disfiguring. Scrofula, as well as a host of other mysterious skin diseases, was typically referred to as the “king’s evil” because it required the touch of a king to be cured.
Scrofula in action.
So, you know, no worries. If you get a large, continually growing outbreak of scrofula on your neck, all you need to do is find a king. Once he’s touched you, you’re good to go. Good-bye disfiguring lumps.
Or so it seemed to the eleventh-century residents of Britain and France, when the practice of kings touching scrofula-infected peasantry became legitimized as a medical practice. As a demonstration of their divinely granted healing prowess, King Edward the Confessor of England (c. 1000–1066) and King Philip I of France (1052–1108) began holding public exhibitions of scrofula healing. Peasants burdened with the disease gathered at a pompous royal ceremony where the kings touched the victims, theoretically curing them.
Parliament member Samuel Pepys described such a ceremony in 1660, a few hundred years later, when Charles II sat on the throne:
His Majesty began first to touch for ye evil according to custom, thus: his Majesty sitting under his state in the Banqueting-House, the surgeon cause the sick to be brought or led up to the throne, where they, kneeling, ye king strokes their faces or cheeks with both his hands at once, at which instant, a chaplain in his formalities, says, “He put his hands upon them and healed them.”
It didn’t hurt that, if left untreated, some cases of scrofula will seem to head into remission. Or at least with enough frequency to make it seem like the king’s touch could have been a major contributor to—or the sole reason for—a cure.
Magic coins.
Another reason for the popularity of king’s touch ceremonies among the British peasantry was the chance to receive a special gold coin dubbed an “Angel” for the image of St. Michael minted on its front. After being touched by the king, the peasant was given this special coin, first minted in 1465. These souvenirs would go on to become prized family heirlooms and were assumed to maintain a little bit of that kingly healing magic inside them. People would wear them on special chains around their necks and rub the coins over their bodies when they were suffering from ailments.
It’s not difficult to imagine that physical contact with a king—or queen, for that matter—combined with the receipt of a “magic coin,” might have inspired awe and wonder in the medieval peasantry. Deeply entrenched in a serfdom economy and without the benefit of modern education, such an experience could quite conceivably generate a powerful placebo effect, possibly helping scrofula symptoms to retreat.
More magic coins.
The kings and queens, meanwhile, do not appear to have been concerned about catching scrofula themselves. Granted it’s pretty easy to just, you know, touch yourself if you’re a king and cure the disease before the rest of the population realizes you have it. But can you imagine the public relations nightmare if a king who practiced the touch came down with scrofula himself? Because the practice died down before we understood how contagious diseases spread, it’s safe to assume that the kings and queens who participated in the ceremony genuinely believed that there wasn’t a chance in hell they could catch scrofula from their subjects. It was really just a happy fluke of history (from the monarchy’s perspective, anyway) that none of them, apparently, ever did.
Kingly Legitimacy via Touching, or Too Legit to Quit
The royal touch even makes an appearance in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when a doctor informs Malcolm and Macduff that King Edward the Confessor is busy touching scrofula patients at the moment:
Malcolm: Comes the king forth, I pray you?
The Doctor: Ay, sir, there are a crew of wretched souls, That stay his cure. Their malady convinces The great assay of art, but at his touch— Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand— They presently amend.
In fact, the royal touch is one of the reasons Malcolm and Macduff enlist King Edward the Confessor—a “true king” because of his divinely granted healing powers—to help them overthrow Macbeth. Shakespeare was definitely ripping from the headlines here: Throughout history, the king’s touch had the extraordinary political benefit of legitimizing a king’s rule in the eyes of the public.
After Edward the Confessor and Philip I in the eleventh century, the ability to cure scrofula by the laying on of hands became viewed as divinely inherited. Only the “true king” could do it. Predictably, the ability appeared to pass down through the strict familial descent of parent to child, thus helping to preserve dynastic control over a kingdom.
Touched by a King.
The divine right to rule, demonstrated in part by the healing powers of the king’s touch, became such an important aspect of kingly legitimacy that English rulers kept it up for seven hundred years and French ruler
s for eight hundred years. One might argue that you can track the popularity of a monarchy by how desperately it clings to its royal legitimacy. It’s almost as if the populace gets reminded of the royal touch whenever the king needs a boost in his approval rating. Funny that.
Take England. With the notable exception of Henry IV—who touched a staggering fifteen hundred victims in a single ceremony—rulers practiced the king’s touch somewhat indifferently, stroking only a handful of patients each year, until a major spike in the seventeenth century. Then things got serious. Charles II (1630–1685) opened the floodgates, touching some ninety-two thousand scrofula patients during his twenty-five year reign, averaging about thirty-seven hundred people per year.
And why might he have wanted to touch so many people? Well, the monarchy was on pretty shaky grounds in those days. Charles’s own father, Charles I, was beheaded in 1649, during the English Civil War. Charles II was subsequently defeated in battle by Oliver Cromwell in 1651, fleeing to safety across the Channel to mainland Europe. England then spent nine years toying with the English Commonwealth, before finally inviting Charles II back from exile in 1660 in the turmoil following Cromwell’s death.
So the king had a clear and obvious legitimacy objective, and he could hardly get scrofula patients through the palace gates fast enough. As in the wise words of the late-twentieth-century bard, MC Hammer, Charles II was indeed too legit to quit.
And yet, all the scrofula-stroking in the world couldn’t prevent the fall of Charles’s House of Stuart when Queen Anne died in 1714. But the scrappy family wouldn’t let exile and the Hanoverian monarchy keep them down. They persistently clung to their claims on the British throne, launching several Jacobite rebellions in the eighteenth century. Their followers also spread the rumor that the Stuarts could still perform the miracle of the king’s touch. (“See, our king can still cure scrofula with his touch. Isn’t it obvious that God favors him and he has the divine right to sit on the British throne?”) It didn’t help: All of the Jacobite rebellions, although romantically entangled with simmering conceptions of Scottish nationalism, ended in failure.