An excuse for the tale of a Fortean nexus.
George Starr White was born 13 July 1866 in Danbury, Connecticut, making him one of the older Forteans. (Charles Fort himself was born eight years later, in 1874.) As he tells it in his biography, White was interested in nature and healing from an early age. It took a long time for him to get into medical school, though—he started in 1881 but hadn’t established a practice until 1908, after he had graduated from New York Homeopathic Medical College. As the school implies, White was interested in what was even then thought of as fringe medical theories. He worked for a time in New York, frequently battling with local authorities, and then moved to California in 1913. Eventually, he settled in Los Angeles and began writing books on alternative therapies in between his many lectures and papers and seeing patients. He wrote books on the human aura, on long-livedness, on the importance of light as a cure, on magnetism’s effect on human life, on electricity and human well-being, on the health of colons and prostates, on methods women could use to curb the length of their menstrual periods, and on natural therapies. Most of these were written with “reformed spelling” (hence his biography was “My Biografy”) and at least some on special paper with particular inks to reduce strain on the eyes.
His medical theories grew to encompass reincarnation and the existence of life on other planets, which endeared him to Theosophists, although he never considered himself one: he was a naturalist. White allowed that animals and plants had evolved, but humans had been specially created by God, and they were meant to follow God’s laws—although this was a New Thought kind of God, not the God of the Old or New Testament. Those that didn’t lost their souls and could be reincarnated as something other than humans. Those that did the best eventually ascended through the various planets. Even today, the Borderland Sciences Research Association—founded by N. Meade Layne—offer some of his books for sale.
White was first mentioned in The Fortean Society Magazine in the 9th issue, dated the spring of 1944. Under the title “Fortean Prescribed ‘Penicillin’ 60 Years Ago,” page 5, Thayer wrote,
“George Starr White, M.D.,—one of the M.D.’s who has been harried by organized medicine all his professional life, but managed to get along very well outside the doctor’s union—states that he has talked and written about mouldy [sic] bread (the source of ‘penicillin’) for the cure of infected wounds, etc., for ‘over sixty years.’ White is a valued member of the Society and the author of many books. Ask for a list.”
Thayer mentioned White again in Doubt 14 (Spring 1946, page 204), in a longer discussion of color therapy. He was upset that the government had cracked down on one practitioner of light therapy and his ‘spectrochrome’ machines. His friend and color theorist Farber Birren, he said, could cite chapter and verse of studies showing color could heal. And
“MFS George Starr White M.D., has had wide experience in the field. He illustrates and describes some ‘fundamental work in colored music as a therapeutic agent’ in his book, ‘Lecture Course to Physicians, 7th Edition.’, and he ‘even built a piano so the rolls would play automatically when cut, playing the music and giving the color that corresponded to the theme.”
From these mentions, it is impossible to tell if White sought out the Fortean Society, joined, and corresponded with Thayer, or if Thayer discovered White through his own reading and offered him membership—one of his standard practices. The name White appears twice more, in the July and October 1947 issues, but whether this is the same White or someone else with the very common name cannot be determined. (For what it’s worth, the clippings regard an astronomer who fell of his telescope and a story that Thayer digested for the flying saucer issue.) White’s writings are voluminous, and I have searched only some of them, but find no mention of Fort—not in his autobiography or his 1945 A Book of Revelations: A True Narrative of Life on Many Planets. White’s critics, on the contrary, noted that he was “a ‘joiner.’ There seemed to be few ‘twilight-zone’ or quasi-medical organizations to which White has not belonged. White listed thirty-nine organizations in which he claimed membership.” So maybe the Fortean Society was simply another organization to join. [Nostrum and Quackery, vol. 3., page 171.]
What would have drawn White to the Society or the Society—in the form of Thayer—is fairly obvious. White’s autobiography tells of him discovering rains of frogs and turtles: his close study of nature revealed many anomalies that science and medicine did not acknowledge. He was opposed to vivisection (medical research on animals) and vaccines. He thought X-rays caused diseases, as did the prescribed treatments for TB and polio. Indeed, he suspected that doctors were in the business of keeping their patients sick—the better to keep charging. Thayer had these same suspicions.
But for all that White is an interesting character, worthy of extended study, and that he shared with the Fortean Society a dim view of modern medicine, it remains that the connection between him and the Society is pretty tenuous: if he wasn’t completely brought into the Society by Thayer, his association is, at most, like those of A. Merritt or Marc Edmund Jacobs. That is to say, he was a giant in a fringe-field and almost inevitably his name was linked to the Society, even if he had no particular thoughts on Fort or developed Fortean theories.
The reason to write about White is not to detail his Forteanism, but rather to trace the links in a Fortean nexus.
