Hoax--A History of Deception by Ian Tattersall

Author:Ian Tattersall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

In September 1924, Scientific American published the results of an extensive investigation into Albert Abrams’s treatment methods and concluded they were “without value.” Abrams had died eight months before, leaving a $2 million estate, amassed chiefly by leasing out his Electronic Reaction equipment.

30. QUACK MEDICINE AD 1910

RADIONICS

As long as there has been disease, there have been both hope and denial. Over the last century and a half the grounds for hope have grown by leaps and bounds as clinical medicine has co-opted the methods of science to design and test the efficacy of potential treatments for almost every imaginable condition that threatens our health. This has led to immeasurably better outcomes, and at the very least to more realistic perspectives on our prospects for cure. But it was not ever thus.

In a very real sense, modern medicine was ultimately born of what we would have to call quackery: from the attempt to provide treatments for a disease in the absence of any knowledge of what caused the particular condition or of how its symptoms might be effectively ameliorated. Since time immemorial, the ingestion of noxious—and sometimes fatal—substances has been indiscriminately used in the attempt to alleviate disease, along with cutting holes into the skull, bleeding, leeches, and a host of other gambits.

Nothing but blind faith (probably originally born of desperation), and later the weight of tradition, supported the efficacy of such approaches; and indeed, many such “treatments” did a great deal more damage than good—which was, of course, the reason for the main principle of the physicians’ Hippocratic Oath, initially promulgated in the fifth century BC: “First, do no harm.”

The Dynomizer looked something like a radio. Abrams claimed it could diagnose any known disease from a single drop of blood, or even from the subject’s handwriting.

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