Radionic Pictures of “Vibrational Energies”

Place California Year 1900 Event Proponents of radionics hail it as a holistic approach to healing. Detractors label it, at best, an offbeat system that depends on the unreliable placebo effect. At worst, it is condemned as potentially dangerous quackery that may delay people from seeking necessary medical care. Like Kirlian photography, radionics presumes all individuals radiate an invisible energy field. But radionic practitioners stray much further from scientific truths. They claim that a mere blood spot or lock of hair, the “witness”, can transmit a person’s “vibrational energies.”

By placing the witness in a special black box and then stroking a pad connected to the box, the oprator supposedly senses the emanations from the substance. He turns dials on the box and makes a diagnosis from the rates of emanations; then his psychic consciousness sends healing vibrations to the patients. Thus an ailment that may not yet have manifested physical symptoms is cured through radionics. Dr. Albert Abrams of California invented the first radionic instrument in the early 1900s. in the 1930s, Hollywood chiropractor Ruth Drown declared it possible to treat patients from a distance using the radionic witness. She also developed radionic photography, which purportedly produces images of problem areas in the body via the energy of the witness streaming across film. Drown’s work proved controversial: In 1951, she was convicted of medical fraud, and the distribution of her radionic devices was banned by the Food and Drug Administration. Still, radionics retains its followers, some no doubt charlatans, but others sincere believers who hope the practice may someday transform orthodox medicine.

A Masonic Monument

Place U.S.A. Year December 1799 Event Within hours of George Washington’s death on December 14, 1799, a motion was on the floor of the House of Representatives to raise a monument to his memory. Congress authorized the project, but then neglected to appropriate any money for it. The idea languished for the next three decades until the first president’s fellow Freemasons picked up the ball. Envisioning the memorial to be in part a monument to their order, U.S. Masons raised money for it, chose a design, and on July 4, 1848, laid the cornerstone in a festive Masonic ceremony. Construction proceeded briskly at first, but a rising tide of factionalism in the country produced a chaotic political climate that fostered anti-Masonic sentiment. Funding for the

project dried up, and by 1855,construction had halted. Not until ten years after the Civil War did Congress move to resume work on the memorial, which by then was no longer under Masonic control. Yet when it was finally dedicated in 1885, it was with full Masonic ceremony, an appropriate tribute, as one speaker noted on the occasion, to “the immortal Washington, himself a Freemason.” For more than twenty years, the unfinshed washington Monument (Below), stood forlornly on a swampy site called Murderer’s Row because of the cirminals and Civil War deserters who congregated there. When construction resumed in 1879, the land was filled in and the elaborate original design scrapped in favor of a simple obelisk. The 100-ounce aluminum capstone was set in place on perilously windy day in December1884, in a Masonic dedication ceremony (up) conducted on a special platform 572 feet above the ground.