Book Excerpts

Mad Scientists of the Forgotten Science | EXTRACT

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.

One of history’s all-time great geniuses was Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). So why isn’t he more well-known? Probably it is because he was profoundly uninterested in the trappings of worldly success. Women, too, never concerned him, it being his staunch belief that the true inventor, so as not to become distracted from his work, should never marry. However, towards the end, Tesla somewhat breached this rule by falling in love with his favourite pigeon. Apparently, the pigeon of his dreams was a very special pigeon, one to whom no other pigeon could ever hope to compare. The lucky pigeon in question (which could also fire laser-beams from its eyes, or so its adoring boyfriend said) undoubtedly made Tesla a happy man during his declining days, but all the same few people could be satisfied with snaring an amorous pigeon as their only reward for electrifying the globe.
Everyone knows what the Nazi dream of Germany becoming the home of a ‘pure’ Aryan master-race ultimately led to, but fewer know just how peculiar some of the claims made in support of such an unpleasant idea were. Take the views of Professor Hans FK Günther (1891-1968), one of the Nazis’ favourite anthropologists, who went to great lengths to prove that Nordic-types were quite simply so much cleaner than all other races were. Among his more ridiculous theories, was his ‘discovery’ that German females had an inbuilt genetic predisposition towards modesty. By closely examining women’s legs on public transport, he said he had gathered indisputable proof that the frauleins of the Fatherland sat with their legs held closer together than the shameless and “diabolically alluring” sluts of inferior races, thus making it harder for him to see up their skirts in the name of science. That, at any rate, was Günther’s excuse for what he got up to on his way into the office every morning …
The celebrated Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg (1849-1912) was not a scientist–but he certainly thought he was. There was the time, whilst living in Paris, that he decided to walk around Montparnasse Cemetery waving test-tubes through the air in an attempt to capture the souls of the dead, before taking them back home to his ‘laboratory’ (re: bedroom) for chemical analysis. I am unaware of the results, but presumably he will have found that the chemical composition of the human soul was surprisingly similar to that of fresh air itself. Such was Strindberg’s desire to be recognised as a titan of science that he even began claiming credit for the discoveries of others. Shortly after the first detection of x-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895, for example, he sat sipping absinthe in a café, before casually slipping into conversation the ‘fact’ that he had discovered the same things himself ten years ago, but had never bothered to tell anyone. He should have stuck to writing his plays!
Eighteenth-century Scotland was a centre of unusual medical beliefs, with the quack Edinburgh doctor John Brown (1735-88) gaining numerous disciples for his unusual creed that all animals, humans and plants were nothing more than giant candles in disguise. Just as candles slowly burned down once lit, said Brown, so all living beings were possessed of their own wick which dissipated over time via a process of slow combustion. So, instead of saying ‘you have flu’, a sick person would just have had a special thermometer inserted, and told that their candle was twelve degrees away from a point of normality. That, at least, was Brown’s dream; the thermometer in question was never actually developed. He did, though, manage to develop a reliable cure for nearly all ailments–drugs and drink. People whose candles were burning too slowly he gave alcohol, to speed up their nerves, and people whose flames were too quick were given opium, to slow them down through stupor. Brown himself sought total chemical balance, dissolving opium in whiskey and drinking it to ensure his candle remained in tip-top order, even whilst giving public lectures; naturally, some suspected he was just an alcoholic drug-addict who sought an excuse to keep on abusing his favoured substances.
The Moscow librarian Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903) was the founder of a bizarre pseudoscientific philosophy named ‘Russian Cosmism’. Fedorov’s creed was laid out in a huge publication called The Philosophy of the Common Task, where he explained that mankind’s overriding scientific quest was nothing less than to resurrect the dead. And when Fedorov said ‘the dead’, he meant all the dead; every single one of them, all the way back to Adam and Eve. All human problems, said Fedorov, had their roots in the fact of death and disintegration. Fedorov announced it was now every individual’s sacred duty to collect all the dust-particles which had once constituted their parents, and reassemble them again. Then, your once-dead parents could resurrect their own dead parents, and so on ad infinitum … Once the dead had risen, of course, science would immediately progress in leaps and bounds, seeing as all people who had ever lived would all be present simultaneously, thus giving us access to a limitless storehouse of universal knowledge. Nikolai Fedorov did not know it, but he had accidentally written the plot to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure a hundred years too early. Most Excellent!
Dr Ferdinand Sauerbruch (1875-1951) was once a genuine surgeon of high repute who had carried out surgery on famous figures and habitually waived his fees when operating upon the poor. However, after WWII broke out he began training military field-surgeons, for which he received a decoration from Hitler himself, and was thus charged with collaboration in 1949. Sauerbruch was exonerated, though, and made good use of by the new Communist regime in East Berlin, where his hospital was located. Unfortunately, in old age he rapidly lost his faculties and began pulling outpatients’ brain-tumours with his bare hands, killing them. “The finger is still the surgeon’s best instrument!” he once declared triumphantly, waving a bloody tumour around in his fist. Finally forced into retirement, Sauerbruch stubbornly refused to stop practising, performing operations on his dining-table which were free of both charge and anaesthetic. He carved up bodies like mutton, chopping off breasts and removing tumours with unsterilized equipment before sealing wounds with his wife’s sewing-kit. Unsurprisingly, not all of these operations proved entirely successful …
The patron saint of Forgotten Science is one of the most eccentric experimenters of all time, the rather brilliant Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82). A Norfolk physician-philosopher, Browne’s masterpiece was his 1646 book Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a massive catalogue of widely-believed fallacies, or ‘vulgar errors’, together with details of the incredibly odd experiments Browne had devised in order to test or disprove them. One vulgar error investigated was the peculiar notion that hanging a dead kingfisher from a string would transform it into an accurate weather-vane. Getting hold of just such a dead bird, Browne suspended it from a beam; he found it just dangled around at random. Dead kingfishers, Browne had conclusively demonstrated, had no special ability to illustrate wind-direction. What about storks, though? Was it true that they could only prosper within republics, as an old saying had it? By searching out proof that they had been seen living quite happily within monarchies such as France, Browne showed that, like all birds, storks had no perceptible desire for regicide. And this was just his investigations into birds …
Lastly, on his death anniversary, we introduce the great neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1829-1893), director of Paris’ Salpêtrière Hospital, spent the late 1800s looking into the pressing issue of female hysteria, a mental disease then thought to be approaching epidemic proportions. Charcot tried to explain hysteria by inventing the concept of so-called ‘hysterogenic zones’ on the female body; points of alleged sensitivity which, when stimulated, would either produce hysterical symptoms or cause them to stop. Needless to say, these zones centred with suspicious predictability on and around a woman’s breasts and genitalia, giving rise to much innuendo at the time. We’re sure it would be the same for most girls…

 

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

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