Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (42 page)

During the plague years of the early 1900s, Dinshah's eclectic and unorthodox ministrations effected a 60 percent recovery rate, in contrast to the 40 percent recovery expectations of conventional medical practice.

Responding to an influential Theosophist friend's urgent summons, Dinshah, from his supervisory position in a major light installation several hundred miles away from central India, travelled to the bedside of his aunt who was dying from mucosa colitis (dysentery). Upon arrival, Dinshah faced several handicaps. The attending physician of record was a prominent Parsee and the Honorary Surgeon of no less than a personage than the Viceroy of India. The old woman revered him as a demigod, but contemptuously referred to Dinshah as "that kid doctor."

For three days he had to watch silently as her health continued to fail rapidly under a brutal but conventional medicinal regimen. Although the regimen was well thought out and in conformity with the best recommendations of The British Pharmacopaedia, Dinshah saw that the opium administered for the pain was stressful to the heart; the catechu, although a good astringent, was a peristalsis inhibitor; the chalk, intended as a binder, was an intestinal irritant; the bismuth subnitrate, a local antiseptic, choked the alimentary canal; and the anti-flatulent chloroform was escharating damaged tissue.

As Dinshah noted:
radioactivity, meeting darling of the press,

Thus she stayed two days more, drinking the poisonous concoction. On the third day she was in such a condition that she lifted her hands to me and implored me, "O, Dinshah, save me!" Medically she was beyond recovery and I said with a sigh, "Call on the Almighty to save you. Dear girl, I have no power, no medicine of which I know I can be of service to you, but if you let me I shall endeavor to do the best otherwise." She nodded her consent and I promptly threw out the drug mixture ... I brought [indigo-] coloured pickle bottles to act as the slides . . . Within 24 hours the [100 daily bowel evacuations] were reduced to four a day; within 48 hours they came down to two; the third day Jerbanoo was out of bed!

Reflecting an Eastern patience and restraint, and reflecting the slower technological pace of a pre-electronic age, Dinshah did not rush impetuously into print. However, before he could publicly promote SCT he had to be satisfied that he could exercise confident control of the procedure. Thus Dinshah embarked on a lengthy theoretical research project, producing remarkably precise and accurate tonation formulations.

By 1904, at Ajmer and Surat, he had established "Electro-Medical Halls" for the promotion of colour therapy research, magneto- and electro-therapeutic approaches as well as orthodox medicine. However, early on he was forced to abandon the otherwise promising electric modalities due to frequent episodes of nerve anastomosis and the inherent and insurmountable problems he encountered with "unmanageable and freaky currents."

In 1908 he left India to promote his inventions through Europe, eventually, in 1911, dropping anchor in the United States with his (first) wife and two children. He loved America and vigorously embraced the principles and politics of an open democracy. However, the same cannot be said of his wife who, in reaction to her early years of impoverishment and perhaps more than a little culture-shocked, returned alone to India.

Dinshah was so taken by his vision of a Walt Whitman/Horatio Alger America as perceived in those pre-war years that in 1914 he turned down a private offer of $100 thousand for his Internal Combustion Engine Fault Finder which he developed while serving as Professor and Chief Instructor at the New York College of Engineering Science and Automobile Instruction. Instead, he gave all rights to the United States military for aviation application. (Amongst his patented inventions are: #983,703, Electrical Wiring Device, Combustion Engine Fault Projector, 1925; #1,724469, Color Wave Projection Apparatus, 1936.)

Dinshah was granted U.S. citizenship in 1917. The following year he 1911; #1,144,898, Automobile Internal Finder, 1915; #1,544,973, Color Wave Electric Thermometer, 1929; #2,038,784, was given a commission as Captain in the New York Police Department Reserve, and in recognition of his wartime civilian aeronautic harbourpatrol activities he was promoted to Colonel, awarded the Liberty Medal by New York City Mayor John Hyland and appointed head and principal instructor of the NYPD Aviation School. The banner year of 1919 found him a member in good standing with the American Association of Progressive Medicine, and the elected Vice-President of the Allied Medical Association of America and the National Association of Drugless

Practitioners.

