Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (43 page)

Dinshah P. Ghadiali, using Chrome. He is under arrest selling a course of lectures alleged curative value for human ailments.

We are wondering if the article in which your name is given is a correct statement. Our Society is somewhat interested in the outcome of this case and we will very much appreciate your telling us if your name was used with authority.
the title M.D., is the publisher in Buffalo charged with grand of Spectrolarceny for

and leasing a colored light apparatus of

Dr. Baldwin's ringing endorsement was but faint indication of the eyeopening testimony she would soon deliver under oath. Her reply read:

Your letter of June 9th is just received. The statement printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association of January 26th, 1924 is practically as written by me for Spectro-Chrome magazine. Susie's was an emergency operation at nine o'clock at night. There was nothing left of the appendix to remove. There were quantities of pus. The wound could not be closed, free drainage was provided and the child put to bed with little hope that she would live until morning. For some days, an enema would simply pass through and out of the abdominal opening. Susie did develop pneumonia. I did use Spectro-Chrome and eventually she did leave the hospital in good condition.

In the Woman's Hospital, I used Spectro-Chrome for many things to the satisfaction of the patients, the staff and the Board. The results were approved by all interested, until the article cited came out in the Journal. Then the staff turned traitor. The Board appointed a Special Committee of five to investigate, and a copy of its report I am enclosing. After this investigation I was granted a large space for the work of SpectroChrome. The American Medical Association continues to rate me as a Fellow in good standing. Not the slightest effort to prove the truth has ever been made by the AMA or the doctors. The simple fact that the AMA made the statement against Spectro-Chrome was sufficient to condemn. At the time I wrote to the Journal stating facts. The courtesy of a reply was not granted. The letter was sent by registered mail and a return card showed that it was delivered. Eventually this article was the cause of my losing my position on the surgical staff of the Woman's Hospital.

The AMA has not been just to one of its members or to humanity; within the year of 1929, communications have been sent by the AMA to several of my patients in the shape of a reprint of the article published in the 1924 Journal and a letter ridiculing Spectro-Chrome and me.

Spectro-Chrome has more value as a therapeutic measure than all the drugs and serums manufactured. I would close my office tonight, never to reopen, if I could not use Spectro-Chrome. [Author's emphasis added.]

Dinshah was to face tribunals eight times, winning vindication only twice and having to serve a total of eighteen months in prison. His first victory, at Buffalo, NY, in 1931, was the last time the anti-light forces dared expose themselves to a decision rendered by a jury allowed to hear medical evidence and expert scientific testimony. His second victory (the first Camden trial, 1934) rested on the judicial reasoning that, being of Parsee descent, Dinshah was a "white man" and therefore, 17 years after his naturalisation, he was ruled to be not deportable.

Just as, in retrospect, the involvement of the normally non-influential intern role in efficaciously precipitating Baldwin's predicament seems to be more than meets the eye, so too is the circumstance that led to Dinshah's arrest in May 1930. The indictment charged that he "did feloniously steal $175 from one Houseman Hughes by falsely representing and pretending that a certain instrument and machine [Spectro-Chrome] would cure any and all human diseases and ailments."

Again, the reliable Court record here gives scanty insight. Looking back at the actual ascertainable, there is reasonable inference that Hughes was only a point man—but for whom? He was a layman who had admittedly never received, witnessed or administered a tonation treatment. Affidavits and testimony from official records show only that he leased a unit (subsequently defaulting on the payment) and promptly pressed charges. There is no indication that he even removed it from the box. Someone on the prosecution side did turn it on, although did not take advantage of the exercise to attempt a tonation.

The core of the embarrassingly underprepared prosecution (what could they actually say?) was the "expert" testimony of a physicist who testified to the fact that the unit used an ordinary light, projected through ordinary coloured glass filters, producing no spectral alterations nor new rays of any sort. This was rather extraordinary testimony, considering that Dinshah had never claimed otherwise!

(This 1931 trial was also the last time the government was to base any indictment on its "ordinariness." Later, when the FDA, in a convenient about-face, proclaimed the Spectro-Chrome a "medical device" (though unauthorised), it provided the cloak of legality under which they conducted, unopposed, hundreds of warrantless, confiscatory and non-compensatory raids through the living rooms, basements and converted garages of otherwise innocent, non-complaining citizens after 1947.)

