INDIVIDUAL MEDICAL quacks in the United States, who have not founded a “school,” but nevertheless achieved a wide following, are legion. It would be impossible to survey completely even the major ones—such a task would require a lifetime of research and many volumes. A few men, however, stand out as particularly unusual or amusing, and it is with these individuals that this and the following two chapters will be concerned.
America’s first great quack was Dr. Elisha Perkins (1740-1799). The doctor had a theory that metals draw diseases out of the body, and in 1796 patented a device consisting of two rods, each three inches long. One rod was supposed to be an alloy of copper, zinc, and gold; the other—iron, silver, and platinum. By drawing “Perkins’ Patented Metallic Tractor” downward over the ailing part, the disease was yanked out.
Perkins sold his tractors for five guineas each to such notables as George Washington, whose entire family used it, and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth. His son, Benjamin D. Perkins (Yale, class of ’94) made a fortune selling the tractors in England. In Copenhagen, twelve doctors published a learned volume defending “Perkinism.” Benjamin himself wrote a book about it in 1796, containing hundreds of stirring testimonials by well-educated people. They included doctors, ministers, university professors, and members of Congress. Most historians of the subject think the old man actually believed in his tractors, but that the son—who retired in New York City as a wealthy man—was simply a crook promoter.
It is worth noting that orthodox medical opinion, by and large, ignored Perkinism, regarding it as not worthy of serious refutation. One doctor, however, did trouble to make some tests with phony tractors. They looked like the genuine article, but actually were nonmetallic. His results, of course, were excellent. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in an amusing discussion of Perkinism, relates that one woman was quickly cured of pains in her arm and shoulder by using a fake tractor made of wood. “Bless me!” the woman exclaimed. “Why, who could have thought it, that them little things could pull the pain from one!”
Our next quack can best be introduced by the following quotation from a chapter on medical charlatans, in a book published fifty years ago. “The physician is only allowed to think he knows it all, but the quack, ungoverned by conscience, is permitted to know he knows it all; and with a fertile mental field for humbuggery, truth can never successfully compete with untruth.” Who is the author of these wise sentences? Ironically, they were written by Dr. Albert Abrams, of San Francisco—a man who eventually became one of the most fantastic quacks in history!
Dr. Abrams was a distinguished-looking man. He had a dark Vandyke beard and sported a pince-nez attached to a long black ribbon. His early medical career was quite orthodox. After obtaining a degree at Heidelberg in 1882, he returned to California where he practiced general medicine, held important medical posts, and wrote a dozen reputable textbooks. In 1909 and 1910 he published two works which suggested he was venturing into uncharted waters. They dealt with methods of diagnosis by means of rapid percussion (tapping) on the spine. It was not long until Abrams discovered it was even better to tap the abdomen. His theory was that every ailment had its own “vibratory rate,” hence the sounds produced by the tapping were clues to the person’s condition.
Dr. Abrams’ first invention was a diagnosing machine called a “dynamizer.” It was a box containing an insane jungle of wires. One wire ran to an electrical source, and another was attached to the forehead of a healthy person. A drop of blood was obtained from the patient, on a piece of filter paper, and placed inside the box. Abrams would then percuss (tap) the abdomen of a healthy person, who was stripped to the waist and always—for a reason never made too clear—facing west. By listening to the sounds, the doctor was able to diagnose the ills of the patient who provided the blood sample!
This makes more sense than one might at first imagine. The spine, one must understand, has nerve fibers which “vibrate” at different rates. The dynamizer picked up “vibrations” from the blood, transmitted them to the healthy person’s spine, which in turn sorted out the different wave lengths and sent them to various parts of the abdomen where they were detected by the doctor’s expert rapping.
In addition to determining the nature of the blood donor’s illness, Dr. Abrams could ascertain the exact part of the body where the ailment was localized, and its severity. Later he discovered he could also determine the patient’s age, sex, and whether he belonged to one of six religious groups—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Seventh Day Adventist, Methodist, and Theosophist. Eventually, he found he could diagnose from a sample of handwriting as well as blood.