After moving to California, White became the proponent of medical ideas propounded by an alternative physician then working in the state—Albert Abrams. Abrams, like White, had many, many ideas and techniques. One of them was something called spondylotherapy, which was based on chiropractic and osteopathic methods and involved stimulating the nerves at their origin in the spine, with electricity or ice or percussion, for example. He also invented a machine which could measure a bodily quality—based on the activity of electrons—he called ERA for electronic reactions of Abrams. From a single drop of blood, the machine could diagnose any disease. As early as 1915, White was giving courses on spondylotherapy. He also boosted Abrams’s ERA machines, though soon enough offered his own, similarly impressive, diagnostic machines. [Nostrum and Quackery, col. 3., page 171.]
Abrams was very successful in the late 1910s and early 1920s—and attracted the attention of early Forteans. In October 1920, Theodore Dreiser arrived in San Francisco at the invitation of the poet George Sterling and the bookstore owner Paul Elder (Thayer would later appreciate the support he received from Elder and his bookstore in getting out the word about the Society). Traveling with Dreiser was Helen Richardson, his cousin, with whom he was having an affair. (They would marry much, much later.) While in San Francisco, they also met John Cowper Powys and his brother Llewelyn.
Llewelyn had a stomach ache, and Sterling recommended that he see Abrams. Eventually, John Cowper Powys, Dreiser, and Richardson would all become patients. Llewelyn was unimpressed, but John, Dreiser, and Helen all thought the doctor had worked miracles. Dreiser’s friend, the skeptical H.L. Mencken visited Abrams and pronounced him “the usual Jew doctor,” unable to perform the feats he claimed. Dreiser continued to see Abrams, though.
Mencken was not the only one to think Abrams was a quack, though, and a number of complaints were registered against him. The magazine Scientific American convened a panel of experts to study Abrams and his claims, and decide if he was quack or genius. On the team? Maynard Shipley, an early Fortean who would write a glowing review of Lo! for the New York Times and even become a correspondent of Fort himself. Shipley went into the study with an open mind, but came out convinced that Abrams was a quack—but also was fooling himself. For whatever reason, he genuinely believed he had made a medical breakthrough. Scientific American condemned Abrams. Further evidence against him came when the American Medical Association sent him a blood sample and Abrams put it through its paces without acknowledging the blood came from a chicken. Abrams, born three years before White, died in 1924, the year of Scientific American’s report and the AMA’s revelation. struck down by pneumonia.
George Starr White, though, continued on, coming to the attention of Thayer and a member of the Society whose founders had been so impressed by his predecessor and rival. He didn’t die until 1956, aged 90.
George Starr White was born 13 July 1866 in Danbury, Connecticut, making him one of the older Forteans. (Charles Fort himself was born eight years later, in 1874.) As he tells it in his biography, White was interested in nature and healing from an early age. It took a long time for him to get into medical school, though—he started in 1881 but hadn’t established a practice until 1908, after he had graduated from New York Homeopathic Medical College. As the school implies, White was interested in what was even then thought of as fringe medical theories. He worked for a time in New York, frequently battling with local authorities, and then moved to California in 1913. Eventually, he settled in Los Angeles and began writing books on alternative therapies in between his many lectures and papers and seeing patients. He wrote books on the human aura, on long-livedness, on the importance of light as a cure, on magnetism’s effect on human life, on electricity and human well-being, on the health of colons and prostates, on methods women could use to curb the length of their menstrual periods, and on natural therapies. Most of these were written with “reformed spelling” (hence his biography was “My Biografy”) and at least some on special paper with particular inks to reduce strain on the eyes.
His medical theories grew to encompass reincarnation and the existence of life on other planets, which endeared him to Theosophists, although he never considered himself one: he was a naturalist. White allowed that animals and plants had evolved, but humans had been specially created by God, and they were meant to follow God’s laws—although this was a New Thought kind of God, not the God of the Old or New Testament. Those that didn’t lost their souls and could be reincarnated as something other than humans. Those that did the best eventually ascended through the various planets. Even today, the Borderland Sciences Research Association—founded by N. Meade Layne—offer some of his books for sale.
White was first mentioned in The Fortean Society Magazine in the 9th issue, dated the spring of 1944. Under the title “Fortean Prescribed ‘Penicillin’ 60 Years Ago,” page 5, Thayer wrote,
“George Starr White, M.D.,—one of the M.D.’s who has been harried by organized medicine all his professional life, but managed to get along very well outside the doctor’s union—states that he has talked and written about mouldy [sic] bread (the source of ‘penicillin’) for the cure of infected wounds, etc., for ‘over sixty years.’ White is a valued member of the Society and the author of many books. Ask for a list.”
Thayer mentioned White again in Doubt 14 (Spring 1946, page 204), in a longer discussion of color therapy. He was upset that the government had cracked down on one practitioner of light therapy and his ‘spectrochrome’ machines. His friend and color theorist Farber Birren, he said, could cite chapter and verse of studies showing color could heal. And
“MFS George Starr White M.D., has had wide experience in the field. He illustrates and describes some ‘fundamental work in colored music as a therapeutic agent’ in his book, ‘Lecture Course to Physicians, 7th Edition.’, and he ‘even built a piano so the rolls would play automatically when cut, playing the music and giving the color that corresponded to the theme.”
