10) Inside Dr. Abrams' Clinic: An Excerpt from Upton Sinclair

“For some fifteen or eighteen years I have had the good fortune to count among my friends one of America's greatest poets and most loveable of men, George Sterling. For ten or twelve years I have been accustomed to read in his letters extravagant statements concerning a certain San Francisco physician. He would say, ‘I should never again be afraid of getting any disease. Abrams would cure it in a week or two.’ He would say, ‘My friend Abrams continues to work new miracles, so rapidly that the medical profession had been frightened away from him.’ These statements were so extreme, that I failed to take them as seriously as I should. I wish now to profit by that blunder, and tell what I have to tell as cautiously and conservatively as possible, so as not to frighten the reader away.

“A few months ago I received from George Sterling a letter from which I quote a couple of paragraphs: ‘I am glad to see you're interested in Dr. Abrams, and I wish I could orally discuss him with you. He has utterly revolutionized medicine and henceforth nine operations out of ten will be unnecessary, especially where bacilli are concerned. I send you one of his quarterly pamphlets, which he publishes for the many physicians who have taken his course. There are always a lot of them in his laboratory, and they tell me that his diagnoses are 100 per cent correct. In this quarterly read especially the article by Sir James Barr, late president of the British Medical Association; realizing meanwhile what it means for a conservative English physician to make such statements! And Barr is going to be convinced even as to cancer. I know of many cases that Abrams has cured lately, four of them personal friends of mine. And Tuberculosis is nothing to him. To me he seems the greatest man ever born…’

“So”, says Sinclair, “I decided to go to San Francisco and investigate. I planned to spend a day or two, but what I found there held me a couple of weeks, and it might have been months or even years, if urgent duties had not called me home. I think the best way to present the work to you, the work of Dr. Albert Abrams, is to take you to his clinic, and let you see what I saw at my first visit, without any preparation or explanation.

“It is a two story building on Sacramento Street, and after I had visited it a few times, I took to calling it ‘The House of Wonder’, for I saw in it such miracles as I had never dreamed of in this world.

“You are in a physician's laboratory, with rows of raised chairs on one side of the wall. These chairs are occupied by a score or so of physicians, who have come from all over the country to study Abrams work. In the center of the room there is a long table containing some electrical apparatus. One of the wires from these apparatus ends in an electrode, and in front of the table upon a grounded plate, stands a young man stripped to the waist, and with the electrode pressed to his forehead. Dr Abrams sits on a chair before the young man, and taps with his finger upon the latter's abdomen, a method known to physicians as ‘percussion’. To save you any unnecessary bewilderment, I explain at once that this young man is not the patient being examined; this young man is known as the ‘subject’, and his body is merely one of the instruments, which Abrams uses in his examination. The patient is in Toronto, or Boston, or Mexico City and all that Dr. Abrams has is half dozen drops of his blood upon a bit of clean white blotting paper.

“ ‘Next specimen’, says Dr. Abrams, and his assistant takes from an envelope a blood specimen which has come in this morning’s mail, and cuts it to the right size and puts it in a little box which is connected by a wire with a rheostat, in turn connected with the body of the subject.

“The doctor's assistant hands him a letter which has come with the specimen, and the doctor reads it to his clinic: ‘I sent the blood of Mrs. J., age 16 years’ that is all. ‘No symptoms!’, grumbles Abrams. ‘They want me to try it out, of course, and I can't blame them, but it is a waste of time to begin at the beginning of each case. All right, gentlemen, we set the instrument at 49 which is the vibratory rate of human blood. I don’t happen to know this doctor who sends the specimen, and there are people trying to play tricks on me all the time. If this specimen contains human blood, the vibratory rate will come through on the body of the subject, and we shall have a dull area on this spot, if it is a male.’ The doctor indicates a line just below the navel, and about an inch to the left. ‘If it is a female, the dull area will be on the corresponding spot on the right. Now listen.’

“He presses the second finger of his left hand against the abdomen of his subject, and with the second finger of his right hand, used as a little hammer, he begins to tap. He starts a couple of inches off from the correct spot and you hear a slightly resonant sound. He moves his finger, and when he comes upon the correct spot you notice a difference in the sound --- at least you come to notice it after you have listened through several sessions of the clinic and your ear has become practiced. The sound is duller, which is the same difference you would notice if you were percussing a table, and changed from the middle of the table to a spot over one of the legs.

