Mad Scientists of the Forgotten Science | EXTRACT

Science has a reputation as the most logical and rational of human pastimes – but this has not always been the case. The last few centuries has seen some eccentric scientists. While some of them were genuine geniuses, others were simply lone loons – S.D. Tucker’s book, Forgotten Science: Strange Ideas from the Scrapheap of History, tells the stories of some of the very strangest.

Let us introduce you to some such strangelings – are they geniuses or loons? You decide!

During the seventeenth century, the precise function of the blood stream was obscure to science. Clearly, its main purpose was to transport things around the body–but what things? Air, most likely. Possibly it transported nutrition about from organ to organ, too? If so, then perhaps it would be feasible to dispense with eating solid food altogether, and start injecting nourishing liquid substances like broth and watery pudding intravenously instead? This was the theory of Richard Lower (1631-91), a Cornish physician who decided to fill an entire dog up with soup instead of blood to see what would happen. I’m sure you can guess what did happen–the dog died, its tasty, broth-infused blood curdling within the animal’s very veins. Chastened, Lower moved on to trying his hand at performing some of history’s first ever blood transfusions instead…

Alfred W. Lawson (1869-1954) was a cult-leader, economic theorist, aerospace-pioneer and scientific genius who was, undoubtedly, the saviour of mankind–in his own view, anyway. His theory, which according to him was the most important scientific theory of all time suggested that there was no such thing as energy (the mere creation of “some fanciful mind”) – this, he thought, could be explained using the human body as a metaphor. The Earth, for example, apparently has a digestive system. The North Pole is its mouth, which sucks in bits of space-debris, transforming them into a gaseous substance called lesether, which fills the planet and allows it to float in orbit. The Northern Lights are really space-gas being eaten before it passes through hidden arteries beneath the Earth’s crust, this gas ultimately being expelled again through a secret planetary anus at the South Pole. That’s right–the Earth has a bum, and it farts! Earthquakes, meanwhile, were the result of indigestion. As of yet, Lawson’s theory has failed to make its way onto the GCSE Geography syllabus, but schoolboys everywhere still live in hope.

A fringe evolutionary scientist of independent means, Oscar Kiss Maerth (1914-90), in his 1973 book The Beginning Was the End explained that, at the dawn of time, our ape-ancestors had discovered that eating other monkeys’ brains could stimulate their sexual appetite. Maerth could vouch for this, he said, as he had eaten a monkey’s brain himself as research and it gave him a hard-on. Early man could not have eaten such a thing for its flavour alone, he complained, as the one he sampled had “the consistency of rubber”. However, swallowing so much Viagra-like grey-matter had the inadvertent side-effect of making prehistoric man super-intelligent. The results were disastrous–human ‘civilisation’, filled with war, violence and crime by our cannibalism-corrupted minds, made us worse off than the monkeys who, Maerth assured us enjoyed “better health” and could communicate telepathically with other planets. Ultimately mankind renounced brain-feasting as it caused epilepsy. Maerth did suggest a solution to make us all de-evolve back into happy, non-sweaty psychic monkeys by going back to Nature, performing yoga and artificially extending our skulls to look like big domed eggs, but the idea failed to catch on.

The insane American homeopath Charles Wentworth Littlefield (1859-1945) claimed to have discovered the secret of life itself. When patients came to him suffering from cuts, Littlefield used to recite a short prayer to help them heal, and wondered how the process worked. The real answer was ‘because most cuts heal by themselves anyway’, but Littlefield disagreed. Taking a sample of the organic body-salts which help clotting occur, Littlefield prayed over it one day whilst idly thinking about a chicken. Then, he examined the sample beneath a microscope. To his surprise, he found the salts now resembled the very same chicken about which he had just been thinking! Presuming he was telepathic, Littlefield began contacting the ghosts of famous dead scientists for advice, and in 1919 published a book in which he revealed that, by concentrating really hard upon small piles of salt, he had managed to make their crystals resemble America’s national mascot, Uncle Sam. Equally as odd, when Littlefield just left the salts alone, they spontaneously developed into tiny animals like crabs, apes, fishes and even miniature humans. Most were not alive, except for a race of microscopic octopuses, which for some reason were. This, said Littlefield, was how life on Earth began–by tiny octopuses generating themselves spontaneously from piles of psychic salt. In the years since, very few persons have found themselves agreeing with him upon this point.

To read about more such scientists who have littered history with their wreckage, order your copy of Forgotten Science today!