The Invisible Rainbow: Neuro Weapons, Effects of Microwaves, Neurasthenia, and Remote Influencing Technology.

[MusicForThePiano]

This is a thread to explore and discuss the emerging global usage of energy weapons and the psychological, physiological, and biological effects caused by such devices and technology.

I will begin with this piece of relevant literature, a book called "The Invisible Rainbow" that explores the entirety of the evolution of "medicine" in the west from the 1800s until the present, and how electricity and technological leaps have simultaneously changed the biological front.



Here is the pdf for reading, though I recommend buying a hard copy if you like this as it will be interesting to share with others around you.
https://archive.org/details/the-invisible-rainbow

Here is the Prologue:

"Once upon a time, the rainbow visible in the sky after a storm represented all the colors that were. Our earth was designed that way. We have a blanket of air above us that absorbs the higher ultraviolets, together with all of the X-rays and gamma rays from space. Most of the longer waves, that we use today for radio communication, were once absent as well. Or rather, they were there in infinitesimal amounts. They came to us from the sun and stars but with energies that were a trillion times weaker than the light that also came from the heavens. So weak were the cosmic radio waves that they would have been invisible, and so life never developed organs that could see them.

The even longer waves, the low-frequency pulsations given off by lightning, are also invisible. When lightning flashes, it momentarily fills the air with them, but they are almost gone in an instant; their echo, reverberating around the world, is roughly ten billion times weaker than the light from the sun. We never evolved organs to see this either.

But our bodies know that those colors are there. The energy of our cells whispering in the radio frequency range is infinitesimal but necessary for life. Every thought, every movement that we make surrounds us with low frequency pulsations, whispers that were first detected in 1875 and are also necessary for life. The electricity that we use today, the substance that we send through wires and broadcast through the air without a thought, was identified around 1700 as a property of life. Only later did scientists learn to extract it and make it move inanimate objects, ignoring—because they could not see—its effects on the living world. It surrounds us today, in all of its colors, at intensities that rival the light from the sun, but we still cannot see it because it was not present at life’s birth.

We live today with a number of devastating diseases that do not belong here, whose origin we do not know, whose presence we take for granted and no longer question. What it feels like to be without them is a state of vitality that we have completely forgotten.

" Anxiety disorder," afflicting one-sixth of humanity, did not exist before the 1860s, when telegraph wires first encircled the earth. No hint of it appears in the medical literature before 1866.

Influenza, in its present form, was invented in 1889, along with alternating current. It is with us always, like a familiar guest—so familiar that we have forgotten that it wasn't always so. Many of the doctors who were flooded with the disease in 1889 had never seen a case before.

Prior to the 1860s, diabetes was so rare that few doctors saw more than one or two cases during their lifetime. It, too, has changed its character: diabetics were once skeletally thin. Obese people never developed the disease.

Heart disease at that time was the twenty-fifth most common illness, behind accidental drowning. It was an illness of infants and old people. It was extraordinary for anyone else to have a diseased heart.

Cancer was also exceedingly rare. Even tobacco smoking, in non-electrified times, did not cause lung cancer.

These are the diseases of civilization, that we have also inflicted on our animal and plant neighbors, diseases that we lie with because of a refusal to recognize the force that we have harnessed for what it is. The 60-cycle current in our house wiring, the ultrasonic frequencies in our computers, the radio waves in our television, the microwaves in our cell phones, these are only distortions of the invisible rainbow that runs through our veins and makes us alive. But we have forgotten. It is time we remember."

In addition to this beginning piece, I will add the interviews of one Barry Trower, a British physicist and formerly of the Royal Navy, who was pioneering much of this tech in the mid-20th century. Mind control is not as conspiratorial as it sounds, its more like strategic mind influence with guaranteed results. Read this article, and watch some of his interview videos below:

"Barrie Trower “The Cooking of Humanity ”Microwaves, Smart Meters and the use of electronics for “mind control” *UPDATED*"
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1030855353584/5

"Mind control , Neuro weapons. Dr. Barry Trower interview." He starts talking around 5:55


"Remote Influencing Technologies, DEWs. Interview with Dr. Barry Trower."


"Effects of Microwaves - Barry Trower - even before 5G"


Take what you will from this, but this is the more existential threat to all of us with the current psychopaths in charge than anything else.

 

[Ember]

The nukes thread runs out of steam, so we move on to a literal tin-foil-hat topic.

