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Electromagnetic
Field Geniuses Before their Time
(1755—1843), a German physician, who is considered the
founder of homeopathy but whose work actually built on
Paracel¬sus' theories of "like cures like." Hahnemann
developed a com¬plex system of medicine based on "the law of
similars," which is enjoying a renewed interest today and is
popular in Europe even in some mainstream medical practices.
Homeopathy, which ad¬ministers minute quantities of
substances to produce symptoms like those a patient is
already suffering from, is thought to stimu¬late the immune
system into action, thereby taking advantage of the body's
own healing capacity. Hahnemann thought these in¬finitesimal
amounts of substances reacted on an energetic level with the
body's vital spirit, in much the same way that the
lode-stone was thought to work. (In fact, he was a proponent
of the lodestone's use in treatment.) Hahnemann's theories
have re¬cently been re-explored and expanded on in a book
called Vibra¬tional Medicine: New Choices for Healing
Ourselves by Dr. Richard Gerber.
The general debate between the vitalists and the mechanists
continued into the 1800s. The vitalists thought that
electricity was the scientific basis to verify the life
force. They may have been partly right, but in adhering to
this single notion, a strategic mistake was made, since if
electricity were to be excluded, they would have nowhere
else to turn. And that is just what happened.
The shy genius Luigi Galvani (1737—1798), a physiologist and
anatomy professor at the University of Bologna in Italy, had
studied static electricity (still the only kind known) for
twenty years and was convinced that in it he had proof of
the life force's being electrical in nature. Observing that
frogs' legs contracted when they were connected to the
spinal cord by metal wires, Gal¬vani proposed that they were
drawing electricity hidden within the nerves themselves,
which he termed animal magnetism. What Galvani missed was
that the muscle contractions occurred only when the wires
were made of different metals. What he had actually
discovered was direct current, but he didn't know it. This
discovery has shaped our entire modern world ever since.
(Galvani also discovered a natural "current of injury," the
process by which an injured limb will produce a negative
charge at the injury site, which will later turn to a
positive charge at the same site. The implications of this
will be discussed later in the ground-breaking
bone-regeneration work of Dr. Robert Becker and his
colleagues in our own time.)
Galvani unfortunately put himself squarely on the line in
an¬nouncing to the Bologna Academy of Sciences, in 1791,
that the body's vital spirit was electricity flowing through
the nerves. This unwittingly gave the mechanists an
objective theory to attack.
Within two years, a physicist and colleague of Galvani's
named Alessandro Volta, from the University of Padua, proved
that what Galvani had discovered was a new kind of
electricity, in the form of a steady current rather than
simple static sparks. In Galvani's original observations,
the frogs' legs had seemed to con¬tract when the wind blew
them against an iron railing. Volta dem¬onstrated that
Galvani had generated direct current between two different
metals (iron and copper) and that the frogs' legs were mere
junctions between them; as such they were dispensable. Since
the frogs' legs were mainly composed of salt water, they
formed an electrolyte conducting medium, and were only
electri¬cal channels between the two wires.
Volta disproved Galvani's animal-magnetism theory, and the
non-combative Galvani was crushed. Volta himself, by his
group¬ing of different metals, had discovered the storage
medium known today as the battery. But Galvani had actually
demon¬strated an animal magnetism of sorts — frogs' legs can
be made to twitch with no metal in a circuit just by
bringing the muscle into contact with the cut end of the
spinal cord. This current of injury is found in any injured
tissue and is the beginning signal for all healing
processes.
Among Galvani's many other accomplishments were the
demonstration that electricity can be transmitted across
space (rediscovered a hundred years later by Heinrich Hertz)
and the first use of antenna wires to search for atmospheric
electricity.
But like many other pure scientists, he was far ahead of his
time and paid a high personal price for it. Like Paracelsus
before him, Galvani died penniless and dispirited, all his
property confiscated by the French, while Volta, supported
under Napoleon, grew fa¬mous for his storage batteries.
Both men's names have, however, come down to us in such
terms as "galvanic skin response" (upon which lie detectors
are based), "galvanized metal," "galvanize into action," and
"volts" and "voltage."
Galvani's work was verified thirty years after his death by
Carlo Matteucci, a physics professor at Pisa. In painstaking
ex¬periments over a 35-year period, Matteucci proved that
the cur¬rent of injury was accurate, but he located it
exclusively at the injury site, rather than in the nervous
system, the way Galvani had.
Then, in the 1830s, a physiology student in Berlin named
Emil DuBois-Reymond discovered that nerve impulses could be
measured electrically. He believed that this directly
identified the nervous system's activity with electricity,
but soon thereafter a researcher named Herman von Helmholtz
measured the actual speed of the nerve impulse and
discovered it to be much slower and weaker than that
conducted in a wire. What this meant was that nerve impulses
could be measured electrically, but the im¬pulses were not
necessarily the passage of actual blocks of electri¬cal
particles.
In 1871, Julius Bernstein stepped into the picture with a
dif¬ferent chemical explanation. He thought that the nerve
impulse was not an electrical current at all, but, rather,
an action poten¬tial. What was being measured as a nerve
impulse was a distur-bance in the ions (charged atoms of
sodium, potassium, or chloride) of a cell's membrane, and
this disturbance was what traveled along the nerve fiber.
Bernstein thought that there was a difference between the
inside of a nerve cell and the tissue fluid that surrounded
it and that this difference created an electrical charge or
polarization of the membrane cell.
Bernstein's hypothesis was shown to be essentially cor¬rect
for all the cells of the body, but instead of becoming a
solid building block of anatomical understanding, it
un¬fortunately hardened into physiological dogma. It has
since been assumed that this kind of electrical activity is
the only kind present in the human body, although an assault
on this "hardened" position has developed. For instance, the
recent work by Dr. Bjorn Nordenstrom, the former head of
diagnostic radiology at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm,
Sweden, has challenged this narrow view by his findings of
an intrinsic electromagnetic system within the body similar
to the meridian concept. And Dr. Robert Becker's theories on
the body's inherent DC system will be discussed later.
By the end of the 1800s, microscopes had made it possible to
observe the actual space between nerve fiber and muscle—a
space eventually called the synaptic gap. The vitalists,
still clinging to electricity as the explanation for the
life force, reached into this tiny area of physiology to
hypothesize that the passage of nerve impulses across the
gap was electrical. Then, in 1921, physiologist Otto Lowei
proved that this impulse passage across the synaptic gap was
chemical, too — a discovery for which he received the Nobel
Prize in 1936.
Vitalism had nowhere else to turn and was eradicated from
the mainstream medical dialogue.
Dr. Becker, a student of Otto Lowei's, tells a revealing
anecdote about Lowei in his Cross Currents. Lowei used to
caution his students that some mysteries remained be-yond
scientific explanation, and it turned out that he had
resolved some plaguing problems with his Nobel Prize-winning
experiment in dreams over two successive nights.
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