The handwriting angle opened up fascinating possibilities. Abrams began experimenting with signatures of people no longer living. His disciples blandly accepted the discovery that Samuel Johnson, Poe, Wilde, and Pepys all suffered from syphilis, but found it hard to believe this same diagnosis when the doctor obtained it from the signature of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
In 1920 Dr. Abrams announced the completion of a new invention called an “oscilloclast.” It made use of vibratory rates for healing. “Specific drugs,” Abrams declared, “must have the same vibratory rate as the diseases against which they are effective. That is why they cure.” But why use drugs? All you need do is direct the proper radio waves toward the patient and kill the bacteria even more effectively. Abrams also invented a “reflexophone” for diagnosing via telephone, and several other ingenious electrical devices. He ran a school to teach his disciples how to use these machines, published a periodical, and lectured widely throughout the country.1
When the doctor died, in 1923, he left a two-million-dollar estate. The money had been made chiefly by leasing out oscilloclasts (they were never sold) for $250, with an additional $200 for a course on how to operate them. Hundreds of lesser quacks rented the machines, bringing Abrams an estimated $1500 every month. The doctors were forced to swear they would never look inside the tightly sealed box. Shortly before the doctor’s death, however, a committee of scientists opened one of the magic boxes and issued a report on what they found. It contained an ohm-meter, rheostat, condenser, and other electrical gadgets all wired together without rhyme or reason.
One would think no one in his right mind would fall for such nonsense; nevertheless many intelligent people did. The most distinguished convert was Upton Sinclair, who wrote many magazine pieces praising the doctor. In his Book of Life, 1921, Sinclair gave an enthusiastic description of Abrams’ diagnosing machine, and added, “So is opened to our eyes a wonderful vision of a new race, purified and made fit for life. . . . Take my advice, whoever you may be that are suffering, and find out about this new work and help make it known to the world.”
When the Journal of the American Medical Association attacked Dr. Abrams, Sinclair replied angrily: “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. He has proved it by diagnosing with taps of his own sensitive fingertips over fifteen thousand people, and my investigation convinces me he has cured over ninety-five percent.”
Using the name of Miss Bell, the doubting A.M.A. sent to an Abrams practitioner in Albuquerque a blood specimen of a healthy male guinea pig. They received a report saying that Miss Bell had “cancer to the amount of six ohms,” an infection of the left frontal sinus, and a streptococcic infection of her left fallopian tube. A Michigan doctor sent Abrams himself a blood sample from a Plymouth Rock rooster, obtaining a diagnosis of malaria, cancer, diabetes, and two venereal diseases.
The 1926 revised edition of the Book of Life, published after Abrams’ death, is Sinclair’s final word on the subject. The total failure of the doctor to make good, when subjected to tests by the medical profession, does not worry Sinclair in the least. When Abrams was perfecting his devices, Sinclair points out, he had the air-waves all to himself. But by the time the challenges came, the air was filled with the “complex vibrations of I know not how many radio stations.” Naturally this interference played havoc with his machines, and so, as Sinclair puts it, “the old man died, literally, of his bewilderment and chagrin.”
To those who accuse Abrams of deliberate deception, Sinclair writes: “The idea that Albert Abrams was a conscious fraud I consider out of the question. I have known many scientists, but never one . . . more passionately convinced of the truth of his teachings. Abrams worked all day and most of the night with never a rest; he literally killed himself in this way. His books are a mine of strange and suggestive ideas, and now that he is gone, hardly a week passes that I do not come upon a record of some new discovery . . . that causes me to say: ‘There is Abrams again!’ . . . Men said that Albert Abrams was ‘insane’; but I predict that when the future comes to trace the leaps that his mind took, it will see that he had a reason for every one.”
One could not ask for a more clinically perfect statement of the persistence of irrational belief on the part of a convert to a totally worthless set of theories hatched in the brain of a brilliant paranoid.2 It is surprising that Sinclair did not attribute Abrams’ successes to faith healing. In 1914 Sinclair did a series of articles for Hearst’s Magazine on his experiments in this art, and later wrote: “. . . If you will lay your hands upon a sick person, forming a vivid mental picture of the bodily changes you desire, and concentrating the power of your will upon them, you may be surprised by the results, especially if you possess anything in the way of psychic gifts.” But radio had just been developed, and it was as easy to imagine that radio waves might have some sort of therapeutic effect as it was easy for Perkins’ followers to suppose that his tractors had some connection with the newly discovered electrical currents.