 

[MusicForThePiano]

@Ember

Yet you simply retort to an ad-hominem description of an entire subject instead of refuting the evidence I provide. Don't shoot the messenger partner. I'm sharing this information freely and if you took some time to look into electromagnetic radiation you would understand how dangerous it is. The book The Invisible Rainbow is the most comprehensive written piece that shares documented research and studies that demonstrate the actual effects of various forms of electrical technology on physical health.

By calling this a "tin-foil hat topic," you are inadvertently attempting a jew-like shutdown of this discourse before it even begins. Are you denying that our bodies, and components of our bodies like the brain and heart are electrical in nature? That our cells are electric and our nervous system operates electrically? And that the technology we use does not interact with them, both in positive and in negative manners? Have you gone through an engineering education and/or worked with multi-million dollar equipment that employs such technology?

The very computer or cell phone you are typing on is built with wires that are emitting an electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field around a wire is an unintentional field and you can shield it, proof the wire, bury the wire, configure it to minimize the electromagnetic field coming out of it. As soon as you power up your device and you start putting alternating current through those wires then it becomes somewhat difficult to manage. The cell phone is a small microwave oven with an open door, an uncontained source of microwave radiation that people are putting next to their head.

Here is an interview with the author of the book:



And who says the discussion on nuclear weapons is out of steam? I haven't even started, especially since very few have looked at the evidence I provided in that thread and simply do the same as your brief and rather empty post above. If anything, its people who simply retort to "Jeb Bush" low-energy style posting that make a thread run out of steam, and that's not what I would expect from you. These topics take time to read, and they require time to learn and understand, something that not everyone has. If you're not willing to put in the time to educate yourself, even enough to attempt to prove me wrong, then who are you to call it a tin-foil hat topic? I do my best to provide more investigative findings, scientific measurements and forensic proof to carry a thesis across than the typical "he said / she said / they said / my grandfather saw xyz" unreliable witness. testimony or embellished written memoirs.

Look into this subject. I implore you. Some part of you must have interest in it, otherwise you would not have posted here. You are very matter of fact when it comes to the Russian-Ukranian war updates, something I appreciate. Applications of this technology are being deployed in that conflict, I can guarantee you that. This thread is meant to discuss the negative effects of electricity and various forms of technology on the body.

 

[Vas Incrementum]

@MFP
It would be helpful, as an introduction, if you could give us a concise summary, maybe in bullet points, of this topic. I may read what's already written, if I have the time, but I need an incentive.

 

[Thomas More]

This is topic is not like the fake nukes thread. There have definitely been experiments in this area, and these kind of directed energy systems do have some effects. I don't know the extent to which spy agencies are using these kind of systems for nefarious purposes, but I'm willing to believe there is at least some of this going on.

 

[MusicForThePiano]

The point that the author makes is that electricity is dangerous for our health, and the imbalance of it within the body, as well as the accumulation of it, not germs or viruses, are responsible for most, if not all of our diseases I will break down the book by chapter with a summary and points of each. This will not be simple bullet points, as hard as I could try, I will paraphrase and take selections of important pieces from each chapter. Bear with this.

Part I: From the beginning...

Chapter 1: Captured in a Bottle

-Early experiments in electricity in the 18th century. and the spread of its influence as a sort of entertainment in societies.
"
“I am going to tell you about a new but terrible experiment,” Musschenbroek wrote to a friend in Paris, “which I advise you never to try yourself, nor would I, who have experienced it and survived by the grace of God, do it again for all the Kingdom of France." He held the bottle in his right hand, and with the other hand he tried to draw sparks from the gun barrel. *Suddenly my right hand was hit with such force, that my whole body shook as though struck by lightning. The glass, although thin, did not break, and my hand was not knocked away, but my arm and whole body were affected more terribly than I can express. In a word, I thought I was done for.”! His companion in invention, biologist Jean Nicolas Sébastien Allamand, when he tried the experiment, felt a “prodigious blow.” “I was so stunned,” he said, “that I could not breathe for some moments.” The pain along his right arm was so intense that he feared permanent injury.”

But only half the message registered with the public. The fact that people could be temporarily or, as we will see, permanently injured or even killed by these experiments became lost in the general excitement that followed. Not only lost, but soon ridiculed, disbelieved, and forgotten. Then as now, it was not socially acceptable to say that electricity was dangerous."

...