This all seems a strange background for a "charlatan" and "huckster," as he was to be labelled and pilloried by Fishbein's AMA, in conjunction with the equally acquiescent, ever-spineless FDA in the decades that followed.

Something insidious and unnoticed had happened during the twentyfour years since Dinshah's first visit to America. The robber barons of the nineteenth century had discovered value in technology and proceeded to exercise the same piratical control over intellectual property as they previously had over the traditional sources of material wealth. Lights dimmed all over the short-lived Age of Enlightenment as new acquisitional and inquisitional institutions became empowered and entrenched.

Social historian and author David Lindsay (Magnificent Possibilities, Koodansha America, Fall 1996) notes that with the change of the century there was a change in the perception of the technical man, the inventor. New social forces coalesced, mediating direct contact between people and technology. The control and credibility that had been the scientist's were co-opted by agencies of industry working with agencies of government.

Canadian political scientist Andrew Michrowski fixes the date with even more precision: "It was possible for Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and George Westinghouse to make their mark because in their time, before 1913, the retardant forces were not yet organized enough to totally counterweigh their innovations."

Suffice it to note that 1912 was the year that young Morris Fishbein, MD [sic] (neither passing anatomy nor completing his residency), entered the employment of Association, without ever Assistant Editor of the AMA's journal, JAMA. A prolific writer of articles, editorials and, later, books crusading for the medical profession, Fishbein became Editor of JAMA and Hygeia in 1924, holding these two posts for 25 years.

So it was against this background that Dinshah, ignorant of or indifferent to this dawning of a New Age of Darkness, innocently went public with SCT in April 1920 in New York City. The first formal instruction, in the already disreputable American Medical

practising medicine. In 1913 he became December that year, was attended by 27 students. During the next four years (as Morris Fishbein consolidated his political power within the AMA) Dinshah held 26 classes, training over 800 students, predominantly physicians but including many lay trainees as well.

It was the very ease with which the correct tonation could be determined and applied by laymen in the privacy of their homes (as much as, if not more than, mere efficacy) which constituted the true threat. If Dinshah had kept the SCT technology arcane, the equipment expensively overdesigned and within the preserve of the professional health community, events would have played out quite differently. Unquestionably it was this accessibility and the consequent commercial threat which SCT represented that made Dinshah an early target for an eager Fishbein.

Fortunately for Dinshah, an early attendee was the twenty-three-yeartenured Chief Surgeon of the Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia, the highly credentialled Kate W. Baldwin, M.D., F.A.C.S., a member of the AMA and the Pennsylvania American Academy of death in 1937, she remained a private SCT practitioner and a vociferous advocate in public, frequently defending SCT and Dinshah against the dark forces of repression.

Dr. Baldwin enjoyed sufficient status and seniority that the initial antilight-therapy onslaught could only incommode but not intimate or destroy her. Indeed, so forceful was her presence and so unequivocal her defence testimony at Dinshah's first trial in 1931, that the government refrained from any prosecution of Dinshah—on the basis of science—during her lifetime.

In 1921 Dr. Baldwin arranged for Dinshah to lecture in Philadelphia. Eventually her brother, the equally eminent surgeon L. Grant Baldwin, M.D., F.A.C.S. (Mayo Clinic), was to produce several SCT units to his Brooklyn, New York, practice.

Some of the social (political) history of SCT is to be found reserved in the meagre, but reliable, regular Minutes of the Board of Managers of the Woman's Hospital in Philadelphia. Over the next five years these records were to suggest even more than they revealed.

Dr. Baldwin's request to address the Board on her in-patient SCT work was granted, and on 21 December 1923, according to the Minutes, she "gave an illustrated account of the wonderful work done in the Hospital with the spectrochrome [sic]. She described a remarkable case of a child ... so badly burned that there seemed no hope of her recovery. With the use of the Spectrochrome [sic] [primarily using the colour turquoise, i.e., blue plus green], the child is almost entirely cured. It is such an unusual case that the Board feels it should be written up for publication by Dr. Medical Society, and the first woman in the

Ophthalmology and Ololaryngology. Until her Baldwin . . . The Spectrochrome is used in no other hospital and credit should be given to Dr. Baldwin for developing its use here. There are four instruments in the Hospital and more could be used if the room were larger. " [Author's emphasis in italics.]