Since Abrams’ day, hundreds of similar electrical devices have reaped fortunes for their inventors. In Los Angeles, for example, Dr. Ruth B. Drown is currently operating an Abrams-type machine which diagnoses ailments from the “vibrations” of blood samples. She keeps a huge file of blotting papers on which are preserved samples of the blood of all her patients. By placing a sample in another machine, she can tune the device to the patient, then broadcast healing rays to him while he remains at home! An issue of her periodical, Journal of the Drown Radio Therapy, has a picture of her “Broadcasting Room,” showing dozens of dials around the walls, by means of which dozens of patients can be treated simultaneously regardless of where they are at the moment. When Tyrone Power and his wife had an auto accident in Italy a few years ago, they were treated in Italy by short-wave therapy from Drown in California. Eventually, of course, Dr. Drown makes a more material contact with the patient. She sends a bill.
Exactly how the Drown devices operate is none too clear, but you can read about them in the doctor’s books—The Science and Philosophy of the Drown Radio Therapy, 1938, and The Theory and Technique of the Drown Radio Therapy and Radio Vision Instruments, 1939. These works also explain two other Drown machines—one for taking “radio photographs” of body organs, and another which uses radio waves to stop bleeding. A more recent book by the doctor, published in 1946, is titled Wisdom from Atlantis.
Mrs. Drown—a handsome, mannish-looking woman—acquired her knowledge of electronics by working in the electrical assembly department of Southern California Edison Company. Her first invention was made in 1929. She has been practicing radio therapy ever since and selling her machines to chiropractors, osteopaths, and naturopaths all over the nation. Mrs. Drown herself is a licensed osteopath, and a member of the American Naturopathic Association.
Several years ago a number of prominent Chicagoans were so impressed by Mrs. Drown’s work that they persuaded the Dean of the Biological Sciences Division, University of Chicago, to conduct a careful investigation. Dr. Drown personally operated her machines during the test, and with spectacular lack of success. (See the Journal of the American Medical Association, Feb. 18, 1950, for details.) She was given blood specimens from ten patients. Her diagnoses of the first three were so erroneous that she did not even attempt the remaining seven. Here is her report on a patient who had tuberculosis: “. . . a type IV cancer of the left breast with spread to ovaries, uterus, pancreas, gallbladder, spleen and kidney.” In addition, the patient was diagnosed as blind in her right eye, blood pressure of 107/71, ovaries not producing ova, and the following organs not functioning properly—pancreas, adrenal, pituitary, uterus, right ovary, parathyroid, spleen, heart, liver, gall bladder, kidneys, lungs, stomach, spinal nerves, intestines, and ears.
The committee investigating Dr. Drown summed up her diagnosing methods as follows: “It is our belief that her alleged successes rest solely on the noncritical attitude of her followers. Her technic is to find so much trouble in so many organs that usually she can say ‘I told you so’ when she registers an occasional lucky positive guess. In these particular tests, even this luck deserted her.”
Concerning Mrs. Drown’s “radio photography,” the committee said: “We find that the film images which have intrigued Mrs. Drown and her disciples are simple fog patterns produced by exposure of the film to white light before it has been fixed adequately. These images are significantly identical regardless of whether or not the film is placed in Mrs. Drown’s machine before being submitted to the highly unorthodox processing which has been devised by her. In the numerous old films shown us by Mrs. Drown we can see no resemblance to the anatomical structures, appliances, bacteria, etc., that Mrs. Drown professes to see. In short, it is our opinion that the so-called Drown radio photographs are mere artifacts and totally without clinical value.”