Aside from entertainment, electricity, assumed to be related to or identical with the life force, was used primarily for its medical effects. Both electrical machines and Leyden jars found their way into hospitals, and into the offices of doctors wanting to keep up with the times. An even greater number of “electricians” who were not medically trained set up office and began treating patients. One reads of medical electricity being used during the 1740s and 1750s by practitioners in Paris, Montpellier, Geneva, Venice, Turin, Bologna, Leipzig, London, Dorchester, Edinburgh, Shrewsbury, Worcester, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Uppsala, Stockholm, Riga, Vienna, Bohemia, and The Hague.

...

Since electricity could initiate contractions of the uterus, it became a tacitly understood method of obtaining abortions. Francis Lowndes, for example, was a London electrician with an extensive practice who advertised that he treated poor women gratis *for amenorrhea."

...

But the floodgates were wide open, and the torrent of enthusiasm about electricity rushed on unhindered, and would continue to do so during the coming centuries, sweeping caution against the rocks, crushing hints of danger like so many bits of driftwood, obliterating whole tracts of knowledge and reducing them to mere footnotes in the history of invention.
"

Chapter 2: The Deaf to Hear, and the Lame to Walk

-Its initial use as a medical panacea without understanding the latent side effects
"
"What is the effect of electricity on life?"—,is one that modern science doesn't even ask. Science’s only concern today is to keep human exposure be-low a level that will cook your cells. The effect of nonlethal electricity is something mainstream science no longer wants to know. But in the eighteenth century, scientists not only asked the question, but began to supply answers.

Early friction machines were capable of being charged to about ten thousand volts—enough to deliver a stinging shock, but not enough, then or now, to be thought dangerous. By way of comparison, a person can accumulate thirty thousand volts on their body in walking across a synthetic carpet. Discharging it stings, but won't kill you.

...

The goal of electrotherapy was to stimulate health by restoring the electrical equilibrium of the body where it was out of balance. The idea was certainly not new. In another part of the world, the use of natural electricity had been developed to a fine art over thousands of years. Acupuncture needles, as we will see in chapter 9, conduct atmospheric electricity into the body, where it travels along precisely mapped pathways, returning to the atmosphere through other needles that complete the circuit.

...

In Jever, Germany, an apothecary named Johann Sprenger became famous throughout Europe for a similar reason. Though he was denounced by the director of the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Berlin, he was besieged by the deaf themselves with requests for treatment. His results were attested in court documents, and his methods were adopted by contemporary physicians. He himself was reported to have fully or partially restored hearing to no less than forty deaf and hard of hearing individuals, including some deaf from birth. His methods, like Duchenne's, were disarmingly simple and gentle. He made the current weaker or stronger according to the sensitivity of his patient, and each treatment consisted of brief pulses of electricity spaced one second apart for a total of four minutes per ear. The electrode was placed on the tragus (the flap of cartilage in front of the ear) for one minute, inside the ear canal for two minutes, and on the mastoid process behind the ear for one minute.

...

Is electricity really the life force, people were asking? This question, gnawing gently at the soul of Europe since the days of Isaac Newton, had suddenly become insistent, forcing itself out of the lofty realms of philosophy and into dinnertime discussions around the tables of ordinary people whose children would have to live with the chosen answer. The electric battery, which produced a current from the contact of dissimilar metals, had just been invented in Italy. Its implications were huge: friction machines—bulky, expensive, unreliable, subject to atmospheric conditions —might no longer be necessary. Telegraph systems, already designed by a few visionaries, might now be practical. And questions about the nature of the electric fluid might come closer to being answered.

...

A sensation of sight was just as easily elicited, by four different methods, using the same one-volt battery: by applying the silver “armature” on one moistened eyelid and the zinc on the other; or one in a nostril and the other on an eye; or one on the tongue and one on an eye; or even one on the tongue and one against the upper gums. In each case, at the moment the two metals touched each other, Humboldt saw a flash of light. If he repeated the experiment too many times, his eyes became inflamed.

In Italy, Volta, the inventor of the electric battery, succeeded in eliciting a sensation of sound, not with one pair of metals, but with thirty, attached to electrodes in each ear. With the metals he originally used in his “pile,” using water as an electrolyte, this may have been about a twenty-volt battery. Volta heard only a crackling sound which could have been a mechanical effect on the bones of his middle ears, and he did not repeat the experiment, fearing that the shock to his brain might be dangerous.

...

Nobody proved that a one-volt battery could restart a human heart, but scores of observers before Humboldt had reported that electricity increased the human pulse rate—knowledge that is not possessed by doctors today.

...

