08) Life Energy Down a Wire: The Electronic Reaction of Abrams (ERA)

In the era Dr. Abrams practiced medicine the human abdomen was used as a diagnostic medical instrument. The doctor taps the patient's abdomen in an attempt to feel and hear the stomach beneath. If he finds an area of several square inches that, instead of sounding hollow like a drum, is flat and dull, it can indicate a particular illness.

The art of percussion consists of tapping with the middle finger of the right hand on the middle finger of the left hand, which is held against the abdominal wall. It was a diagnostic technique Dr. Abrams had used for many years. From experience he knew instinctively that the dull sound above the naval did not belong where it was unless the patient was in the early stages of cancer. A similar sound along the inner border of the shoulder blade confirmed his suspicions.

His reasoning for the sound was that the cancerous tumor was emanating a specific radiation that was affecting the nerve fibers of those areas, reflexively causing a muscle contraction of the abdomen in that spot. By assembling other patients with similar conditions, he could verify that each had a contraction in the same location.

These observations caused him to question whether a cancer tumor removed from a patient would have the same effect in the proximity of a healthy person.

To answer this question, Abrams devised a clever experiment. He found an entirely healthy young man and had him apply to his forehead a vial containing a piece of a malignant tumor just removed from a cancer patient nearby. Within a few seconds the dull areas percussed on the cancer patient appeared on the body of the young man, but only when he was facing west. For some unknown reason, when the young man wasn’t facing west, or removed the vial from contact with his skin, the cancerous tone disappeared.

This astounding discovery was repeated many times. For the first time in anyone's memory, a slice of diseased tissue held against the surface of the skin, in a closed container, was producing a clearly observable reflex action in the nervous system of a healthy person that wasn’t there moments before! Abrams surmised from his knowledge of physics that the molecules of the diseased tissue must have a different atomic or electronic signature from healthy tissue. If the difference between the healthy and diseased tissue was electronic in nature, then perhaps it would travel down a wire and produce the effects at the other end.

Again the healthy young man (call the Subject) was asked to stand with a wire fastened to a small aluminum disc held by elastic against his forehead. On the other end of the wire, an insulated handle was mounted to a larger aluminum disc. This wire was passed behind a screen, where an assistant who could not be seen, held a cancer specimen. Without Abrams or the young man able to know when, the disc was pointed by the assistant at the cancer specimen. In each instance, the dull tone appeared in the young man's abdomen as before, and every time the wired disc was pointed away, the healthy tone re-appeared. This tone was audible to the assistant behind the screen, so he knew exactly when the tone matched his pointer.

In later experiments, thousands varying conditions were tried. Different diseases resulted in dull tones appearing at various locations on the body. However, it was not long before Abrams discovered that certain diseases shared locations close to one another on the body, like syphilis and cancer.

To overcome this obstacle, Abrams reasoned that if the signal of the diseased tissue would travel down a wire, then perhaps he could distinguish one radiation from another using the methods of electrical calibration. He simply cut the wire going between the assistant and the man being percussed and attached a variable resistance box between the two cut ends and resumed his tests.

Edward W. Russell, a prominent writer on Radionics who knew many early Radionics inventors well described this box. “Large and durable, it had three knobs fastened to brass blades that were designed to sweep across three arcs of studs. The studs were attached behind the box to coils of wound wire inside. With three blades able to make contact with a total of sixty-one studs, it was possible to accurately measure resistance in ohms across the two connecting terminals.” (1973, REPORT ON RADIONICS)

By using variable resistance, which assigns a numerical rate to the amount of resistance (in Ohms) in the line, Abrams was able to numerically differentiate between the different diseases that he observed in his experiments. The first notorious ‘Black Box’ was nothing more than three old fashioned dial resistors, but Abrams gave it a complicated name: the ‘Reflexophone.’

In testing cancer, the assistant held the wire pointed to the tumor sample while he twisted the dial of the resistor. When he hit 50 Ohms resistance in the circuit, Abrams heard the familiar thud on the abdomen of the Subject. At 49 and 51 it disappeared. When he tested for syphilis, the thud appeared at 55Ohms, and so on. With this process of calibration in place, Abrams was able to assign a spot on the body and a rate in ohms, to thousands of diseased conditions. These he published in a book called the ATLAS.

This simple experiment was of critical importance for the next hundred years of Radionics.

The measurements made with the resistance box were called the “Electronic Reactions of Abrams” or ERA. Later, the process became known as “Radionics”.

So far, nothing Abrams had done went beyond what any highly curious and talented researcher might have done under the same circumstances. Given the many unknowns about electricity at that time, Abrams’ discovery of a biological radiation that had an electrical component would certainly have merited scientific investigation. Many of Abrams contemporaries duplicated his simple experiments with similar results. The enormous implications of his findings---being able to electrically detect radiations emanating from diseased tissue were eagerly received by many physicians of his day. They are all but lost to us now. Yet this discovery was just the beginning for Abrams. As he began to devise instruments to treat illness based upon these mysterious radiations, Abrams silently crossed over the invisible boundary between science and metaphysics.