In a final test, Mrs. Drown attempted to stop, by means of radio waves, an anesthetized laboratory animal from bleeding. The animal bled until, as the committee reports, “her friends found the sight beyond their capacities.” Nevertheless, Mrs. Drown continues to have thousands of followers. Her machines are particularly popular with spine thumpers in Chicago, where several osteopaths are currently using them.
Another popular form of quack radiation therapy is based on the “discovery” 35 years ago, by an obscure doctor named Abbott E. Kay, of a mysterious substance which he called “vrilium.” The name comes from “vril,” the cosmic energy used by the super-race in Bulwer-Lytton’s utopian fantasy, The Coming Race, 1871. Madame Blavatsky often wrote about vril, which she said had been mastered by the Atlanteans, and was the motivating power of John Keely’s perpetual motion machine.
During the twenties Robert T. Nelson, a businessman, sold a small brass cylinder, about two inches long, which was supposed to contain vrilium. You pinned it to your lapel or wore it around the neck. It radiated for a distance of twenty feet, Nelson claimed, keeping off bacteria and killing germs inside the body. After Nelson died, his son, Robert Nelson, Jr., developed the manufacture of these “magic spikes,” as they were called, into big business—selling them for as much as $300 each. A number of political bigwigs in Chicago, including former Mayor Kelly, wore the cylinders. “I don’t pretend to know how it works,” Kelly told newsmen, “but it relieves pain. It has helped me and my wife.” When the government took action against Vrilium Products Co. in 1950, it revealed that the cylinders contained nothing but a cheap rat poison. “I believe we have an unrecognized form of radioactivity,” Nelson said when the government demonstrated that the cylinders had no effect on Geiger counters.3
Currently operating another remarkable device is Dr. Fred Urbuteit, a Florida naturopath. He has a Sinuothermic Machine which shoots a mild electrical current into the body to perform miraculous cures of incurable diseases. The machine sells in various models at prices from $1500 to $3000. Although arthritis is an ailment the machine is supposed to help, Dr. Urbuteit is confined to a wheel chair by this affiction—a fact which has no effect on the intense loyalty of patients at the doctor’s Sinuothermic Institute in Tampa. “Professor” William Estep, author of a 742-page medical treatise called Eternal Wisdom and Health (published by himself in 1932), is the inventor of still another therapy machine and has been in and out of southern jails for years.4 The device is called an Estemeter, but I have been unable to find out how it operates or what it does.
Perhaps the greatest quack of them all is eighty-year-old Colonel Dinshah Pestanji Framji Ghadiali, of Malaga, New Jersey, who has been treating people for thirty years with colored lights. The colonel is a white-goateed, bespectacled little old man who was born in Bombay in 1873. He came to the United States in 1911, and became a citizen in 1917. During World War I he served without pay as commander of the New York Police Reserve Air Service—a civilian organization of pilots organized to protect New York harbor. This is where the “colonel” in his title comes from. The government cracked down on him a few years ago, with fines totaling $20,000, and a suspended three-year prison sentence.
In 1920 Ghadiali “discovered” Spectro-Chrome Therapy. In theory it is exceedingly simple. Every ailment can be cured by proper diet plus colored lights of the right “tonation.” All you need is a Spectro-Chrome machine, built by Ghadiali. The machine contains a strong light source over which you slide the appropriate panes of colored glass. If you are diabetic, for example, you eat lots of starches and brown sugar, and bathe the body alternately with yellow and magenta light. Early stages of gonorrhea require green or blue-green rays. Scarlet increases sexual desires. Purple dampens them. In addition to special diets for each ailment, one must also abstain from tobacco, alcohol, meat, tea, coffee—and sleep with the head pointing north. All this and much more is explained in fascinating detail in Ghadiali’s three-volume Spectro-Chrome Metry Encyclopedia, in shorter books, and in his monthly magazine, Spectro-Chrome.
In 1925, when Ghadiali was on a lecture tour, he was arrested in Seattle and sentenced under the Mann Act to five years in the Atlanta Penitentiary. He later published a two-volume work, Railroading a Citizen, in which he blamed this unjust “persecution” on the medical trusts, the KKK, Catholics, Negroes, Henry Ford, the Department of Justice, and Great Britain. The book reprints the more sensational parts of the trial in which his teen-age secretary accuses him of rape, forcing her into “unnatural practices,” and later performing an abortion. Ghadiali’s purpose in reprinting this testimony is to allow himself a chance to interject comments accusing the girl of lying. Unfortunately, the impression left on the reader is that the girl was telling a straightforward story.
