Science and medicine was simply weird back in the early 1900s, especially when one doctor claimed that he captured and bottled human energy.
Here is the article that announced the “great” mystical discovery.
Human Energy Trapped into Bottle for Use Some Day in Cure of Disease
By Kenneth W. Payne
Human energy – that mystery which is life itself – has just been caught, trapped in a glass jar – actually bottled up to save for future use! Captured and canned, to be used some day in the cure of disease!
With the performance of this miracle of magnetism a world-old, world-wide puzzle is solved!
“Can human energy really leap out from a man’s body into space, and cast a magic influence on other men?”
In dim past ages of superstition men asked themselves that question.
Only yesterday, in the era of Science, men were still asking it.
Today they are answered.
The letters “Q.E.D.” – which was to be demonstrated – have been signed to the problem. It has been proved by a scientist before scientists that the human body does radiate energy into space; that this mysterious human energy can influence others!
It’s a former professor of Leland Stanford University, the famous Dr. Albert Abrams of San Francisco, who has signed the letters “Q.E.D.” to this great problem.
Just the other day at a doctor’s convention in Chicago, Dr. Abrams caught some of his own magnetic energy, bottled it up in a Leyden jar – the kind of jar electricity is stored in – kept it there a moment and then, conducting this captured human energy in an ordinary insulated wire, used it to stop momentarily the heartbeat of one of his colleagues.
A large assemblage of well known doctors, gathers from all over the country, watched him and marveled. Nervous invalids who had come as many as six hundred miles to plead with the over-busy doctor for a moment’s consultation forgot their own troubles, fascinated by the experiments.
Dr. Abrams, surrounded by delicate electro-magnetic apparatus, explained his theory. Unique, startling, were the methods he used to prove it.
The room was darkened. A patient, stripped to the waist, stood on the platform before a sputtering, blazing x-ray machine.
In the darkness the doctors gathered about an x-ray screen held before the man’s stomach. They could see straight through him. When he swallowed a glassful of thickish, dark mixture, they could watch it flow down and fill his stomach.
“Now, watch closely,” said the doctor. “In ordinary digestion it would take an hour and a half for that liquid to pass on into the intestine. But, if a finger is held near the patient’s fifth dorsal spine – a joint of the spinal column where the nerves are near the surface – I maintain that human energy, discharged from the finger, will leap across like an electric spark, stimulate the nerves and cause the man’s stomach to empty its contents within a minute and a half!
“Now, will some of you doctors hold a finger near the patient’s spine? Thank you, Dr. Franklin. Now watch!”
The finger approached the spine. Suddenly the stomach was seen to straighten out! Its contents poured into the intestine like milk out of a pitcher!
“A perfect demonstration of the stomach reflex!” exclaimed Dr. Abrams.
“Now doesn’t that prove that there is an energy radiated from our bodies which affects other people’s bodies? How else can you explain the phenomenon?”
Next the doctor performed the experiment with the Leyden jar, mentioned above, showing that this human energy which emanates from our bodies can actually be stored up.
There was no trickery here – no charlatanry. It was serious science. Dr. Abrams himself admitted that these few experiments alone would prove nothing.
But on the following day he repeated them!
He has performed them again and again, with different subjects and in different ways. And practically always with the same results.
“I have proved that this mysterious human energy exists,” says Dr. Abrams. “I don’t know what it is. It isn’t electricity. But I have proved that it can be stored up in a glass jar just like electricity.
“Some day this powerful human energy, captured and bottled, will be used to revolutionized the entire treatment of disease!”
Source: The day book. (Chicago, Ill.), 07 Oct. 1913
