Dr.Albert Abrams of San Francisco began to make some astounding medical claims in the early 1920s. His claims were so outrageous as to be viewed by many as absurd on its face. He claimed that all substances radiated electronic vibrations that could be detected and measured. All human organs, diseased and healthy, transmitted radiation or "vibrations" unique to that organ or disease. All that was needed from a patient for diagnosis was a drop of blood, a single hair, or even a handwriting sample as these would give off the unique "vibrations" of that individual. Not only were diseases ascertained by a drop of blood or handwriting, but one could determine a person's religion, golf handicap, sex, age, present location, when that person would die, and innumerable other tidbits of information.
Did Abrams discover something of significance? Was the scientific diagnosis and cure of every conceivable disease within reach? This became a huge controversy in the early 1920s when the famous author, Upton Sinclair, wrote the article "The House of Wonders" for Pearson's Magazine in June of 1923 which promoted Dr. Abrams' theory and methods. This led to numerous articles on the E.R.A. in popular magazines both pro and con. The scientific and medical communities in the United States and Britain were forced to respond to this situation. Two scientific investigations were conducted to get to the bottom of the matter.
Who was Dr. Abrams and how did his peers in the medical community view his theory and methods? What did the scientific investigations of his claims and methods discover?

Background and training
Albert Abrams was born in San Francisco in 1863. [1] In his teen years he learned German and graduated as an MD from Heidelberg in 1882. He became Professor of Pathology at Cooper College in San Francisco in 1893 and resigned in 1898. [2] He was also elected vice-president of the California State Medical Society in 1889 and made president of the San Francisco Medico Churgical Society in 1893. [3] By the early 1900s Abrams had become a respected expert in neurology. [4] By all accounts, Abrams had a respectable background and promise of a distinguished career.

Spondylotherapy
In 1910 Abrams published a book on a medical technique he called Spondylotherapy. This volume "constituted his first definite departure from medical orthodoxy."[5] Even in Abrams' estimation, his "spondylotherapy" was his version of Chiropractic and Osteopathy which were viewed as "cults" by "orthodox" medicine at the time. [6] For this reason Dr. Abrams began to be viewed with some suspicion and concern by his peers for promoting questionable medical practices.

The electronic reactions of Abrams





In 1916, when Abrams published his New Concepts in Diagnosis and Treatment book, he had been experimenting with what came to be called "the electronic reactions of Abrams" or the E.R.A. This was a complete departure from conventional medicine and those in the medical community were not hesitant to call him a quack as a result.
Describing the E.R.A. can be difficult due to its complex nature and theory as well as the numerous methods and devices used. Briefly, the theory behind the E.R.A. was the human body transmitted radiation or "electronic vibrations" from the atomic level, specifically from the electrons. These electronic vibrations emanating from the electrons, if normal, would vibrate at a specific rate, if they vibrated at an abnormal rate, it would cause or indicate the presence of disease. Each disease vibrated at a unique rate. In this theory, one could cure disease by transmitting back at the disease the same electronic vibratory rate it was transmitting. This would neutralize the abnormal vibrations and allow the electrons to return to normal vibration rates and eliminate the disease. Abrams believed that drugs worked when they had the same or similar "vibrations" as the disease they cured.
How Abrams detected and normalized these "electronic vibrations" of diseases was bizarre and complex. He would take a hair, handwriting or blood sample (sometimes a photograph) of a patient to be diagnosed. This would be placed into a device he called a Dynamizer. This was hooked up by wires to a headpiece to be worn on a healthy individual (called a reagent) who, while facing west, would "react" biologically through the central nervous system to the diseased "vibrations". These "reactions" could be detected by percussing (thumping) the abdomen of the reagent which would reveal areas of "dullness." The location of the dullness (a dull note sounded when thumped) and its size would indicate the precise disease and its location in the patient.
The precise rate of vibrations were ascertained by boxes containing resistance coils which were also hooked up by wires to the reagent and Dynamizer. Dials would be turned to different "ohmage" rates once the disease was identified. This would pinpoint the exact amount and rate of the disease the patient had. Sometimes horseshoe magnets were placed over the reagent's head to "clear" him of extraneous "vibrations" to get a better "reaction."
Methods used later by Abrams and his followers involved stroking the reagent's abdomen with a glass rod to obtain the "reactions." Later the reagent was dispensed with altogether and the operator stroked a plate hooked up to the Dynamizer, etc. with his fingers to feel the "vibrations" from the patient's blood or handwriting.
In all this, numerous things could interfere with the vibrations as they were sensitive in more ways than one. In collecting a blood sample, the patient had to be facing west in dimmed light. No strong orange or red colored material could be present in the room. The same was true when getting the reactions from the reagent to the sample. In addition to the above, reactions could be driven away by the presence of skeptical minds or enhanced by other mental activity. For these reasons, most have compared the E.R.A. to psychic phenomena, sympathetic magic and the occult.
Abrams had another device called an oscilloclast which he used to cure patients. This machine supposedly transmitted back at the diseased tissue the same electronic vibrations it was emitting until the patient was "clear" of the electronic reactions in the reagent. The best account of how Abrams came up with this theory and how he developed these strange methods is given in the pro-E.R.A. book, Report on Radionics. [7]



