Extropia’s Curious Science

EXTROPIA’S CURIOUS SCIENCE

Are you a fan of the TV series ‘Star Trek’? If so, you will no doubt have noticed that the Enterprise’s medical officer, Dr ‘Bones’ McCoy, never performed any work that we would recognise as being part of his profession. That is to say he never wielded a scalpel or gave people pills to swallow (although I think he gave somebody something that instantly cured their cancer in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). The reason why ‘Bones’ never did any invasive surgery was because he did not need to. Star Trek was, after all, set in the far future and the series predicted advances in medical technology that would enable surgeons to treat patients without ever having to cut them open. All ‘Bones’ has to do is wave some mysterious gizmo over your body, and you are cured of whatever ails you.

Along warp-speed spaceships and those transporters that can ‘beam’ a person between distant locations, Dr McCoy’s ‘miracle’ medical technologies are the most obvious sign that Star Trek was set in the future. After all, such things do not yet exist. Or do they? One person might have claimed that something like Dr McCoy’s gizmo has already been invented. And not recently, either, but as far back as 1882.

So what was this amazing invention, and who made such grandiose claims? Well, the invention was something called an ‘Oscilloclast’ and the claims were made by its inventor, one Dr Albert Abrams. This machine was developed from techniques that Dr Abrams had perfected, which involved diagnosing illnesses by tapping on people’s bodies and interpreting the vibrations. Frankly it sounds like quackery to me, but it must have convinced the medical establishment of his time, because Dr Abrams was made professor of pathology at Cooper Medical College.

(Dr Albert Abrams. Image from wikimedia commons)

Dr Abrams took the idea that different diseases cause tissues to vibrate at different frequencies and developed a device that could measure these vibrations. He called this device the ‘Reflexophone’. The ‘Reflexophone’ could only diagnose illness, not cure it. But Dr Abrams had further idea. If he could make a device that could generate the same frequency of vibrations, then waving such a gizmo over affected tissues would eradicate any disease. This gadget was the ‘oscilloclast’, and it sounds just like ‘Bones’ McCoy’s handheld cure-all doesn’t it? Actually, it was supposedly even better, because you did not even have to be present in order to be cured. All you had to do was supply a sample (of blood, say, or a lock of hair) and the device would be able to remotely treat you.

By now you are probably smelling a rat, thinking ‘I know of no such capability in general use today, so this Dr Abrams was just some fraud’. But it does seem like people believed in the effectiveness of his methods. His invention made him a multi-millionaire, he had many influential supporters and over 3000 doctors used Oscilloclasts.

However, not everyone in the field of medical science accepted the authenticity of Dr Abrams’ claims. The Lancet claimed that samples of healthy chicken blood had been diagnosed as having major diseases, and Scientific American were not sparing in their criticism, concluding, “At best [it] is all an illusion. At worst, it is a colossal fraud”.

Damning verdicts from prestigious journals was not enough to kill off the Oscilloclast entirely, however. It continued to evolve, mostly thanks to one Dr. Ruth Brown who renamed it Radionics. Whereas the Oscilloclast was used to treat diseases in humans, Radionics was used in the 1950s to help farmers deal with pests. The method involved sprinkling a minuscule amount of pesticide on a photograph of an afflicted area of farmland and placing it inside a box that was a modified Oscilloclast. This supposedly cured the actual site through some means unknown to conventional science. Again, sounds decidedly like quackery to me but several farms testified to the effectiveness of this method.

(Radionics kit. Image from wikimedia commons)

The ‘Science’ of Radionics certainly has not become part of mainstream medical or agricultural practice, but Dr Abrams’ methods continue to attract a committed following even to this day. Sadly, whatever other miracles his devices could perform, it seems they could not allow you to cheat death, and Radionics’ inventor passed away in 1924. But, then again, even with all his futuristic technology ‘Bones’ could not raise the dead or make people immortal so perhaps we shouldn’t hold that against Oscilloclasts!

REFERENCES

‘FAR OUT’ by Mark Pilkington