MATHEMATICAL MEDICINE

When mathematics developed, applications of that science were made to physiology and to medicine. Under the influence of Borelli, the school of Iatro-Mathematical medicine developed and it flourished long after him. Foster, in his "History of Physiology," says:

Borelli was so successful in his mechanical solutions of physiological problems that many coming after him readily rushed to the conclusion that all such problems could be solved by the same methods. Some of his disciples proposed to explain all physiological phenomena by mathematical formulas and hypotheses concerning forces and the shapes and sizes of particles.

MAGNETISM

Magnetism occupied a large place in the minds of the great thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is no doubt that Paracelsus accepted, quite literally, what we embody in figurative expressions with regard to magnetism. To him the attraction of sex was magnetic. People had personal magnetism because they possessed physical powers by which they attracted others. He considered that these powers of attraction were expressions in human beings of the power of the magnet in the physical world, and that the two were literally equivalents. Kepler, one of the deepest thinkers of his time, evidently entertained the idea that the magnet represented the soul of the physical world, and that the planets were held in connection with the sun and their satellites with the planets, by magnetic attraction. We now call it the attraction of gravitation. We understand the force no better than before, but have changed the terms. Descartes theorized much along magnetic lines, and felt that by the use of certain expressions he was adding to knowledge, though he was really only multiplying terms.

Human Magnetism.—How seriously the question of human magnetism was taken will perhaps be best appreciated from one old fallacy. For a long period it was supposed that human beings were so highly magnetic that if a man were exposed in an open boat, in perfectly calm weather, in the open sea, where no currents would disturb him, his face would turn to the north, under the same magnetic influences as caused the needle to point to the north! Many studies of magnetism were made at this time, so that the subject attracted widespread attention. Columbus had made some rather startling observations on his voyage to America with regard to the declination of the magnetic needle, and, during the century following, Norman and Gilbert made interesting studies in the same subject. Father Kircher wrote two books on magnetism and there were a number of others written by university professors. Advantage was taken of this thoroughly scientific interest in magnetism to erect a whole body of pseudo-scientific medicine supposed to be founded on magnetic principles. The same theories were also applied to supposed explanations of various psychological phenomena.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the application of magnets was a favorite treatment for a great many diseases. Especially were they useful in the treatment of muscular pains and aches and the chronic diseases which so disturbed men's minds. Many of the joint troubles of the aged, the muscular pains and aches that develop from the wrong use of muscles, and the vague internal discomforts which often disturb men so seriously, were cured by the application of magnets. Perkins' success with his tractors shows how much can be accomplished in this way.

ELECTROTHERAPY

The great development of pseudo-science in medicine remained for the era following the scientific investigation of electricity. With the discovery of the Leyden jar and its startling spark, a new and marvelous healing agent seemed to be at hand. It is quite amusing to read the accounts of the influence of the spark of the Leyden jar on the well and on the ailing. In my "Catholic Churchmen in Science" (Dolphin Press, Phila., 1909) I summed up the situation.

Winckler of Leipzig said that the first time he tried the jar, he found great convulsions by it in his body; it put his blood into great agitation; he was afraid of an ardent fever, and was obliged to use refrigerating medicines. He felt a heaviness in his head as if a stone lay upon it. Twice it gave him a bleeding at the nose. After the second shock his wife could scarcely walk, and, though a week later, her curiosity stronger than her fears, she tried it once more, it caused her to bleed at the nose after taking it only once. Many men were terrified by it, and even serious professors describe entirely imaginary symptoms. The jar was taken around Europe for exhibition purposes, and did more to awaken popular interest than all the publications of the learned with regard to electricity, in all the preceding centuries.

The extent to which the curative power of electric sparks from the Leyden jar was supposed to go is best appreciated from a list of the affections that one distinguished electro-therapeutist claimed could be not only benefited, but absolutely cured by its employment. It included pulmonic fever, under which title practically all the more or less acute diseases of the chest were included, and some at least of the sub acute; dropsy, by which was meant every effusion into the abdominal cavity no matter what its cause; dysentery, under which was included at that time not only the specific dysenteries but many of the summer complaints and some typhoid fevers; diarrhea, including all the intestinal diseases not already grouped under dysentery; putrid and bilious fever, under which category were assembled the worst cases of typhoid; typhus fever, and all the other continued fevers, and any febrile condition reasonably severe for which no other term could be used; epidemic diseases, pest, anthrax, small-pox, cancer, gravel, diseases of the bladder and of the brain and spinal cord. The Leyden jar had no real effect on any of these affections, but doubtless the mental effect of this new remedy was quite sufficient to be of distinct therapeutic value in the milder forms of many of them.