The AMA and Dr. Albert Abrams
The American Medical Association (AMA) never did take Dr. Albert Abrams' claims seriously. No formal investigation of Abrams' methods was ever undertaken by the AMA.[8] The AMA believed Abrams' methods and claims were ridiculous on the face of it, and that it therefore wasn't worth the time and money to investigate it. The AMA commented on Dr. Abrams and the ERA in their two periodicals: Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and Hygeia (changed to Today's Health in 1950), the latter being a magazine on health issues for the general public. Both were edited by Dr. Morris Fishbein during the 1920s and 1930s. Fishbein also wrote numerous articles for various popular level magazines on quackery. These were published in book form in 1925 as The Medical Follies. This was followed by The New Medical Follies in 1927 and both were combined and updated in 1932 as Fads and Quackery in Healing.

JAMA
JAMA began commenting on Dr. Albert Abrams and the ERA in response to readers' letters, beginning with their March 25, 1922, issue (pp. 913-914). This and following articles appeared in "The Propaganda for Reform" section of the Journal that dealt with quackery. The articles mainly presented some of the clearly ridiculous claims and experiments that Dr. Abrams made with the ERA, such as carrying around on one's person a cut potato for curative and diagnostic purposes, his claim that numbers and vowels have a "sex," experiments with determining the outcome of a chicken's sex before it is born, determining the religion and present location of a patient from a drop of blood or handwriting sample, etc. [9]
A couple JAMA articles dealt with Medical Associations that made the decision to either charge MDs that used Abrams' oscilloclast with "unethical conduct" for promoting and using quackery, or expelling from their society those who used it. [10] Some JAMA articles recounted tests by other's of ERA practitioners' diagnostic ability by sending them blood samples in the mail as requested. In one case, a blood sample from a fictitious "Miss Bell" and another from a fictitious "Mrs. Jones" were actually blood samples of a male guinea-pig. "Miss Bell" was diagnosed as having various ailments including a streptococcus infection of the "the left [fallopian] tube". [11] Another article presented the results of a similar test of an ERA practitioner who was sent the blood of a rooster. The "innocent" and apparently virtuous rooster was diagnosed as having a venereal disease![12] JAMA also noted that the California State Journal of Medicine invited Dr. Abrams to participate in a scientific test to see how accurate his ERA tests were in diagnosing diseases. Abrams "flat-footedly" refused. [13]