Electrification almost always caused dizziness, and sometimes a sort of mental confusion, or “istupidimento,” as the Italians called it." It commonly produced headaches, nausea, weakness, fatigue, and heart palpitations. Sometimes it caused shortness of breath, coughing, or asthmalike wheezing. It often caused muscle and joint pains, and sometimes mental depression. Although electricity usually caused the bowels to move, often with diarrhea, repeated electrification could result in constipation.

Electricity caused both drowsiness and insomnia.

Humboldt, in experiments on himself, found that electricity increased blood flow from wounds, and caused serum to flow copiously out of blisters.!® Gerhard divided one pound of freshly drawn blood into two equal parts, placed them next to each other, and electrified one of them. The electrified blood took longer to clot.'? Antoine Thillaye-Platel, pharmacist at the Hótel-Dieu, the famous hospital in Paris, agreeing, said that electricity is contraindicated in cases of hemorrhage.” Consistent with this are numerous reports of nosebleeds from electrification. Winkler and his wife, as already mentioned, got nosebleeds from the shock of a Leyden jar. In the 1790s, Scottish physician and anatomist Alexander Monro, who is remembered for discovering the function of the lymphatic system, got nosebleeds from just a one-volt battery, whenever he tried to elicit the sensation of light in his eyes. “Dr. Monro was so excitable by galvanism that he bled from the nose when, having the zinc very gently inserted in his nasal fossae, he put it in contact with an armature applied to his tongue. The hemorrhage always took place at the moment when the lights appeared.” This was reported by Humboldt.? In the early 1800s, Conrad Quensel, in Stockholm, reported that galvanism "frequently" caused nosebleeds.

...

Abbé Nollet proved that at least one of these effects—perspiration— occurred merely from being in an electric field.

In carefully controlled repeatable experiments, accompanied by modern-looking data tables, he had demonstrated measurable weight loss in all of his electrified subjects, due to an increase in evaporation from their skin.

Then Nollet had the idea to place his subjects on the floor underneath the electrified metal cage instead of in it, and they still lost as much, and even a bit more weight than when they were electrified themselves.

Nollet was thus the first person, back in 1753, to report significant biological effects from exposure to a DC electric field—the kind of field that according to mainstream science today has no effect whatsoever.



"

This is where the premise begins to take shape:

Chapter 3: Electrical Sensitivity

-The symptoms begin to show in the researchers
"
“I HAVE ALMOST ENTIRELY given up the electrical experiments.” The author of these words, in referring to his own inability to tolerate electricity, wrote them not in the modern era of alternating currents and radio waves, but in the mid-eighteenth century when all there was was static electricity. French botanist Thomas-Frangois Dalibard confided his reasons to Benjamin Franklin in a letter dated February 1762. “First, the different electrical shocks have so strongly attacked my nervous system that I am left with a convulsive tremor in my arm so that I can scarcely bring a glass to my mouth; and if I now were to touch one electrical spark I would be unable to sign my name for 24 hours. Another thing that I notice is that it is almost impossible for me to seal a letter because the electricity of the Spanish wax, communicating itself to my arm, increases my tremor.”

Dalibard was not the only one. Benjamin Wilson’s 1752 book, A Treatise on Electricity, helped promote the popularity of electricity in England, but he himself did not fare so well by it. “Upon repeating those shocks often for several weeks together,” he wrote, “I at last was weakened so much that a very small quantity of electric matter in the vial would shock me to a great degree, and cause an uncommon pain. So that I was obliged to desist from trying any more.” Even rubbing a glass globe with his hand— the basic electrical machine of his day—gave him “a very violent headache.”!

The man who authored the first book in German devoted solely to electricity, _ Neu-Entdeckte Phenomena von Bewunderns-wurdigen Wiirckungen der Natur (“Newly Discovered Phenomena of the Wonderful Workings of Nature,” 1744), became gradually paralyzed on one side of his body. Called the first electrical martyr, Johann Doppelmayer, professor of mathematics at Nuremberg, stubbornly persisted in his researches and died of a stroke in 1750 after one of his electrical experiments.”

These were just three of the earliest casualties—three scientists who helped birth an electrical revolution in which they themselves could not participate.

Even Franklin developed a chronic neurological illness that began during the period of his electrical researches and that recurred periodically for the rest of his life. Although he also suffered from gout, this other problem worried him more. Writing on March 15, 1753, of a pain in his head, he said, “I wish it were in my foot, I think I could bear it better." One recurrence lasted for the better part of five months while he was in London in 1757. He wrote to his doctor about *a giddiness and a swimming in my head," *a humming noise," and "little faint twinkling lights" that disturbed his vision. The phrase “violent cold,’ appearing often in his correspondence, was usually accompanied by mention of that same pain, dizziness, and problems with his eyesight? Franklin, unlike his friend Dalibard, never recognized a connection to electricity.

