Credit: Dangerous Minds / Public Domain

It’s a cliché to say now, but it really does need repeating: some people really should suffer from imposter syndrome. The irony is that if you do, you’re almost certainly not one of those people.

It’s truly depressing how many people waltz through life with their core belief being “I do what I want”. No deeper thoughts about what they’re doing, whether it’s the right thing to do, whether it’s helping people. That shit’s for the weak; much better to just decide on a course of action than to go ahead with it, no matter the cost. Even if that cost is the lives of other people. You might think I’m being overly dramatic here, but when it comes to “Dr” Albert Abrams, that’s exactly what he was playing dice with.

Born in San Francisco, California, in 1863, it’s truly baffling that everything Abrams has said about his education in medicine seems to be true. He studied at the Medical College of the Pacific (Stanford as we know it today). Apprenticed under the medicinal leading lights of the day. After all that, he continued his studies, first in Heidelberg, German, then in London, Vienna and Berlin afterwards. All this to say, a man with his level of medical expertise must have known that the core to his entire medical “practice” was bullshit.

You see, Abrams believed, or at least claimed to believe, that electrons were the basic element of life. Thus, if one applied electromagnetic radiation to a patient, one could “diagnose” their ailments. This is, of course, nonsense. However, Abrams was a charismatic salesman and designed a number of different machines that he swore blind could identify any illness in anyone. In the contract to lease one of these machines was a clause that under no circumstances were these machines ever to be opened.

It would be hilarious if real people weren’t dying as a direct result of this.

What was the machine of Albert Abrams?

The most widely used of these machines was ‘The Dynomizer’.

It may sound like something Reed Richards would cook up to take on Galactus, but trust me, this was somehow even more fictional. I often like to talk about how we were no more gullible now than we were then, but there is still something genuinely mind-boggling about how obvious a con this was. Not only was it ludicrously expensive for the time, not only were you not allowed to open it, but the base claim of the machine was that it could diagnose a patient, and I’m not making this up, via their handwriting.

That’s right. Albert Abrams said that a big radio could diagnose your ailments with a drop of your blood or a sample of your handwriting. You want to know the really depressing part? It worked like gangbusters. Abrams became a millionaire several times over off the back of these machines, and shockingly enough, I haven’t even got to the worst part of it all. The truly horrifying part is that these Dynomizers were rigged to say that perfectly healthy people were about to die. Normally, saying that whoever was “tested” by them had some combination of syphilis, cancer and diabetes.

Now, obviously, not everyone was fooled by this. There was a huge backlash to his work, no matter how many high-profile defenders Abrams had in the press, including the famously gullible Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. However, it wasn’t until the early 1920s that he began to see any real pushback for exploiting thousands of terrified people and telling them they were about to die a horrific death.

By which time, Abrams was already dying of pneumonia. In January 1924, Abrams was finally summoned to be questioned as a witness in a fraud case regarding his machines, but before he could stand, he died at the age of 60. One wonders whether he’d spent a moment of those six decades previously interrogating whether he did anything wrong.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.