Medicine: Electric Disease Detector

In 1924 died Dr. Albert Abrams, San Francisco millionaire whom officials of the American Medical Association called “the outstanding quack . . . the most polished charlatan … of the century.” Abrams made lasting contributions to the science of medicine by discovering that when the skin of the chest is irritated, the heart and lungs contract slightly. He also discovered that a clout on the spine may reduce a disabling bulge in the aorta. On the other hand, Abrams claimed without acceptable evidence that the human body was an electrochemical machine which produced certain vibrations when healthy, certain other vibrations when sick. He claimed that he could diagnose specific diseases by means of a machine which resembled a radio receiver. By means of this “Oscilloclast” he claimed that he could also cure diseases, detect lies, measure love, determine parentage.

Last week respectable scientists of the Yale faculty announced completion of an electric machine which does very much what Abrams claimed for his condemned Oscilloclast. Professor Harold Saxton Burr, upright Yale neuroanatomist, learned son of a professor in the Y. M. C. A. at Springfield, Mass, calls the Yale machine “a vacuum tube microvolt-meter for the measurement of bioelectric phenomena.” In the current Yale Journal of Biology & Medicine he and his colleagues give precise instructions for building the diagnostic machine and the principles on which it operates, something which Albert Abrams never provided for his device.

The machine measures electrical changes in the body as small as five one-millionths of a volt. By means of it Professor Burr and associates have been able to detect and record electrically the instant of ovulation in rabbits, cats and women, the development of chicks and salamanders in their eggs, differences between mice who are bound to develop cancer and mice who never will develop cancer, the first stirrings of cancer in mice long before the tumors are visible.

The possible extension of such detection to all human diseases set Professor Burr’s imagination afire, impelled him to crow last week: “The technique should be a new and powerful weapon for the analysis of fundamental biological activity. . . . It seems well nigh unlimited in its application.”