414 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



Then, apparently, he ran out of suckers, and with nothmg to do, he 

 left for Italy to see if he could start there all over again. But the 

 Italians did not take to the idea, and when last I heard of the man he 

 had failed to get going even with the help of his old prestige, his wealth, 

 and the support of some dukes and duchesses. His imitators also 

 failed. Some of you may ask: But didn't the method have some value? 

 Yes; it was no tiling new. Nose specialists have used it for years, and 

 with it have helped occasional patients with hay fever and headache. 



Albert Abrams. — Another typical story is that of Albert Abrams, a 

 licensed physician of no great reputation in CaUfornia. For years he 

 promoted a scheme for curing disease by pounding the spine with a 

 little rubber hammer. But the idea never took hold, and until he 

 was about 60, Abrams had only a mediocre practice. Then one day as 

 he sat looking at one of the first Uttle radio sets, he got an idea that 

 was soon to bring him in a million dollars. He took a couple of cheap 

 resistance boxes and an old Ford spark coil, hooked them together in 

 the sUUest way, and announced to the worid that with this magic 

 detector he could tune in on the electronic vibrations coming from a 

 drop of blood and could tell exactly what disease the patient was 

 suffering with. For good measure he would tell if the sample of blood 

 came from a Chinese or a Jew, or from a Presbyterian or a Catholic ! 

 Just as easily he could connect the patient to another silly box of wires 

 and tune the disease right out of him. 



To people who were just beginning to reaUze what marvels the radio 

 tube could perform, this all sounded so reasonable and so up to date 

 that thousands flocked to him and paid $100 or more to sit for awhile 

 holding onto the end of a wire out of which was flowing — absolutely 

 nothing. Many felt that they were cured, and writers Uke Upton 

 Sinclair, who swallowed hook, line and sinker, wrote articles accusing 

 the leaders of the medical profession of narrowness, backwardness, and 

 jealousy, and an inability to recognize genius when they saw it. The 

 fact that Professor Millikan, on the witness stand in a malpractice 

 suit, swore that he had examined the instruments and that they 

 couldn't possibly do what they were supposed to do, did not seem to 

 discourage anyone. 



And then Abrams died, and without his frequent startling pro- 

 nouncements, which had served to keep his name in the newspapers, 

 his disciples found themselves with but few patients, and most of 

 them were compelled to shift over into some other better advertised 

 and more popular form of quackery. 



SELF-LIMITED DISEASES 



But some of you may still be saying that you know of a man who 

 was lying at death's door and, after treatment by some irregular 