Hygeia and Today's Health
The AMA's popular level magazine Hygeia contained numerous articles on quackery and medical "cults" it believed the public should be informed of and warned about. The Hygeia articles on medical fads and quackery continually referred to Abrams as a quack, even stating he may have been the greatest quack of the 20th century:
IF SOME ONE were to set about the task of selecting the greatest medical quack in history, he would find a long list of colorful competitors.... In recent times, our country has produced no greater charlatan than Albert Abrams... the founder of the "electronic" and "radionic" hokum that still flourishes among many medical cults. [14]
As James Graham of Celestial Bed fame easily ranked first among quacks of his generation, so the name of Albert Abrams (1863-1924) leads all the rest in the history of medical charlatanry in the first quarter of the present century. [15]
The rankest piece of quackery of our present generation was that of Albert Abrams, whom HYGEIA called "the most finished medical charlatan of our time." [16]
Many Hygeia articles in the 1920s and 1930s on quackery mentioned Abrams or recounted his story.[17] As late as 1939 they printed a full length article on Abrams' life and quackery. [18] Most of the Hygeia articles, like the JAMA articles, ridiculed Abram's bizarre experiments, instruments, and claims, such as his "Reflexaphone" device which allowed him to diagnose and even treat patients over the phone. [19]
The successor to Hygeia was Today's Health. It also printed many articles on fads and quackery in medicine during the 1960s. Some of these were still pointing back to Abrams, his theories and devices, as these were still being used by Chiropractors and others in updated versions as late as the 1960s. [20]

Dr. Morris Fishbein
Dr. Morris Fishbein's first book, The Medical Follies, became an influential best seller. His 1932 book, Fads and Quackery became a classic in the field and was referred to by many authors who wrote on the subject of quackery in the coming decades. [21] All three books by Fishbein dealt with Dr. Albert Abrams. Like the AMA literature, he ridiculed Abrams numerous outrageous claims, methods and endless gadgets. He also made it a point to mention how much money Abrams was making as the result of his "practice." He believed quackery was perpetrated for the revenue it generated. Abrams was reportedly worth $2,000,000 when he died in 1924. Courses in Spondylotherapy and the ERA went for $200.00 a head with the terms being cash &endash; in advance. His oscilloclast was leased at around $200.00 with a monthly $5.00 charge thereafter. The lessee was required to sign a contract stating he would never open the device. [22] These things were pointed out by Fishbein to show that to him, the whole thing was a sham operation designed to "separate sick people from their money" as the Watchtower Society later claimed about radionics.

"These Cults": A Response to Fishbein
In 1926, Annie Hale wrote the book, "These Cults" as a response to Morris Fishbein's 1925 The Medical Follies. [23] It defended the medical "cults" from Fishbein's attacks. These included Chiropractic, Osteopathy, Naturopathy and others including the "electronic reactions of Abrams." Her chapter on Abrams covered pages 80-106.
Her complaints about the AMA's attacks on Abrams such as Fishbein's book was that it was an a priori attack without investigating it (p. 81). She complained that Abrams was the "storm center of medical rancor and hate" (p. 84). As an example, she mentioned JAMA's review of Abrams' book Spondylotherapy that was "a long sarcastic review... a gratuitous slap at its author"(p. 87).
In Abrams' defense she said he was "one of the most educated men of his day" (p. 84). She mentioned a few prominent individuals who supported the E.R.A., the most prominent one being Sir James Barr, a past president of the British Medical Association. As would be the case after the Scientific American and Thomas Horder committees' investigation of the E.R.A., she only briefly mentioned the Scientific American investigation and paid much attention to a few positive statements by the Horder committee and ignored their mostly negative conclusions (see below).

British Medical Societies and the E.R.A.
British medical journals also mentioned Abrams and the E.R.A. much in the same vein as the AMA including ridiculing Dr. Abrams' bizarre claims, experiments and gadgets. [24] One of the gadgets mentioned, the "sphygmobiometer", was used by Abrams in court to determine the father of a child in a paternity case based on the "vibrations" of a blood sample! [25]





Science journals such as Nature commented as well on the Abrams controversy. [26] It wasn't taken any more seriously there than by the medical community. A long Scientific Monthly article on quacks called Abrams a "queer freak," outdoing even JAMA 's and Hygeia's name calling. [27]
Two major scientific investigations were done on the ERA in 1923 and 1924 to get past the rancor, charges and counter charges. One was conducted by a committee set up by the Scientific American, the other was conducted by a committee headed by Sir Thomas Horder in Britain. Of the two, the Scientific American investigation was the most comprehensive.