Name/Title
Radionics UnitDescription
Radionics Calbro-Magnowave
This free-standing Radionics device will probably go down in medical history as one of the most sophisticated quackery devices marketed during the early 20th century to medical practitioners. The development of this device was envisioned by San Francisco physician Albert Abrams who was a Heidelberg trained neurologist. Dr. Abrams was inspired by early theories of “Radionics” while undergoing his residency training in Germany. The pseudo-scientific theory underlying radionics encouraged the belief that living tissue emitted radiation that could be detected, measured and employed to make medical diagnostic decisions: Dr. Abrams also related this theory to Franz Anton Mesmer’s “animal magnetisms” and Luigi Galvoni’s “galvanism”. With the arrival of radio in the late 19th century, he further refined his theory incorporating physics and electrical engineering to disease processes formulating the “Electrical Reactions of Abrams” (ERA). The basic tenet underlying ERA was that all diseases emit radiation at different vibration rates (frequencies) that can be measured without the patient’s physical presence. Dr. Abrams began marketing a Radionic device in1920 to detect these vibrations from blood samples mailed in on cloth fabric that was referred to as either a “Radioclast”,or later as a “Calbro-Magnowave”. The postulate underlying its operation was that various disease processes emit radiation at different frequencies. Once the exact frequency was detected and recorded, the patient would be encouraged to visit the practitioner’s office for a modest fee and receive electrical stimulation at a specific frequency through a skull-plate electrode attached to their head while standing in a saline solution. This therapeutic process would be repeated over a number of visits. There was no medical or engineering merit associated with the Radionic device: It turned out to consist of nothing but a series of randomly connected resistors, lights and knobs to impress patients. This quack therapy was most likely to incur a placebo effect.