Dinshah, despite facing a looming 10-year/$10,000 adverse judgement, chose to defend himself with a five-witness defence which included three M.D.s. He reasoned: "The judge knows the law and I know my science so I can defend it better than any lawyer. Truth can be defeated but never conquered."

Unprepared for an impregnable defence, the state produced in its rebuttal its only medical witness: Albert Sy, M.D., a practitioner of the hightech, expensive and generally inaccessible treatment modalities of radium, X-ray and ultraviolet radiation. This prosecution witness, also testifying to his zero experience with SCT, was forced to admit under oath that he had no evidence at all for his "expert" opinion that there "could be no therapeutic value of colored light or other appreciable effect on animals."

Dinshah's first witness, Dr. Welcome Hanoi, an early SCT student and enthusiastic proponent, had posted the $1,500 bail. His modest credential was his reputation as a local general practitioner of thirty years' experience. He gave unresolved credit to SCT for his successes with cancers, diabetes, gonorrhea, syphilis, ulcers, neuritis, meningitis, heart conditions and many other disorders.

Dr. Martha Peebles had a distinguished twenty-four-year private practice in New York where she had also held public office with the City Department of Health before serving with General Pershing's expeditionary forces (attending up to sixty-one operations a day). Invalided by crippling arthritis and neuritis, her health was restored one month after receiving her first tonation treatment from Dr. Baldwin, and she subsequently re-established her medical practice. In court she recounted her success with cancers, hypotropic arthritis, poliomyelitis, mastoiditis, sciatica, heart disorders, goitres, ulcers, neuritis and many other disorders.

Dr. Kate Baldwin's testimony was extensive, forcefully unequivocal and unshakeable. The worst nightmare of a prosecuting cross-examiner, she repeated affirmatively as to SCT's efficacy in the treatment of cataracts, glaucoma, acute eye infections and hemorrhaging; mastoid and middle-ear problems; tonsillitis and adenoidal bronchitis and pleurisy; functional and organic hemorrhoids, boils, drug addictions, asthma, laryngitis, mouth disorders, rheumatism, lumbago, syphilis, cancer, radiation burns, appendicitis, strangulated hernia and many other disorders.

The trial lasted for four days before the jury returned a "not guilty" verdict in ninety minutes. Subsequently (in addition to his previous loss in Portland in 1928), Dinshah was to lose actions in Cleveland, Wilmington, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn (the decisive FDA ruling) and, finally, in Camden in 1947.

By 1941, mail sent to Dinshah's institute was being returned by the local postmaster, marked "Fraudulent: Mail to this address returned by order of the Post-Master General." No doubt this purely postal administration, not the result of a judicial proceeding, contributed measurably to the recognition of the AMA as a para-governmental agency of intimidation, and hastened the final discontinuance of SCT by the dwindling numbers of loyal M.D. practitioners.

Through an internal restructuring and reorganising at the SpectroChrome Institute, Dinshah was for a while able to circumvent and neutralise the mail blockade. Suffice it to note that Dinshah's manoeuvre was a short-lived expediency, lasting six years until 1947.

While looking back on Dinshah as an exemplar of indefatigable, persevering resiliency and inner strength of character, in balance we must also note with all due respect the persistence, long memory and vindictive, sindisorders; tuberculosis, heart disorders; ulcers, gle-minded purposiveness of the private professional associations, in concert with government regulatory agencies, now legislatively armed to dispose of the inconvenience of the evidences and protocols of both court and clinic.

No narrative, historical reportage or creative mythology of suppression and censure, however factual or fantastical, is complete without the obligatory, timely, lab or library fire under suspicious circumstances. To paraphrase Cervantes very loosely, a tale of "intellectual inquisition" without arson is like a meal without wine.

The 1945 fire that destroyed Dinshah's main building, just ninety days before the Brooklyn trial, caused inestimable damage not just to his defence but to all of us through the destruction of demonstration prototypes and the irreplaceable case histories of twenty-five years.