Jean Morin, professor of physics at the Collége Royale de Chartres, and author, in 1748, of Nouvelle Dissertation sur l'Électricité (“New Dissertation on Electricity”), thought that it was never healthy to expose oneself to electricity in any form, and to illustrate his point he described an experiment conducted not with a friction machine but with his pet cat. “I stretched out a large cat on the cover of my bed,” he recounted. “I rubbed it, and in the darkness I saw sparks fly.” He continued this for more than half an hour. “A thousand tiny fires flew here and there, and continuing the friction, the sparks grew until they seemed like spheres or balls of fire the size of a hazelnut... I brought my eyes near one ball, and I immediately felt a lively and painful stinging in my eyes; there was no shock in the rest of my body; but the pain was followed by a faintness that made me fall to the side, my strength failed me, and I battled, so to speak, against passing out, I fought against my own weakness from which I did not recover for several minutes.”

Such reactions were by no means confined to scientists. What is known to few doctors today was known universally to all eighteenth-century electricians, and to the nineteenth-century electrotherapists who followed them: electricity had side effects and some individuals were enormously and unaccountably more sensitive to it than others. “There are persons,” wrote Pierre Bertholon, a physicist from Languedoc, in 1780, “on whom artificial electricity made the greatest impression; a small shock, a simple spark, even the electric bath, feeble as it is, produced profound and lasting effects. I found others in whom strong electrical operations seemed not to cause any sensation at all... Between these two extremes are many nuances that correspond to the diverse individuals of the human species."^

Sigaud de la Fond’s numerous experiments with the human chain never produced the same results twice. “There are people for whom electricity can be unfortunate and very harmful,” he declared. “This impression being relative to the disposition of the organs of those who experience it and of the sensitivity or irritability of their nerves, there are probably not two persons in a chain composed of many, who experience strictly the same degree of shock.”

Mauduyt, a physician, proposed in 1776 that “the face of the constitution depends in great part on the communication between the brain, the spinal cord and the different parts by means of the nerves. Those in whom this communication is less free, or who experience the nervous illness, are then more affected than others.”

Few other scientists made any attempt to explain the differences. They simply reported them as fact—a fact as ordinary as that some people are fat and some thin, some tall and some short—but a fact that one had to take into account if one were going to offer electricity as a treatment, or otherwise expose people to it.

Even Abbé Nollet, popularizer of the human chain and electricity’s leading missionary, reported this variability in the human condition from the very beginning of his campaign. “Pregnant women especially, and delicate persons,” he wrote in 1746, “should not be exposed to it.” And later: “Not all persons are equally appropriate to the experiments of electricity, be it for exciting that virtue, be it for receiving it, be it finally for feeling its effects.”

...

The term "electrical sensitivity," in use again today, reveals a truth but conceals a reality. The truth is that not everyone feels or conducts electricity to the same degree. In fact if most people were aware of how vast the spectrum of sensitivity really is, they would have reason to be as astonished as Humboldt was, and as I still am. But the hidden reality is that however great the apparent differences between us, electricity is still part and parcel of our selves, as necessary to life as air and water.

...

Today, people who are electrically sensitive complain about power lines, computers, and cell phones. The amount of electrical energy being deposited into our bodies incidentally from all this technology is far greater than the amount that was deposited deliberately by the machines available to electricians during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The average cell phone, for example, deposits about 0.1 joule of energy into your brain every second. For a one-hour phone call, that's 360 joules. Compare that to a maximum of only 0.1 joule from the complete discharge of a one-pint Leyden jar. Even the 30-element electric pile which Volta attached to his ear canals could not have delivered more than 150 joules in an hour, even if all the energy were absorbed by his body.

Consider also that a static charge of thousands of volts accumulates on the surface of computers screens—both old desktop computers and new wireless laptops—whenever they are in use, and that part of this charge is deposited on the surface of your body when you sit in front of one. This is probably less charge than was provided by the electric bath, but no one was subjected to the electric bath for forty hours a week.

Electrotherapy is indeed an anachronism. In the twenty-first century we are all engaged in it whether we like it or not. Even if occasional use was once beneficial to some, perpetual bombardment is not likely to be so. And modern researchers trying to determine the biological effects of electricity are a bit like fish trying to determine the impact of water. Their eighteenth century predecessors, before the world was inundated, were in a much better position to record its effects.

...