“‘It is human blood, female,’ says Abrams. ‘In order to verify it, I set the rheostat at 50, and you notice that the dullness disappears. I set it back at 49, and the dullness returns. I call your attention to the fact that the subject is facing west. I turn his body slightly out of the line, so, and you note the dullness is gone, even at 49. I have to impress upon you again and again the importance of these minute details. I do not know why it is necessary to face west; it must have something to do with magnetic currents of the earth, of course. All I know is that if you face west you get these reactions, and if you face any other way, you don’t get them. All this work of mine is empirical, you understand. I experiment and find what happens. I try one way, and then I try another; so little by little I am groping my way to these secrets of nature.’

“‘Another physician I do not know’, says Abrams. ‘And again, no symptoms given. It seems that we have to spend the whole morning doing this a-b-c work; every physician in the country has to be separately convinced --- and then they aren't convinced! All right, no help for it. First, is it human blood? We set the dial at 49. Forehead, please.’

“The subject places the electrode upon his forehead, and Dr. Abrams begins to tap. ‘Aha!’ he says. ‘A practical joker. No human blood! You see gentlemen; it is clear and unmistakable. The area for human blood is precisely here. Now listen carefully; there is no difference whatever in the sound. Neither male nor female! About once a week we have someone trying to play this silly joke upon us. Just for fun, let us determine what kind of blood it is.’ And the doctor sets the rheostat at one figure after another. ‘Cows blood? No, dog's blood --- no! Monkey, cat, sheep---ah yes, sheep's blood. He has pressed the paper against his Sunday dinner before it went into the oven. All right, we will waste no more time upon that.’ The doctor takes the envelope, and the vehemence of his pencil as he writes the words ‘sheep's blood’ ought surely, if there be anything in his theory of radioactivity, to convey a vigorous shock to the doctor in Boston who has played the trick.

“ ‘Next specimen.’ And so we proceed. Another sample is put in, and the tapping begins, and we are told that this person has 25 ohms of tuberculosis, located in the spinal cord and left kidney. We are told that the disease is of 12 years standing, also that there is ‘strep’, that is to say streptococci, or pus infection in the teeth on the lower left hand side. We are told that the next specimen, which comes from a town in Texas, indicates a tumor located on a certain precise spot of the brain. The next specimen comes without any indications whatever, and we are told that it is a woman 52 years of age, and she is suffering from acquired syphilis of 14 years standing, and the lesion will be located on the right fore-finger. Some of these findings are made in two or three minutes. None of them take more than ten minutes, and after you have watched the work for an hour, you find yourself with one clear-cut conclusion in your mind. This eager and excitable little Jewish doctor is either one of the greatest geniuses in the history of mankind, or else one of the greatest maniacs. You are not quite sure which, and you go on day after day, and still you cannot be sure, because that unveiled to your view is so amazing, you cannot make it real to yourself.

“But one thing becomes quickly clear to you. The hypothesis of fraud must be excluded. This man is passionately, even furiously, convinced of the reality of his phenomena; also he is a reverent scientist, working in the highest traditions of the healing art. He is a much over-worked man, irritable and nervous.

“Things go wrong with his apparatus; the wires get in his way, or his assistants make blunders, and he says, ‘Damn it’ and he has to apologize to the lady doctors. But present him with a new idea, some way to verify or perfect his work and he pounces on it like a cat. He is a veritable incarnation of Nietzsche’s phrase about the human soul which hungers for knowledge like a lion for his food. There is no experiment he will not try: you suggest an idea to him one morning, and discover the next day he has slept only two hours – he was working the rest of the time on that idea. There is hardly any subject of human thought about which he has not read and has not something vivid and vital to say. Incidentally, he is a warm-hearted and loveable man whose work is a personal pleasure to aid.

“He has a marvelous acquaintance with the human body. He calls it the most delicate scientific instrument in existence, and he has not merely that knowledge of its structure and functions which other physicians and surgeons possess – he has gone on to explore the radioactivity it manifests and the infinite variety of reactions resulting there from. Many years ago this man was known in the medical profession as the discoverer of ‘the reflexes of Abrams’. He studied the nervous system of the body, tracing out each minute thread of nerve, and showing exactly where disturbances in the functions and structure would manifest themselves. It is this knowledge about nerve reactions, which he has now turned to use. The nerve threads all carry out different vibrations, and if radioactivity is introduced into the body, they instantly sort it out, and manifest it at a certain area, which can be found.