Losing the second Camden trial (the FDA-driven action on "mislabeling") in 1947, Dinshah was fined $20,000 and sentenced to a five-year probation period, a condition of which was to "surrender for destruction all printed material (save some personal notes) pertaining to coloured light therapy—a singular collection valued then at $250,000. He was further ordered to disassociate himself from any research in the field.

Probation completed in 1953, Dinshah again restructured his institute, this time as an educational institution, Visible Spectrum Research Institute, and resumed the dissemination of information and equipment—but with the disclaimer asserting that "in accordance with the current conventional medical view, there is no curative, therapeutic value" to these projection systems. Independent of any SCT/Dinshah data, this scientific "edict" was already known to be false. (In 1958 the FDA finally obtained the permanent injunctions, still in effect today, under which Dinshah was to operate until his death in 1996, at the age of ninety-two.)

Contrary opinions such as those of the medical establishment-respected A. J. Ochsner, M.D., F.A.C.S., author of still-classical surgical textbooks, could again be made weightless by edict. Writing to no apparent effect in those days, he reported:

In a personal experience with septic infection, the pain was so severe that it seemed unbearable. When the use of electric light was suggested, it seemed unlikely that this could act differently from the other forms of therapy that had been employed. Upon applying the light, however, the excruciating pain disappeared almost at once, and since this experience we have employed the light treatments in hundreds of cases of pain caused by septic infection, and quite regularly with results that were eminently satisfactory, not only in relief of pain but also because the remedy assists materially in reducing the infection.

There is little comfort to be taken from the fact that half a century separates us from those distant, dark ages of book-burning in America. The relation of improved. unchanged. Large and loud, unapologetic denial; unembellished, unforgivable, inexplicable and dangerously erroneous counter-factual utterances are still being recycled by the usual bunch of high-prestige suspects.

For example, the highly regarded Cancer Journal for Clinicians (CJC) in 1994 (44:225-127), in an anonymous diatribe, characterised the World Research Foundation (WRF) (41 Bell Rock Road #C, Sedona, AZ 86351, USA) as "helping people locate questionable cancer cures .... [and has] touted the Spectro-Chrome device." It then astonishingly concluded: "There is no scientific evidence that shining colored lights on the body will produce any biological effects."

This must come as quite a shock—to the generations of the paediatric health community who, for half a century, have routinely been treating the jaundice (neonatal bilirubin imbalance) of premature babies with the spectrally rebalanced, blue-enhanced Westinghouse maternity bulb; to the generations of commercial breeders of chickens, chinchillas and fish who, for half a century, have been using the monochromatic reformulation work of photo-pioneer John Ott (the original champion of full-spectrum light) to manipulate fertility, gender and even behaviour; and to the readers of the respected American Teacher (71[6]:16, March 1987), who were gullible and naive enough to believe the account of H. Wohlfrath of the University of Alberta, Canada, who in 1982 replicated the nearly fifty-year-old work of Soviet researcher E. I. Kritvitskya, in which high-frequency-restored classroom light reduced absenteeism, eye strain, dental caries, etc. as it increased attention, retention, etc.

When Dr. Sy expressed his "disbelief in 1931, he could do so with a certain innocent honesty. But would the editors of CJC have us dismiss vol. 453 (1985) of the Annals of the New York Academies of the Sciences, on "The Medical and Biological Effects of Light" (an entire conference on the subject) as so much chopped liver? Or was the then nine-year-old Annals too recent to have come to the attention of the CJC editors, or too old for their consideration? Unlike Dr. Sy, they are at least guilty of criminal paucity of scholarship.

Responding to this anonymous CJC article, Dr. Steve Ross, writing in the WRF International Health and Environment Network Journal, World Research News (2nd quarter, 1995), goes succinctly to the core. phototherapies to the medical mainstream has not much

The dynamics of the relationship, the rules of combat are

The Cancer Journal for Clinicians is sent to virtually all the physicians in the United States dealing with cancer. Could this sort of stupidity and misinformation be one of the reasons why the answer to the cancer problem has not come as quickly as suspected?
During the Inquisition, individuals were burnt at the stake for believing that the Earth revolved around the Sun. The same Inquisition takes place today when the bastion of the medical community persecutes and removes those individuals who attempt to discuss and utilize therapies that are different than the therapeutic system that is being touted by the pharmaceutical industry.