It was but a short five weeks later, in the 26 January 1924 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (which had just recently fallen under the editorial control of Fishbein), that the first salvo was fired: a lengthy, baseless denunciation of SCT, complete with a defamatory attack on the character of Dinshah and, by associative implication, all SC therapists—with explicit reference to Dr. Baldwin, who, among numerous physicians, had been regularly contributing case histories to Dinshah's Spectro-Chrome monthly journal (which he published from 1922 to 1947). The JAMA article concluded:

Some physicians, after reading this article, may wonder why we have devoted the amount of space to a subject that, on its face, seems so preposterous as to condemn itself. When it is realized that helpless but incredulous patients are being treated for such serious conditions as syphilis, conjunctivitis, ovaritis, diabetes mellitus, pulmonary tuberculosis and chronic gonorrhea with colored lights, the space will not be deemed excessive.

While it took four years for Fishbein finally to bring Dinshah before his first magistrate, the first blood had been drawn much earlier. Two months after the JAMA article appeared in print, the Woman's Hospital Board of Managers' Minutes of 28 March 1924 report the receipt of a letter from the staff, requesting that Dr. Baldwin discontinue the use of SCT. The only ground offered for this initiative was the JAMA article. The Board's timetested response was the classic bureaucratic reflex: an ad hoc committee was established to evaluate the situation for later discussion.

Not all the Board's problems conveniently faded during this interval and it was forced to address the issue head on. According to the minutes of 23 May 1924: ".. . the question had been considered from every viewpoint and . . . the Committee recommended the continuance of present conditions. This report of the Committee was accepted." [Author's emphasis added.]

Almost a year later, the Minutes of 27 March 1925 record that, "Dr. Baldwin in a letter spoke of her need of more room for the Spectrochrome. She asked to have two cubicles made; she is getting many cases . . ." Subsequently Dr. Baldwin was permitted to install additional treatment cubicles.

Notwithstanding all of these i n i t i al successes, buttressed by the consistent clinical evidence, official affirmations and i ns t i t u t i on al support, SCT was soon to suffer the first of a nearly unbroken string of reversals. There is a subtle but interesting peculiarity to this sudden, decisive turnabout spontaneously appearing in the Minutes without warning. True, the Minutes give no picture of day-to-day hospital politics, and given their narrow purpose and focus, especially as the sole historical source, they would of course tend to conceal more of a general contextual circumstance than they could reveal.

So we are left to speculate on the strangeness of the impudence of a letter from the hospital interns, received by the Board and reported in the Minutes of 24 September 1926, expressing their objections to Dr. Baldwin's presence on the surgical staff.

Traditionally interns, from a socio-political perspective, constitute the least vocal and effective participants in hospital policy formation. However, one can perhaps understand, even sympathise with the interns' position, with their cumulative daily frustration as endless streams of serious surgical candidates and other diseased patients were regularly being sent home without ever seeing a knife or pill. What is less understandable is the effectiveness of their one letter.

The September meeting moved to request Dr. Baldwin's resignation from the surgical staff, but also moved that she "be granted the privilege of practising Spectro-chrome Therapy with her private patients in the Woman's Hospital." Both motions were carried. The Board passed on the request to Dr. Baldwin, and by the meeting of 22 October 1926, without record of internal debate or explanation, the board accepted "with regret" Dr. Baldwin's resignation from the surgical staff. Just before Dinshah's first trial in 1931 in Buffalo, Erie County, New York state, Dr. Baldwin received a letter from the Secretary of the Erie County Medical Society specifically soliciting her comments about the 1924 article and the impending criminal action. The letter read:

According to [the JAMA] article, Susie T., age 9, who was admitted to the Woman's Hospital with a sloughed appendix and peritonitis, developed a pneumonia which was treated by Dr. Baldwin with lemon, turquoise and magenta colored lights. Susie went home well and happy.