From these mentions, it is impossible to tell if White sought out the Fortean Society, joined, and corresponded with Thayer, or if Thayer discovered White through his own reading and offered him membership—one of his standard practices. The name White appears twice more, in the July and October 1947 issues, but whether this is the same White or someone else with the very common name cannot be determined. (For what it’s worth, the clippings regard an astronomer who fell of his telescope and a story that Thayer digested for the flying saucer issue.) White’s writings are voluminous, and I have searched only some of them, but find no mention of Fort—not in his autobiography or his 1945 A Book of Revelations: A True Narrative of Life on Many Planets. White’s critics, on the contrary, noted that he was “a ‘joiner.’ There seemed to be few ‘twilight-zone’ or quasi-medical organizations to which White has not belonged. White listed thirty-nine organizations in which he claimed membership.” So maybe the Fortean Society was simply another organization to join. [Nostrum and Quackery, vol. 3., page 171.]
What would have drawn White to the Society or the Society—in the form of Thayer—is fairly obvious. White’s autobiography tells of him discovering rains of frogs and turtles: his close study of nature revealed many anomalies that science and medicine did not acknowledge. He was opposed to vivisection (medical research on animals) and vaccines. He thought X-rays caused diseases, as did the prescribed treatments for TB and polio. Indeed, he suspected that doctors were in the business of keeping their patients sick—the better to keep charging. Thayer had these same suspicions.
But for all that White is an interesting character, worthy of extended study, and that he shared with the Fortean Society a dim view of modern medicine, it remains that the connection between him and the Society is pretty tenuous: if he wasn’t completely brought into the Society by Thayer, his association is, at most, like those of A. Merritt or Marc Edmund Jacobs. That is to say, he was a giant in a fringe-field and almost inevitably his name was linked to the Society, even if he had no particular thoughts on Fort or developed Fortean theories.
The reason to write about White is not to detail his Forteanism, but rather to trace the links in a Fortean nexus.
After moving to California, White became the proponent of medical ideas propounded by an alternative physician then working in the state—Albert Abrams. Abrams, like White, had many, many ideas and techniques. One of them was something called spondylotherapy, which was based on chiropractic and osteopathic methods and involved stimulating the nerves at their origin in the spine, with electricity or ice or percussion, for example. He also invented a machine which could measure a bodily quality—based on the activity of electrons—he called ERA for electronic reactions of Abrams. From a single drop of blood, the machine could diagnose any disease. As early as 1915, White was giving courses on spondylotherapy. He also boosted Abrams’s ERA machines, though soon enough offered his own, similarly impressive, diagnostic machines. [Nostrum and Quackery, col. 3., page 171.]
Abrams was very successful in the late 1910s and early 1920s—and attracted the attention of early Forteans. In October 1920, Theodore Dreiser arrived in San Francisco at the invitation of the poet George Sterling and the bookstore owner Paul Elder (Thayer would later appreciate the support he received from Elder and his bookstore in getting out the word about the Society). Traveling with Dreiser was Helen Richardson, his cousin, with whom he was having an affair. (They would marry much, much later.) While in San Francisco, they also met John Cowper Powys and his brother Llewelyn.
Llewelyn had a stomach ache, and Sterling recommended that he see Abrams. Eventually, John Cowper Powys, Dreiser, and Richardson would all become patients. Llewelyn was unimpressed, but John, Dreiser, and Helen all thought the doctor had worked miracles. Dreiser’s friend, the skeptical H.L. Mencken visited Abrams and pronounced him “the usual Jew doctor,” unable to perform the feats he claimed. Dreiser continued to see Abrams, though.
Mencken was not the only one to think Abrams was a quack, though, and a number of complaints were registered against him. The magazine Scientific American convened a panel of experts to study Abrams and his claims, and decide if he was quack or genius. On the team? Maynard Shipley, an early Fortean who would write a glowing review of Lo! for the New York Times and even become a correspondent of Fort himself. Shipley went into the study with an open mind, but came out convinced that Abrams was a quack—but also was fooling himself. For whatever reason, he genuinely believed he had made a medical breakthrough. Scientific American condemned Abrams. Further evidence against him came when the American Medical Association sent him a blood sample and Abrams put it through its paces without acknowledging the blood came from a chicken. Abrams, born three years before White, died in 1924, the year of Scientific American’s report and the AMA’s revelation. struck down by pneumonia.
George Starr White, though, continued on, coming to the attention of Thayer and a member of the Society whose founders had been so impressed by his predecessor and rival. He didn’t die until 1956, aged 90.
