Shocking Revelations: An Outlandish Theory on Disease

Shocking Revelations: An Outlandish Theory on Disease

By Mr Ghaz, January 30, 2010

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Shocking Revelations: An Outlandish Theory on Disease

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For many years the cause of cholera was unknown. Theories accounting for the disease ranged from pollution by foul air to one’s elevation above sea level. Even hair color was suggested as a possible culprit.

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But perhaps one of the most bizarre notions was set fort in a book published in Dublin in 1849. The work of Sir James Murray, a physician, it bore the extraordinary title Electricity as a Cause of Cholera, or Other Epidemics.

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Based on a series of articles he had written the previous year for the British medical journal The Lancet, Murray’s book expounded his remarkable theory in great detail. Essentially, he argued that there was no such thing as a germ (he dismissed the idea as “absurd”). All contagious and infectious diseases were caused by one factor: electrical disturbances, with the degree of the disturbance determining the nature of the illness.

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Expanding on his theme, Murray explained that diseases such as malaria were caused by disturbed electro- galvanic currents … causing a want of electrical equilibrium in human bodies.” Taking the arbitrary figure of 10,000 as a “natural” level of electricity, he showed, with the help of a detailed chart, that a disruption of+ 01 would result in acute rheumatism, + 70 epilepsy, + 100 “Mania,” +120 tetanus, and +130 “fatal lightning.” On the negative side, -10 would cause influenza, – 90bubonic plague, and -130 ‘fatal thunder.”

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Murray also explained that clouds of positive charges were inclined to hover over people, attracting their negative charges. These two “elementary fluids” would then “rush towards each other into the centre of the body” – often with lethal results.

Potent Remedy

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The Irish cholera epidemic of 1832, Murray maintained, was caused by “the disturbed galvanic state of earth and air,” and he came up with a number of suggestions to “lighten the density and pressure of the atmosphere around cholera patients.” For example, he had found trough experiments that a potion made from liquid camphor mixed with “fluid magnesia” was effective against the electrically induced cholera.

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Murray also advocated wearing silk (or, in the case of the poor, flannel) next to the skin. Sleeping under silk sheets, he claimed, would assist “in warding off the mysterious and all- pervading currents of irregular electricity.” Damp floors, he thought, should be covered with quicklime to dry them out, and baskets of lime placed all around the patient’s house “to abate untoward galvanism.”

Murray had proposed further defenses: houses should be built on insulated platforms, beds balanced on glass bottles, and huge batteries positioned around cities to absorb charges. Quarantine, he insisted, was a waste of time.

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Murray was not without his supporter in this vies of the association between electricity and disease. And he was neither hardly the first nor the last to promulgate such ideas. Some 50years earlier a U.S. quack named Elisha Perkins had marketed two expensive rods that he called “tractors.” Each was made of three metals: one of iron, silver, and platinum, the other of copper, zinc, and gold. When the rods were drawn over the body, claimed Perkins, the electricity they generated discharged all known diseases.

Similarly, late in the 19th century, the London Medical Battery Company sold electric corsets, claiming that they would cure everything from gout to consumption.

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However out blandish these ideas may seem, in some ways we not entirely free of such notions today. Many people still believe that car sickness can be cured by grounding automobiles with metal contact strips that drag along the road and drain away static electricity.