“You decide that the man is not a fraud, and then you begin to wonder, can it be that he is deceiving himself, and that he only imagines that he is getting these reactions? You talk with the physicians who sit watching. ‘Why did you come here?’, you ask, and the answer is, ‘I sent Abrams some blood specimens, and found his diagnoses were right every time.’ You ask another, and get the same response. You ask a third and he says, ‘He diagnosed my cancer while I was in Illinois, and cured it, so I came to learn about it. Half the physicians here have been cured of something, you find, and several are in the process of a cure.

“I assume that the reader is skeptical concerning these miracles. It is proper that he should be. Some one may point out that the little drama with Dr. So-and-so might easily have been arranged in advance, after a fashion understood in the ‘medium parlors’, where you talk with the spirit of your deceased grandmother for the sum of two dollars. But I sat in this clinic twice a day for a couple of weeks, and in that time I saw several hundred blood specimens examined; and letters and telegrams sent to physicians all over the United States. Abrams has examined to date over 12,000 blood specimens for other physicians, and the fact that letters continue to arrive by special delivery can have only one meaning, that the physicians find his diagnoses correct. Also, I saw in this clinic more than a hundred patients who had been treated, or were being treated, by Abrams' methods. He must have been a stage manager of supernatural skill to have taken all this variety of people, men and women from a dozen races and of ages varying from eight to eighty, and taught them to play the strange roles, which they played before the critical audience! Again and again I saw Abrams make a diagnosis from the blood, and then bring in the patient, and invite some physician in the clinic who happened to be a specialist, to make an examination and see if he could find signs of the disease.
“And here comes an actor, who has had a tumor on the brain, and had lost the power to make connected sounds, and was rapidly losing the power to walk. Now, after two month’s treatment, he can both talk and walk again, and his stage ambitions have revived. He is a tall, black-coated figure, presenting a weird appearance, because a part of his treatment has consisted of shaving his head and painting it a vivid red, some substance whose vibratory rate corresponds to that of sarcoma.

“‘Now show us how you can walk’, says Abrams. ‘Can you stand on your toe?’

“‘Yes, sir’, says the actor, and he toddles around.

“‘You couldn't do that a few weeks ago?’

“‘I fell on my face every time I tried it.’

“‘And now on your heels. You couldn't do that?’

“‘No, sir, if I got up on my heels when I got out of bed, I fell back on the bed helpless.’

“‘And your voice is coming back all right?’

“‘Well, you can hear it’, says the actor proudly. His voice still falters, but he tells us how in the old days he acted in England, and how some day he is going to act Richard III. He shows us how he will do it, with many expansive gestures:

“‘Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York!’

“What is the principle upon which these marvels are based? Let us bear in mind to begin with that all our explanations in this matter are guesses. What Abrams has done is to find out what happens. He has done this by twenty years of minute and painstaking experiment. Having found out he tries to account for the happenings, to rationalize them, but if all his guesses are wrong, that does not alter his facts.

“Every high school boy knows that water consists of two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and if it varied from that composition, it would be something other than water. In the same way, Abrams as discovered experimentally that every disease has a radioactivity peculiar to itself; uniform and invariable. He calls this the ‘vibratory rate’ of the disease; but you must bear in mind that this term is purely arbitrary, a name which he gives to certain effects which he has observed and measured, though he does not know what they are or how they came to be. Tubercular tissue, and the tubercle bacillus and every drop of blood from a body which contains the tubercle bacillus—all these substances produce a reaction when the rheostat is set at 42, and if the reaction does not come through at this point, there is no tuberculosis in that body. That this is amazing and new does not in any way alter the fact that it is so. It has been demonstrated by Abrams in many thousands of cases. It is demonstrated over and over again, scores of times every day in his clinic, and it can be demonstrated by any one who will take the trouble to understand his method.

“It would be impossible to exaggerate the revolutionary nature of this one discovery. It gives us for the first time an infallible method for the diagnosis of disease; it gives us also a means of exploring disease and understanding its real nature.”

Upton Sinclair’s original article is far longer. Likewise, his letter to the American Medical Association extolling the virtues of Dr. Abrams’ discovery is quite compelling as well. This was their response:

“May 12, 1922.

“MR. UPTON SINCLAIR:

“Your point of view as to what constitutes scientific evidence is so at variance with that of our readers that it would be a waste of space to publish your letter.
Yours very truly,
THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
(Signed) George H. Simmons.

“P. S. We are returning your letter herewith."