With Galvani's discovery of the twitching of the muscles of the frog there came a new impetus to the exploitation of electricity in medicine. Many felt that now it was beyond doubt that electrical energy bore some definite relation to vital energy—that one might be made to replace the other if indeed they were not more or less the same thing. This led to many applications of electricity in medicine. Students of physiology were convinced that they were getting close to the solution of the mystery of life, and their persuasion was readily carried over to the people of the time, so that electricity literally worked wonders on them.

When the various electrical machines were invented and their use popularized, pseudo-science proceeded to exploit them, and succeeded, because the mechanical shock of the electric current proved a suggestive therapeutic stimulant. Gordon in the eighteenth century made the first practical frictional electrical machine, and soon some men were observing wonderful effects with it, though the charge was so small that it could actually accomplish little. Just after the invention of the voltaic pile in 1800 it came to be used in medicine with wonderful results. We are prone to think that electrotherapy is modern, but when electrical machines were quite crude, current strength small and potential low, old-time electro-therapeutists were recording their wonderful results and were getting just as marvelous effects as are reported now by enthusiasts. Considerable electro-medical literature existed a century ago when next to nothing was known of electricity. When, later, high potency currents came in and the Wimshurst and other powerful machines were invented, there was revealed at each novel invention a new horizon in electro-therapy and wondrous cures were reported. These continue to occur in the practice of a few favored individuals, though the general profession secures only some ordinary mechanico-muscular effects, which demand much time for real good to be accomplished and have nothing at all of the marvelous about them.

The power of the pseudo-scientific aspect of electricity to influence patients, far from being lost in our time, has rather been increased. Our newspapers make their readers eminently suggestible because they constantly furnish suggestions, and nothing so strengthens a function of any kind as exercise of it. All sorts of electrical contrivances and apparatuses are advertised to cure various pains and aches. Many of them actually seem to relieve long-standing discomfort, though it is not through any electrical power that they do so, but entirely through their influence on the patient's mind. A museum of the electrical contrivances of various kinds for which absurdly high prices are paid at the present time and which people recommend to others because of having been benefited by them would be interesting. There are belts of many kinds, and rings, and medallions, and plates to be worn on the back and on the chest, and curiously shaped poles or "polar plates" resembling various organs, and pendants and armlets and anklets and insoles of many, many kinds, usually going in pairs, one made in zinc and the other in copper, and worth exactly as much as the weight of copper and zinc in them, yet curing chronic ailments by suggestion, or at least bringing relief from many pains and aches complained of.

LIGHT AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Just as electricity has always been therapeutically abused by those who have taken advantage of the suggestive influence of its marvelous energy, so each new discovery in light has been the source of pseudo-scientific applications to medicine. When the explanation of photography was first made, shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was demonstrated that it was the blue light, or at least that end of the spectrum, and even some of the rays beyond the visible violet, which were the most active in this regard, applications of this fact to popular medicine became the order of the day. We had a wave of "blue light therapy" that wandered over this country and sold tons of blue glass. People simply sat beneath the blue glass as the sun shone through it and were supposed to absorb the actinic rays and acquire new life. According to many who had tried them, the ultra-violet rays were quite equal in their power to heal and restore new vigor to old frames to the fabled elixir of life of the olden time. "Rheumatism (that universal ill of the unthinking) in all its hydra-headed forms disappeared," as one enthusiast declared, "before the blue light, like the mists of the morning before the sun." All this, though it is said that the movement had no more serious foundation than the desire of a manager of a glass factory, who found himself stocked up with blue glass through a mistake, to dispose of his surplus stock. He not only did so, but many other manufacturers turned special attention to the new product because of the demand for it. The newspaper advertising was through the reading columns. The results were heard of on every side.