Dr. Albert Adams and His “Curative Machines”

We are (I hope) appropriately dismissive at the ridiculous bogus discussions concerning the treatment of COVID-19 that have appeared in the media. Hydroxychloroquine, bleach, “Plandemic,” blah blah blah quackery. It’s a good thing to be appalled by those who tout cures which lack scientific merit. And so perhaps it would be well to have a reminder that public trusting in false medical claims is part-and-parcel of American history.

Folks, may I introduce to you one Dr. Albert Abrams, known as “the dean of twentieth-century charlatans.” That’s Dr. Abrams in the chair, and he’s looking at a patient hooked up to a machine that supposedly emitted vibrations that could detect the cause of illness.

Abrams died at age 60, and by the time he went in 1924, he had made two million dollars hawking his “Dynamizers” — which he claimed could reveal from a drop of a patient’s blood his or her ethnicity, year of death, religion, and golf handicap. Many times, the Dynamizer detected disease, like cancer. Proclaiming that electrons were “the basic elements of all life,” and that his vibratory machines could manipulate them, Abrams developed “the Oscilloclast,” which he promoted as curative machines. In the 1920’s thousands of doctors had purchased Abrams’ machines for use on their patients.

Many scientists bridled at Abrams’ fraudulence. One Nobel Prize physicist said that the Dynamizer looked like something “a ten-year-old boy would build to fool an eight-year-old.” As we can see with parallels today, folks who really had high hopes for the Dynamizer and the Oscilloclast could look to famous stars in pop culture to buttress their confirmation biases — thus, Upton Sinclair (writer of _The Jungle_) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of the Sherlock Holmes books) were ardent defenders. Eventually scientists tested the Dynamizer with predictable conclusions.