Since 1924 Ghadiali’s Spectro-Chrome Institute has been located on a fifty-acre estate at Malaga, New Jersey. Signs on the fences read OUR AIM: SPECTRO-CHROME IN EVERY HOME. More than 10,000 people bought memberships in the Institute for $90, which included a lease on a Spectro-Chrome, plus a Favoroscope which showed the best time of day to use the machine. In addition, the new member paid $250 for two weeks of study at Malaga. Photographs in Ghadiali’s books, showing him at work in his Malaga laboratory, are indistinguishable from stills of a grade D movie about a mad scientist.
During his recent trial, Ghadiali had no trouble at all finding 112 witnesses to testify they had been miraculously healed by colored lights. One witness, an epileptic, had a courtroom fit just after shouting, “I tell you I had fits all my life till Doctor Ghadiali cured me!” The government introduced relatives of many patients who died under color therapy. A son told how Ghadiali had advised his father, a diabetic, to stop taking insulin and give himself doses of colored light. The father lived three weeks.5
Ghadiali is not alone in advocating color therapy. It has a long and confused history, chiefly in occult traditions. In America in 1861, a General Augustus J. Pleasanton became convinced that sunlight shining through blue glass had curative properties. His work, The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and the Blue Color of the Sky, was printed in 1871 on blue paper. It was followed by a book titled Blue and Red Light, by Dr. Seth Pancoast of Philadelphia, printed in blue letters on white paper, with a red border on each page. Dr. Pancoast thought blue good for some ills, red for others. During the 1870’s these speculations led to a minor “blue glass craze” among New Englanders.6
In more recent times, the “I am” cult, founded by the Ballards, has placed a large emphasis on the spiritual and bodily effects of color. Dr. George Starr White, a Los Angeles homeopath and occultist, has long been recommending “Rithmo-Duo-Color Therapy” in his many books, as well as “biodynamochromatic diagnosis” in which the patient’s abdomen is bathed with colored light, then thumped in the manner of Dr. Abrams. (See Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine, February, 1918, for an article on this system. It is by Edwin F. Bowers, who co-authored the work on zone therapy cited in the previous chapter.) The Rainbow Lamps of Dr. Charles Littlefield were discussed earlier in the book. In England, some operators of pendulums are combining radiesthesia with color therapy. The pendulum is used in various ways to determine what color the body needs. “Color healing is a science of the future,” writes Bruce Copen, in The Pendulum, January, 1952, “and coupled with radiesthesia it becomes a wonderful healer because the effects of any one color can be constantly checked for reaction.”7
Some idea of the difficulty in obtaining convictions against quacks is revealed by the government’s failure, after two sensational trials in 1943 and 1946, to convict Dr. William F. Koch (he pronounces it “Coke”) of Detroit. Dr. Koch has the reputation of being the best educated and most successful cancer quack in the nation’s history. Born in Detroit in 1885, he was graduated in 1909 at the University of Michigan, where he later (1917) obtained a Ph.D. degree in chemistry. In 1918 he received a medical degree from the Detroit College of Medicine, Wayne University. From 1910 to 1913 he taught histology and embryology at the University of Michigan, and from 1914 to 1919 was professor of physiology at Detroit Medical College. His two books, Cancer and Its Allied Diseases, 1929 (revised in 1933), and The Chemistry of Natural Immunity, 1938, are among the best counterfeits of sound medical writing in the entire annals of pseudo-science.
In 1919, Dr. Koch first announced his “discovery” of a cure-all which he calls “glyoxylide.” It is, he claims, a catalyst synthesized by obscure methods, and when injected into a person suffering from any known disease, including cancer, tuberculosis, and leprosy, there is complete recovery in over 80 per cent of the cases. The catalyst does not attack the disease directly, Koch explains. It merely raises the body to such a frenzy of health that the body manufactures its own remedies.