Eighteenth century scientists were not the first to discover this (weather sensitivity). The Chinese model, formulated in the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, written in the fourth century B.C., is similar. In fact, if one understands that “Qi” is electricity, and that “Yin” and “Yang” are negative and positive, the language is almost identical: “The pure Yang forms the heaven, and the turbid Yin forms the earth. The Qi of the earth ascends and turns into clouds, while the Qi of the heaven descends and turns into rain."*^

Famous weather sensitive—and therefore electrically sensitive— individuals have included Lord Byron, Christopher Columbus, Dante, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Victor Hugo, Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, Michelangelo, Mozart, Napoleon, Rousseau, and Voltaire.

"

I will go into the following chapters in several posts. I could not recap all 17 of them in one. Chapters 4 through 7 are where the big picture begins to form.

The military applications took this for granted at first, as they usually do when something new comes out that can serve warfare, and many not knowing, but now these complexes definitely are aware of the harm that this energy causes to our bodies when overexpose or misused.

 

[MusicForThePiano]

Bold points emphasize key takeaways, continuing from before.

Chapter 4: The Road Not Taken
"
it was electricity that was most obviously connected with life. Electricity alone breathed motion into nerves and muscles, and pulsations into the heart. Electricity boomed from the heavens, stirred winds, tossed clouds, pelted the earth with rain. Life was movement, and electricity made things move.

Electricity was "an electric and elastic spirit" by which "all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles."! So spoke Isaac Newton in 1713, and for the next century few disagreed.

...

Then came Luigi Galvani's stunning announcement that simply touching a brass hook to an iron wire would cause a frog's leg to contract. A modest professor of obstetrics at the Institute of Sciences of Bologna, Galvani thought this proved something about physiology: each muscle fiber must be something like an organic Leyden jar. The metallic circuit, he reasoned, released the “animal electricity” that was manufactured by the brain and stored in the muscles. The function of the nerves was to discharge that stored electricity, and the dissimilar metals, in direct contact with the muscle, somehow mimicked the natural function of the animal’s own nerves.

But Galvani’s countryman, Alessandro Volta, held an opposing, and at that time heretical opinion. The electric current, he claimed, came not from the animal, but from the dissimilar metals themselves. The convulsions, according to Volta, were due entirely to the external stimulus. Furthermore, he proclaimed, “animal electricity” did not even exist, and to try to prove it he made his momentous demonstration that the electric current could be produced by the contact of different metals alone, without the intervention of the animal.

...

Volta, of course, won the day. His invention of the electric battery gave an enormous boost to the industrial revolution, and his insistence that electricity had nothing to do with life also helped steer its direction. This mistake made it possible for society to harness electricity on an industrial scale—to wire the world, even as Nollet had envisioned—without worrying about the effects such an enterprise might have on biology. It permitted people to begin to disregard the accumulated knowledge gained by eighteenth century electricians.

Eventually, one learns if one reads the textbooks, Italian physicists Leopoldo Nobili and Carlo Matteucci, and then a German physiologist named Emil du Bois-Reymond, came along and proved that electricity did after all have something to do with life, and that nerves and muscles were not just moist conductors.

...

The other, even more significant change that occurred after 1800 is that gradually people even forgot to wonder what the nature of electricity was. They began to build a permanent electrical edifice, whose tentacles snaked everywhere, without noticing, or thinking about, its consequences. Or, rather, they recorded its consequences in minute detail without ever making the connection to what they were building.
"

Chapter 5: Chronic Electrical Illness

"
IN 1859, THE CITY of London underwent an astonishing metamorphosis. A tangle of electric wires, suddenly and inescapably, was brought to the streets, shops, and residential rooftops of its two and a half million inhabitants.

...

"The industrious spiders have long since formed themselves into a commercial company, called the London District Telegraph Company (limited), and they have silently, but effectively, spun their trading web. One hundred and sixty miles of wire are now fixed along parapets, through trees, over garrets, round chimney-pots, and across roads on the southern side of the river, and the other one hundred and twenty required miles will soon be fixed in the same manner on the northern side. The difficulty decreases as the work goes on, and the sturdiest Englishman is ready to give up the roof of his castle in the interests of science and the public good, when he finds that many hundreds of his neighbors have already led the way."

...

The systematic electrification of Europe had begun in 1839 with the opening of the magnetic telegraph on the Great Western Railway between West Drayton and London. The electrification of America began a few years later, when Samuel Morse's first telegraph line marched from Baltimore to Washingon in 1844 along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Even earlier, electric doorbells and annunciators began decorating homes, offices, and hotels, the first complete system having been installed in 1829 in Boston's Tremont House, where all hundred and seventy guest rooms were connected by electric wires to a system of bells in the main office.

