Etheric Technologies 8: Wilhelm Reich and Orgone, Part Two

[ecosophia]

We ended last week's post in this sequence with Wilhelm Reich safely ensconced in the United States, constructing his first orgone accumulators using alternating layers of conductive and insulative materials.  He was by this time certain that he'd broken through into an entirely new field of scientific research, and that orgone was a reality -- an energy closely related to biological life and health, which bridged the gap between psychology and physiology.  It was a busy time for him; he was teaching classes at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, training physicians in the techniques he'd already devised, getting his books translated into English, and pursuing further researches into orgone. 

Unfortunately for him, he began looking into the possibility that orgone treatment could be used to benefit cancer patients. When he first began this research in the late 1930s, that wasn't a problem, but it became a massive problem for him once the Second World War ended. 

I'm not sure how many of my readers realize that today's sky-high rates of cancer are a very recent phenomenon.  In the 19th century, cancer was an uncommon disease, mostly found in old people -- childhood cancers were so rare that individual cases were written up in medical journals. That started to change between the two world wars, but it was after the end of the Second World War that cancer rates soared and cancer became the #2 cause of death in the United States. Readers of my generation and older will recall the flurry of books and movies in the 1960s about young adults dying of cancer -- Love Story, Brian's Song, Sunshine, and so on through a very long list.  Those made such a splash because young adults dying of cancer was a new and shocking thing at that time. 

That made cancer an immense challenge for the medical and pharmaceutical industries.  They had just succeeded in getting a stranglehold over health care in the United States, and all of a sudden they were faced with a widespread health crisis for which they had no effective treatments. Nor could they address the cause, because it was recognized quite early that the major causes of cancer were environmental, resulting from the explosive growth of the chemical industry and the saturation of the environment with an ever-expanding list of toxic compounds. (There's a reason, in other words, why the American Cancer Society gets most of its funding and many of its board members from the chemical industry.)

What made all this a potential disaster for the medical-industrial complex was that some alternative treatments seemed to work against cancer in at least some cases. That was why, from the 1950s on, anyone outside the medical industry who claimed to be able to treat cancer could count on facing an all-out attack by the medical industry and its lawyers and media flacks. 

Reich was completely unaware of this. He was caught up in his research, trying to push the boundaries of his new science of orgonomics. He experimented with the effects of orgone accumulators on radioactive material and nearly ended up with a disaster on his hands -- the result was a devitalized form of orgone that Reich named DOR, "deadly orgone radiation."  He found by accident that orgone directed from an accumulator toward the sky appeared to cause changes in weather, and developed a device -- the "Cloudbuster" -- which was tested successfully in drought conditions in Arizona and Maine.  He built a new home and laboratory in Rangeley, Maine, where he pursued his work.

Meanwhile the medical industry followed its usual game plan. Mass media denunciations came first. Next was an investigation by the FDA -- then as now controlled by the pharmaceutical industry via the "revolving door" policy, by which FDA officials retired into well-paid corporate positions as a reward for decisions that benefited the industry they were supposed to regulate. In 1954 the FDA got a compliant judge to issue an injunction forbidding Reich to ship orgone accumulators across state lines and banning his books -- this latter under the pretext that the books in question were "labeling" for the accumulators. 

Reich made the mistake of trying to fight this by proving that his methods actually worked. Under American law, once the injunction was issued, all that mattered was whether Reich obeyed it, and once one of Reich's subordinates transported several accumulators from Maine to New York City, the FDA had what it wanted and set the legal machinery in motion. Reich was thrown into prison, where he died.  By court order, all his laboratory notes, manuscripts, and unsold books -- three tons of them -- were burnt, and all his equipment was destroyed. Only the fact that many copies of his books had already been published and some orgone accumulators were in other hands kept his life's work from being completely erased. 

Comments

[readoldthings]

Ain't that America.

When I was in college in the early 2000s, I had a student job at the newly formed Center for Environmental Oncology at my university. At one time, my job was to help edit a book being written by the head of the Center which documented the ways that the Chemical and Tobacco industries had spent decades in a secret war, trying to pin the blame for cancer on one another. Tobacco eventually lost, probably because it's less necessary to the economy and more associated with Southerners, the working class and other deplorables. But both were responsible. The book was published more than a decade ago, claiming that a million excess cancer deaths had been caused by the chemical industry-- and I've never heard anyone make any mention of it anywhere since.

[ecosophia]

Let me know the title and author and I'll give it a signal boost.

[readoldthings]

It was entitled "The Secret History of the War on Cancer," by an author named Devra Davis. It's worth noting that the author is a Democratic Party insider of the usual sort. Not that that means anything one way or the other about the book. It's just funny to remember a time when criticisms of big industry and their-- er-- conspiracies against the public good were a staple of leftwing discourse, denounced by the Right Wing as "Communism." "Toxic Sludge is Good for You" and "Trust Us, We're Experts!" by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are other examples of the genre.

[ecosophia]

The public libraries here in Rhode Island have a lot of copies; I'll check it out.

[robertmathiesen]

Was that The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis (2007)? I've never heard of it either, but it wasn't too hard to track the author and title down from the clue you gave by mentioning the "Center for Environmental Oncology."

[robertmathiesen]

Here's a bit more about Dr. Davis. It's very interesting.

https://ehtrust.org/about/dr-devra-davis/

PatriciaO, she seems to have done a fair amount of recent work on electromagnetic spectrum sensitivity and on how 5G is now a major health threat.

The non-tinfoil guide to EMFs : how to fix our stupid use of technology

[sothismedias]

I saw this book at work this week and thought it might be of interest to some people:

The non-tinfoil guide to EMFs :how to fix our stupid use of technology by Nicolas Pineault.

Re: The non-tinfoil guide to EMFs : how to fix our stupid use of technology

[(Anonymous)]

Pineault's book is really quite good, with decent explanations of a complex technical subject for people new to it. BTW, I'm Pat Ormsby (I can't see any way to stop being "anonymous" except say my name here.)

[tunesmyth]

Robert, I don’t believe Patricia O normally reads this blog— she told me that she doesn’t some time ago, at least— but I just sent her an email to let her know you pinged her.

[robertmathiesen]

Thank you, tunesmyth!

[(Anonymous)]

I may have met Dr. Davis in Tokyo about 20 years ago. Many of the dedicated EMF scientists came over of a conference, including the late Dr. Neil Cherry. The press came and were quite impressed with the importance of the knowledge the scientists were revealing. They swore they would alert the public. What reached the papers was desiccated and relegated to the back pages. Suppression of this quite large body of knowledge dates back to at least the late 1940s. The reason for that then was the arms race. Since then we have gone further and further out on a limb.
Recently Dr. Davis has participated in filing a lawsuit against the FCC regarding how the 5G rollout violates rights of community self-determination and the rights of the disabled. So much is going on right now, though, that this has been buried under a stack of new developments, in particular, attention among the EMF scientist/activist community has turned to the threat of forced vaccination that is being driven in part by fear of long-COVID, the symptoms of which are nearly identical to electromagnetic illness.
A big thank you to Quin Arbeitman for telling me about this conversation.

[ecosophia]

If so, that's good news; the Rhode Island state library network has seven copies available.

[readoldthings]

Yes indeed!

It may be that I simply avoided hearing about it. My time at the Center for Environmental Oncology ended badly for reasons that were largely my fault-- I was 21, more than usually immature, and had no idea how to hold a professional job.