Usually one injection is all that is given. Dr. Wendell G. Hendricks, a California osteopath who claims to have treated 3,000 patients with the Koch method, likens the injection to the starter button on a car. “The Koch catalysts may be considered to be the starter,” he writes in a pamphlet, “and after getting the recovery process started, all that is necessary to keep it going is to provide the body with fuel. . . .” In some cases a second injection is given, and in difficult cases, like cancer, several may be administered. For decades, doctors using the Koch cure have demanded $300 and up for a single injection. During the late forties, Koch was charging $25 for a two-cubic-centimeter ampoule of glyoxylide, bringing him an estimated income of $100,000 annually.
There is not the slightest doubt about the complete worthlessness of the “Koch treatment.” Government chemists testified in 1943 that Koch’s glyoxylide was indistinguishable from distilled water. Yet scores of “doctors” throughout the country, most of them osteopaths and chiropractors, are still giving Koch injections. In 1949, Senator William Langer of North Dakota actually placed in the Congressional Record a report of the alleged success of Koch injections in curing ailing cows! The report was promptly reprinted by Koch and widely distributed.
In recent years Koch has adopted a Protestant fundamentalist front for his activities. The Koch Cancer Foundation has been abandoned for the Christian Medical Research League, Detroit, which currently supplies the catalysts. Gerald B. Winrod, a fundamentalist rabble-rouser in Wichita, Kansas, who was one of the Nazi seditionists on trial during the last war, has been promoting Koch vigorously in his hate-sheet, The Defender. In 1950, Winrod published a book called The New Science in the Treatment of Disease, which hails Koch as a great medical genius and compares his “persecution” by the American Medical Association to the persecution of Semmelweis. A Detroit organization called The Lutheran Research Society (no connection with the Lutheran church) has also been issuing literature promoting Koch, including a magazine called The Eleventh Hour. The magazine is also against communism and the Jews.
The government dismissed its case against Koch in 1948 after failing to secure conviction in its two trials. The Federal Trade Commission did, however, manage to secure a temporary injunction against him in 1942 which still prevents him from advertising his drug as a cure. At present he is operating in Rio de Janeiro, and indications are that South America has proved as lucrative a pasture as the northern continent.
This chapter would not be complete without some mention of the occult areas of medical quackery. The field is much too large even to summarize, but a few individuals stand out as being of special interest.
A recent work by British surgeon Kenneth Walker, Venture with Ideas, 1951, has revived interest in George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff—a bald, walrus-mustached, Russian-born Greek whom Time once characterized as a “remarkable blend of P. T. Barnum, Rasputin, Freud, Groucho Marx, and everybody’s grandfather.” His only published work is an allegory about Beelzebub, modestly titled All and Everything, and almost as unreadable as Madame Blavatsky’s writings. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, near Paris, attracted hundreds of intelligent disciples during the twenties, including the British writer Katherine Mansfield, who died while there. Another enthusiast was Margaret Anderson, the American editor of an avant garde magazine. Her recently published autobiography, The Fiery Fountains, gives a valuable picture of the Gurdjieff movement.
Gurdjieff’s medical views are hard to pin down. They seem to be a blend of Yogi and other occult systems, with some original material mixed in. His therapy included tree chopping and complicated dance exercises (at one time he directed an Oriental ballet troup in Moscow) accompanied by tunes written by Gurdjieff. Mansfield’s death may have been hastened by her own “cure,” which involved living in a cowloft where she could breathe air exhaled by cows.
Gurdjieff’s most active disciple was Peter D. Ouspensky, who founded a Gurdjieff Institute in London and wrote several large books elaborating the Master’s “system.” Like Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff claimed to have obtained his “system” from “initiates” in obscure Eastern monasteries. As a consequence, Ouspensky’s speculations are so mixed with esoteric revelation, and so far removed from science, that we have not discussed them in this book. He died in 1947, two years before the death of Gurdjieff.
