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ecosophia
Despite the usual pushback from the medical profession, the work of Dr. Albert Abrams -- which was discussed in an earlier post in this sequence -- attracted a great deal of attention from medical practitioners who were willing to push the envelope. That allowed Abrams' work to come to the attention of the next pioneer of radionics, Dr. Ruth Drown. (That's her on the left.) Drown entered the medical profession the hard way. Born in rural Colorado in 1891, she married a local farmer, but caught a train to Los Angeles in 1918 with her children to escape domestic abuse. She landed on her feet, worked in a variety of jobs, and in 1923 became a nurse working for Dr. Frederick Strong, one of a number of physicians who used Abrams' equipment to diagnose and treat patients. She turned out to have a remarkable talent for healing with the Abrams method. Her experiences and succesful cures convinced her to study for a chiropractic degree, which she earned in 1927. As soon as she hung out her shingle and began practice, she began experimenting with modifications on Abrams machines. She was apparently the first person to guess that the effects Abrams and his peers were getting had nothing to do with radio waves or electricity, and began to devise machines of her own that had electrical wiring but used no electrical current. Her talent for naming devices, alas, was not on a par with her talent for healing; she called her most successful device the Homo-Vibra Ray. (In her defense, "homo" as slang for homosexual wasn't yet in common use. George Winslow Plummer's once-famous volume Rosicrucian Fundamentals, published in 1920, began with the ringing sentence: "The subject of Rosicrucianism is Man, the Homo.")
Some of her innovations turned out to be crucial for the evolution of radionics -- a term which she invented, by the way. Along with the recognition that some force distinct from radio waves and electricity was responsible for radionics cures, she pioneered the "stick pad," a plate of glass or plexiglass used by radionics machine operators to gauge the flow of the unknown force through the machine, and she began the systematic collection of "rates" -- settings on radionics machines -- which are specific to illnesses, organs, and other factors. These became standard elements of radionics during her lifetime and remain common today. Some of her other claims pushed the boundaries of radionics further than many subsequent practitioners have been willing to go, and helped fuel the debunking crusade against her. She found, according to her writings, that she could get accurate readings using a drop of blood from the patient, and that she could treat patients at a distance using the same medium. (Paracelsus, the great Renaissance alchemist and physician, made the same claim; both were able to produce evidence for it.) The spookiest of her achievements, and the one that came in for the most criticism, was the apparent ability of her Radio-Vision machine to take photographs of organs at a distance -- photographs that apparently showed lesions where medical diagnosis by other means found them to be. The judge, predictably, refused to let these be introduced as evidence in her trial.
Yes, there was a trial. In the wake of the Second World War, as the American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical industry tightened their grip on health and healing in the United States, alternative medical practitioners of all kinds came in for increasing persecution under laws designed to defend the medical monopoly. In 1950, at the behest of the AMA, federal authorities brought charges against Drown. Most of the evidence she offered in her own defense -- evidence that her methods worked, and that she had successfully diagnosed and treated thousands of patients -- was excluded from her trial. She was accordingly convicted of interstate fraud for shipping one of her machines across a state line and served a brief prison sentence. Still more legal charges were pending against her when she died in 1965. Some of her equipment survived, and inspired other students of radionics -- the device above is one example. After her time, however, while radionics flourished elsewhere, it was forced underground by legal proscription in the United States. The fate of the next pioneer of etheric healing we'll be discussing put the seal on that process. The golden summer of etheric medicine was ending, and a bitter winter followed.
Re: A follow up to last week's magic/fantasy books discussion.
Date: 2021-04-10 04:22 am (UTC)1) Nonfiction-to-fiction-- I was reminded of Jonathan Maberry (http://www.jonathanmaberry.com/aboutjonathan.cfm), whose writers' workshop I attended for a year. He is a now-successful horror author who got his start writing nonfiction books about martial arts. As JMG says, the first big step is getting published-- anything published. Agents and publishers see that and figure you are a better risk.
2) I vote for short pieces in the same universe. You could try submitting them to New Maps (http://www.new-maps.com/). And/or, sign up for a Dreamwidth account, and start posting them as blog entries here. When you post a comment, do so after logging in and post it as you. Your name becomes a link to your blog, and people can go find your "free samples". I've browsed the comment-names of a number of the other posters here and they have some neat stuff up.
3) Your earlier comment was a little long. I tend to go long-winded if I don't watch myself. So I will write something, then go back over it a couple times and condense it down to the essentials as much as possible before hitting "post". Not just here on the blog; I do this all the time at work with emails too.
- Cicada Grove
Re: A follow up to last week's magic/fantasy books discussion.
Date: 2021-04-10 04:52 am (UTC)Is it possible to edit my post here? I'd like to replace the outburst with an apology. I meant it to be whimsical and inviting, but I see that it's hard to find a way to take it as anything but haughty, arrogant, rude, condescending, intrusive, demanding, and entitled. That's not at all what I meant. I want to apologize and take that back.
I do like getting to discuss entry points to fiction writing with a successful writer I respect tremendously, and with commenters I respect tremendously, who are also avid readers with adventurous mindsets. I hope that with a more respectfully participatory attitude shown on my part, and without any links or specifics, that my journey of self-publishing might be an interesting and relevant little theme to include here.
Re: A follow up to last week's magic/fantasy books discussion.
Date: 2021-04-10 07:39 pm (UTC)Re: A follow up to last week's magic/fantasy books discussion.
Date: 2021-04-13 02:48 am (UTC)- MNW