Electric burglar alarms were available in England by 1847, and soon afterwards in the United States.

By 1850, telegraph lines were under construction on every continent except Antarctica. Twenty-two thousand miles of wire had been energized in the United States; four thousand miles were advancing through India, where “monkeys and swarms of large birds" were alighting on them"?; one thousand miles of wire were spreading in three directions from Mexico City. By 1860, Australia, Java, Singapore, and India were being joined undersea. By 1875, thirty thousand miles of submarine cable had demolished oceanic barriers to communication, and the tireless weavers had electrified seven hundred thousand miles of copper web over the surface of the earth—enough wire to encircle the globe almost thirty times.

And the traffic of electricity accelerated even more than the number of wires, as first duplexing, then quadriplexing, then automatic keying meant that current flowed at all times—not just when messages were being sent— and that multiple messages could be sent over the same wire at the same time, at a faster and faster rate.

...

In the midst of this transformation, a slender, slightly deaf clergyman's son wrote the first clinical histories of a previously unknown disease that he was observing in his neurology practice in New York City. Dr. George Miller Beard was only three years out of medical school. Yet his paper was accepted and published, in 1869, in the prestigious Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, later renamed the New England Journal of Medicine.

...

As far as the new disease that he described in 1869, Beard did not guess its cause. He simply thought it was a disease of modern civilization, caused by stress, that was previously uncommon. The name he gave it, "neurasthenia," just means "weak nerves." Although some of its symptoms resembled other diseases, neurasthenia seemed to attack at random and for no reason and no one was expected to die from it. Beard certainly didn't connect the disease with electricity, which was actually his preferred treatment for neurasthenia—when the patient could tolerate it. When he died in 1883, the cause of neurasthenia, to everyone's frustration, had still not been identified. But in a large portion of the world where the term “neurasthenia” is still in everyday use among doctors—and the term is used in most of the world outside of the United States—electricity is recognized today as one of its causes. And the electrification of the world was undoubtedly responsible for its appearance out of nowhere during the 1860s, to become a pandemic during the following decades.

Today, when million-volt power lines course through the countryside, twelve-thousand-volt lines divide every neighborhood, and sets of thirtyampere circuit breakers watch over every home, we tend to forget what the natural situation really is. None of us can begin to imagine what it would feel like to live on an unwired earth. Not since the presidency of James Polk have our cells, like puppets on invisible strings, been given a second’s rest from the electric vibrations. The gradual increase in voltage during the past century and a half has been only a matter of degree. But the sudden overwhelming of the earth's own nurturing fields, during the first few decades of technological free-for-all, had a drastic impact on the very character of life.

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It is easy to calculate, using these simple assumptions, that the electric fields beneath the earliest telegraph wires were up to 30,000 times stronger than the natural electric field of the earth at that frequency. In reality the rapid interruptions in telegraph keying also produced a wide range of radio frequency harmonics, which also traveled along the wires and radiated through the air.

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A number of historians of medicine who have not dug very deep have asserted that neurasthenia was not a new disease, that nothing had changed, and that late nineteenth and early twentieth century high society was really suffering from some sort of mass hysteria.

A list of famous American neurasthenes reads like a Who's Who of literature, the arts, and politics of that era. They included Frank Lloyd Wright, William, Alice and Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry Brooks Adams, Kate Chopin, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Emma Goldman, George Santayana, Samuel Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and a host of other well-known figures.

Historians who think they have found neurasthenia in older textbooks have been confused by changes in medical terminology, changes that have prevented an understanding of what happened to our world a hundred and fifty years ago. For example, the term "nervous" was used for centuries without the connotations given to it by Freud. It simply meant, in today's language, “neurological.”

George Cheyne, in his 1733 book, The English Malady, applied the term "nervous disorder" to epilepsy, paralysis, tremors, cramps, contractions, loss of sensation, weakened intellect, complications of malaria, and alcoholism. Robert Whytt's 1764 treatise on "nervous disorders" is a classic work on neurology. It can be confusing to see gout, tetanus, hydrophobia, and forms of blindness and deafness called “nervous disorders” until one realizes that the term “neurological” did not replace “nervous” in clinical medicine until the latter half of the nineteenth century. “Neurology,” at that time, meant what “neuroanatomy” means today.