As far as I know, the only occult resort of recent times which surpassed Gurdjieff’s in madness was the infamous monastery established near Cefalu, in Sicily, by the fabulous British occultist, Aleister Crowley. It was supposed to teach Yoga and self-discipline but actually gave instruction largely in drinking, drug addiction, and sex. When an English poet died there it precipitated a Sicilian explosion, and Crowley was forced to emigrate to Tunis. One of Somerset Maugham’s novels, The Magician, is based on Crowley, with whom Maugham and Arnold Bennett once shared an apartment in Paris. Crowley was as satanic a mixture as has ever been thrown together of poet, painter, occultist, mountain climber, chess player, mountebank, psychotic, drug addict, and satyr—and the less said of him here the better. If you want to know more about him, you can read John Symond’s The Great Beast, or try to read some of Crowley’s mystical poetry or his tomes on black magic.
The diagnosis of ailments and the giving of medical advice have long been the stock in trade of certain psychics. The information may come from God, or departed spirits, or simply from clairvoyant insight. Andrew Jackson Davis, known as the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” practiced this type of medicine for thirty-five years around New England during the latter half of the past century. He even wrote a five-volume work called The Great Harmonia about his visions. But the greatest psychic diagnostician of all time was, without a doubt, Edgar Cayce, of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. When he died in 1945, he left full stenographic accounts of 30,000 medical “readings” given over a period of forty-three years.
The best reference on Cayce (pronounced “Casey”) is There is a River, 1943, by the American Catholic writer, Thomas Sugrue.8 The book is similar in many ways to Kenneth Roberts’ recent tribute to the dowsing abilities of his friend Henry Gross. Sugrue had been a friend of Cayce’s, was completely sold on his psychic powers, and, like Roberts, tells the story of his friend’s abilities in a form resembling fiction. The book does not give an objective account of Cayce’s work, but it does give a vivid picture of the man and his history.
As a child, Cayce was dreamy and introverted. He played with imaginary playmates, had visions of his dead grandfather, and on one occasion talked to an angel with wings. He was deeply religious (the family belonged to the Christian Church). Once a year he read the Bible from cover to cover. Although he never went beyond the ninth grade, he did a vast amount of miscellaneous reading, and at one time worked in a bookstore. Sugrue emphasizes the fact that Cayce was a simple, untutored man who could not possibly have possessed the information he gave during his trances, but a far more reasonable supposition is that he. absorbed large quantities of knowledge from reading and contacts with friends—knowledge he may have consciously forgotten.
There is no question about the genuineness of Cayce’s trances. His technique was to lie on his back with his head facing south (later he changed it to north) and place himself in a state of self-induced hypnosis. The patient was usually present, though not necessarily, as Cayce gave thousands of readings for people who wrote to him for help. The reading commenced with the statement, “Yes, we have the body.” He would then proceed to give a rambling diagnosis of the cause of the disorder, in terms borrowed largely from osteopathy and homeopathy.
Most of Cayce’s early trances were given with the aid of an osteopath who asked him questions while he was asleep, and helped later in explaining the reading to the patient. There is abundant evidence that Cayce’s early association with osteopaths and homeopaths had a major influence on the character of his readings. Over and over again he would find spinal lesions of one sort or another as the cause of an ailment and prescribe spinal manipulations for its cure. Here is a portion of a Cayce reading on his wife, who was suffering at the time with tuberculosis:
The condition in the body is quite different from what we have had before . . . from the head, pains along through the body from the second, fifth and sixth dorsals, and from the first and second lumbar . . . tie-ups here, and floating lesions, or lateral lesions, in the muscular and nerve fibers which supply the lower end of the lung and the diaphragm . . . in conjunction with the sympathetic nerve of the solar plexus, coming in conjunction with the solar plexus at the end of the stomach. . . .
This is talk which makes sense to an osteopath, and to almost no one else. Sugrue records the case of a priest who wrote to Cayce for advice on a condition resembling epilepsy. Cayce recommended osteopathic treatment, “with particular reference to a subluxation as will be found indicated in the lower portion of the 9th dorsal center, or 9th, 10th, and 11th. Co-ordinate such correction with the lumbar axis and the upper dorsal and cervical centers. There should not be required more than six adjustments to correct the condition.”
