The value of music as a therapeutic agent is briefly touched on by Dr. Abrams and we are told that the overture of “Tannhäuser” will increase the pulse rate whereas “Meditation” diminishes blood pressure and pulse rate. “In dogs, music augments elimination of carbonic acid and increases the consumption of oxygen.” Love, says Dr. Abrams, “is dependent upon matter in vibration and the passional component has a wave metric index of 14 in both sexes.” In referring to legendary lore, Dr. Abrams apparently assigns a scientific basis for the belief among the bucolic that carrying around a potato has therapeutic virtue. Thus:
“A cut potato (carried on the person) prevents elicitation of the stomach reflex when the negative pole of a bar-magnet is presented to the stomach region whereas the positive pole will evoke dulness.”
It seems also that the “rheumatic rings” of iron “when worn yield a neutral energy which prevents the elicitation of the stomach reflex by either pole of a bar-magnet.” We learn, too, that the divining rod “no longer belongs to occultism but is entitled to consideration as a scientific fact.”
Dr. Abrams also has investigated methods whereby the sex of the fetus may be diagnosed. In the human these investigations have, apparently, been so limited as to permit only tentative conclusions. In the case of eggs of the domestic fowl, Dr. Abrams reports that with four eggs that yielded negative polarity, the result of incubation was four hens. Of five eggs yielding a positive polarity only two hatched, one was a hen and one a rooster, giving an “error in observation.” Three eggs tested yielded neutral polarity and “as predicted the eggs were sterile.” In case of an egg yielding a negative (female) polarity “an attempt was made to reverse the sex by painting one end of the egg with a yellow coloring material.” The result was a rooster.
Much more might be written about what one of our correspondents calls the wonderful things they are doing in the West, but space forbids. “Neither the fury of tongue,” says Dr. Abrams in the preface to his book, New Concepts in Diagnosis and Treatment, “nor the truculence of pen can discredit the author’s observations which are capable of analyzation and demonstration.” If there is any scientific foundation for the marvels that Dr. Abrams so picturesquely features, the scientific world has not yet found it out!—(From The Journal A. M. A., March 25, 1922.)
Dr. Abrams’ Graduation
In this department of The Journal for March 25 appeared an article on Dr. Albert Abrams and some of his discoveries. We have now received a letter from a physician, who asks that his name be not published, reading:
“To the Editor:—I notice in your article on Albert Abrams the statement that he was born in 1864 and received his degree of M.D. in Heidelberg 1882; if these data are furnished by himself and not a typographical error—though I find the same data in the American Medical Directory for 1916—then it is high time that some board of censors should make a careful examination of his credentials.
“Anybody, like myself, who is acquainted with medical matters in Germany knows that it is preposterous to assume that anybody could obtain the degree of M.D. in any German university at the age of 18 years.
M. D., Leipzig.”