The Electronic Reactions of Abrams: Albert Abrams and the Machine That Diagnosed a Rooster with Syphilis

At some point in the early 1920s, the American Medical Association mailed a blood sample to one of Albert Abrams’s trained practitioners for diagnostic analysis. The practitioner placed the sample in the device Abrams had designed, performed the electronic testing protocol Abrams had developed, and returned a diagnosis: the patient whose blood had been submitted suffered from malaria, diabetes, cancer, and syphilis. The blood sample was from a Plymouth Rock rooster.

This experiment was one of many conducted to test the claims of Albert Abrams, a San Francisco physician who had built what was, by the early 1920s, one of the most successful medical fraud operations in American history. His devices had been placed in the offices of an estimated 3,500 practitioners across the country. His Electronic Medical Foundation generated revenue through diagnosis-by-mail services, training courses, and device leasing arrangements that were specifically designed to prevent practitioners from opening the machines and examining their contents. When the AMA finally did open one, they found simple wiring, a small motor, and some lights. Nothing inside the Oscilloclast, as the main device was called, could have performed any diagnostic function at all.

The Theory

Albert Abrams was not a diploma-mill physician. He had a legitimate medical degree from the University of Heidelberg, had trained in Europe, and had held academic positions at Stanford. His earlier career, before he developed the Electronic Reactions theory, included genuine research in neurology and pathology. The pathway from credentialed physician to the most prolific medical quack of the early twentieth century is one of the stranger trajectories in the history of medicine.

His theory, which he called the Electronic Reactions of Abrams, or ERA, held that every disease produced a specific electronic vibration that could be detected from any biological material (blood, saliva, hair) belonging to an affected person. His diagnostic device, the Dynamizer, was supposedly capable of reading these vibrations from a blood sample and identifying the disease present. A second device, the Oscilloclast, was supposed to transmit corrective vibrations back at the patient to eliminate the pathological ones. ERA practitioners believed, or claimed to believe, that diagnosis could even be performed from a drop of dried blood on a piece of paper.

This extended to tests conducted on the signatures of famous dead people. When a practitioner submitted the autograph of Samuel Pepys for ERA analysis, the diagnosis returned was congenital syphilis. The autographs of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe produced the same result. These experiments were not designed to support the theory.

The Commercial Operation

Abrams’s commercial structure was sophisticated. He did not sell his devices outright. He leased them, at rates that provided ongoing income, under contracts that required practitioners to return the devices if they ever attempted to open or examine them. Students attended training courses at $200 a head, a substantial sum in early 1920s dollars, and received certification as ERA practitioners. A mail-order diagnosis service charged fees for analysis of blood samples sent in from patients around the country. Abrams himself became very wealthy.

Defenders of Abrams, who included both Upton Sinclair and Arthur Conan Doyle, argued that his results were genuine even if the mechanisms were not understood by conventional science. Sinclair wrote favorably about ERA in a publication specifically devoted to defending it. Conan Doyle, by then deeply invested in spiritualism and a credulous patron of unconventional claims, was similarly supportive. Neither endorsement had any basis in evidence. Both provided significant public relations value in a controversy that Abrams was adept at framing as the persecution of an innovative practitioner by a medical establishment unwilling to consider new paradigms.

The Investigation

The definitive public exposure of Abrams came through an investigation conducted by Scientific American, which assembled a team of investigators and subjected ERA practitioners to controlled tests. The magazine had received letters from readers claiming Abrams’s machines were among the greatest inventions of the century; it decided to find out. Practitioners were given vials containing unknown substances and asked to identify them using ERA methods. They could not. When investigators opened the Oscilloclast, they found the interior of a device that had no capacity to perform any of the functions it was sold to perform.

Abrams died of pneumonia in January 1924, at age sixty-two, before the Scientific American investigation was complete. The fact that his machines had not cured his pneumonia was noted by his critics without particular subtlety. After his death, the AMA formally opened one of his devices for public documentation. The Electronic Medical Foundation continued to operate for some years under the management of his estate before eventually being shut down by regulatory action.

The Abrams case contributed directly to the development of medical device regulation in the United States, providing a clear historical example of why devices making medical claims require independent verification of their claimed mechanisms and efficacy before entering clinical use. The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which dramatically strengthened federal authority to regulate medical devices as well as drugs, was the legislative response to an era of medical device fraud of which Abrams’s operation was the most prominent example.

TL;DR: Key Facts and Why This Case Matters

Who was Albert Abrams?

Albert Abrams (1863–1924) was a San Francisco physician with a legitimate medical degree from the University of Heidelberg who developed a pseudoscientific diagnostic and treatment system called the Electronic Reactions of Abrams (ERA) in the 1910s and early 1920s. He built a commercial operation around leasing diagnostic and treatment devices to approximately 3,500 practitioners, training ERA practitioners at significant fees, and running a mail-order diagnosis service. He was, by any measure, one of the most successful medical fraudsters of the early twentieth century.

How was the fraud exposed?

The American Medical Association tested ERA practitioners by submitting blood samples from non-human subjects, including a rooster, and received confident diagnoses in return. Scientific American conducted a formal investigation using controlled tests that ERA practitioners could not pass. When the AMA opened an Oscilloclast device, they found simple wiring, a small motor, and no components capable of performing any diagnostic or therapeutic function. Abrams died before the investigation concluded; his foundation continued for some years before regulatory action shut it down.

What were the legal and regulatory consequences?

Abrams was not prosecuted during his lifetime. Several ERA practitioners were charged with fraud in cases where diagnostic failures had direct negative consequences for patients. The broader regulatory legacy of the Abrams case and similar medical device frauds of the era contributed to the development of federal medical device regulation under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which gave the FDA authority to require evidence of safety and efficacy for devices making medical claims.

Why does this case matter?

The Abrams case is the definitive early twentieth century example of medical device fraud at scale, and it illustrates how a credentialed physician can leverage professional legitimacy to sell an entirely fraudulent product to other credentialed practitioners who then use it on patients. The lease-only commercial model that prevented practitioners from examining the devices, and the referral structure that made ERA practitioners financially invested in the system they were operating within, were innovations in medical fraud structure that have since been replicated in various forms. The regulatory response the case helped produce, requiring independent verification of medical device claims, is one of the clearest examples in this series of specific harm producing specific protective legislation.