In addition to spinal massage, Cayce advocated a bewildering variety of remedies borrowed from homeopathy and naturopathy, with occasional inventions of his own subconscious tossed in. There were special diets, tonics, herbs, electrical treatments, and such medicines as “oil of smoke” (for a leg sore), “peach-tree poultice” (for a baby with convulsions), “bedbug juice” (for dropsy), “castor oil packs” (for the priest mentioned above), almonds (to prevent cancer), peanut oil massage (to forestall arthritis), ash from the wood of a bamboo tree (for tuberculosis and other diseases), and fumes of apple brandy from a charred keg (for his tuberculous wife to inhale). It is something of an innocent and thumping understatement when Sugrue confesses, “There was apparently no elaborate medical system, or theory, to be got from the cures.”
In later years Cayce and his associates actually manufactured and sold some of the remedies he invented while in trance. These included Ipsab (for pyorrhoea), Tim (for hemorrhoids), a hay fever inhalant, and various devices for radioactive and electrical treatments. One of his readings advised attaching the copper anode of a battery to the third dorsal plexus center, and the nickel anode first to the left ankle, then to the right ankle. None of these remedies has, of course, the slightest value from the standpoint of medical science.
Eventually Cayce developed an interest in occult literature, and by answering metaphysical questions while in the trance state, a complex occult philosophy slowly emerged. From the summary given by Sugrue, it seems to be a confusing hodge-podge of Christianity, astrology, Pyramidology, theosophy, and other occult traditions.9 The conscious mind is located in the pituitary gland. Arcturus is the next stop for souls leaving the solar system. And so on ad nauseam—little bits of information gleaned from here and there in the occult literature, spiced with occasional novelties from Cayce’s unconscious.
Cayce became a confirmed occultist, having no difficulty harmonizing the new outlook with his Christianity. Christ was simply one of the “initiates” who did not preach all he knew. In addition to medical readings, Cayce began giving “life readings” in which he described the subject’s past incarnations. Osteopathic causes for ailments gave way to causes rooted in the subject’s “Karma” (the accumulation of good and bad effects from previous lives). A magazine called The New Tomorrow was published quarterly by a society formed to study these revelations. Later, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc., at Virginia beach, Virginia, took over the Cayce records and is now issuing material on it. Typical of this literature is a booklet by Cayce titled Auras, published in 1945 with a preface by Sugrue. Cayce describes his lifelong ability to see a colored aura surrounding every person’s head and shoulders, tells how he diagnoses character and health from the colors, and predicts that healing by colors will eventually become part of medical science. (The literature of occultism is rich with books and articles describing techniques for making visible, measuring, photographing, and even weighing the so-called “human aura.”10 Unfortunately, only occultists succeed with the techniques.) Many study groups devoted to Cayce are currently meeting in large cities, and if interest continues to grow, he may become as important a figure in modern occultism as Madame Blavatsky.
There seems no doubt about Cayce’s sincerity. He was a kindly, gentle man—with a round boyish face, gray-blue eyes behind rimless glasses, and a receding chin. He seemed constantly surprised and baffled by his unique gift, fearful it might be a source of evil but convinced until his death that it came from God.
Although thousands of people believed themselves cured by Cayce’s trance-given remedies, in many cases even the initial diagnosis was widely off the mark. Rationalizations, however, always come easily. If the patient had “doubts” about the procedure, Sugrue naively writes, the diagnosis would not be a good one. Since almost anyone would have some doubts, which he would be quick to express if the reading was obviously bad (but would not mention otherwise), it is hard to see how evidence could be found that would shake the faith of a Cayce believer.
Sugrue does record, however, that Dr. Joseph Rhine of Duke University was unimpressed by Cayce when a reading the psychic made for Rhine’s daughter failed to fit the facts. Presumably, if anyone would be favorably disposed to find Cayce practicing clairvoyance it would be Dr. Rhine, but no doubt Sugrue feels the professor had “doubts” which disturbed the diagnosis.