Another source of confusion for a modern reader is the old use of the terms “hysterical” and “hypochondriac” to describe neurological conditions of the body, not the mind. The “hypochondria” were the abdominal regions and “hystera,” in Greek, was the uterus; as Whytt explained in his treatise, hysterical and hypochondriac disorders were those neurological diseases that were believed to have their origins in the internal organs, “hysterical” traditionally being applied to women’s diseases and “hypochondriac” to men’s. When the stomach, bowels and digestion were involved, the illness was called hypochondriac or hysterical depending on the patient’s sex. When the patient had seizures, blackouts, tremors, or palpitations, but the internal organs were not affected, the illness was called simply “nervous.”

For thousands of years all sickness was believed to be caused by an imbalance of “humors”—the four humors being phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, and blood—so that the goal of medical treatment was to strengthen the deficient humors and drain off those that were in excess. Therefore all medical complaints, major and minor, were subject to treatment by some combination of purging, vomiting, sweating, bleeding, medicines, and dietary prescriptions. And the drugs were liable to be neurotoxic, preparations containing heavy metals such as antimony, lead, and mercury being frequently prescribed.

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In fact, the first description anywhere of the disease to which Beard called the world’s attention is in Austin Flint’s textbook of medicine published in New York in 1866. A professor at the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, Flint devoted two brief pages to it and gave it almost the Same name Beard was to popularize three years later. Patients with “nervous asthenia,” as he called it, “complain of languor, lassitude, want of buoyancy, aching of the limbs, and mental depression. They are wakeful during the night, and enter upon their daily pursuits with a sense of fatigue." These patients did not have anemia or any other evidence of organic disease. They also did not die of their disease; on the contrary, as Beard and others were later to also observe, they seemed to be protected from ordinary acute illnesses and lived, on average, longer than others.

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Other related illnesses were described in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occupational diseases suffered by those who worked in proximity to electricity. “Telegrapher’s cramp,” for example, called by the French, more accurately, “mal télégraphique” (“telegraphic sickness”) because its effects were not confined to the muscles of the operator’s hand. Ernest Onimus described the affliction in Paris in the 1870s. These patients suffered from heart palpitations, dizziness, insomnia, weakened eyesight, and a feeling “as though a vice were gripping the back of their head.” They suffered from exhaustion, depression, and memory loss, and after some years of work a few descended into insanity.

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Telephone operators, too, often suffered permanent injury to their health. Ernst Beyer wrote that out of 35 telephone operators that he had treated during a five-year period, not a single one had been able to return to work. Hermann Engel had 119 such patients. P. Bernhardt had over 200. German physicians routinely attributed this illness to electricity. Hermann Engel had 119 such patients. P. Bernhardt had over 200. German physicians routinely attributed this illness to electricity. And after reviewing dozens of such publications, Karl Schilling, in 1915, published a clinical description of the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of illness caused by chronic exposure to electricity. These patients typically had headaches and dizziness, tinnitus and floaters in the eyes, racing pulse, pains in the region of the heart, and palpitations. They felt weak and exhausted and were unable to concentrate. They could not sleep. They were depressed and had anxiety attacks. They had tremors. Their reflexes were elevated, and their senses were hyperacute. Sometimes their thyroid was hyperactive. Occasionally, after long illness, their heart was enlarged.

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Then there was “railway spine,” a misnamed illness that was investigated as early as 1862 by a commission appointed by the British medical journal Lancet. The commissioners blamed it on vibrations, noise, speed of travel, bad air, and sheer anxiety. All those factors were present, and no doubt contributed their share. But there was also one more that they did not consider. Because by 1862, every rail line was sandwiched between one or more telegraph wires running overhead and the return currents from those lines coursing beneath, a portion of which flowed along the metal rails themselves, upon which the passenger cars rode. Passengers and train personnel commonly suffered from the same complaints later reported by telegraph and telephone operators: fatigue, irritability, headaches, chronic dizziness and nausea, insomnia, tinnitus, weakness, and numbness. They had rapid heart beat, bounding pulse, facial flushing, chest pains, depression, and sexual dysfunction. Some became grossly overweight. Some bled from the nose, or spat blood. Their eyes hurt, with a *dragging" sensation, as if they were being pulled into their sockets. Their vision and their hearing deteriorated, and a few became gradually paralyzed. A decade later they would have been diagnosed with neurasthenia—as many railroad employees later were.

The most salient observations made by Beard and the late nineteenth century medical community about neurasthenia are these:

It spread along the routes of the railroads and telegraph lines.

It affected both men and women, rich and poor, intellectuals and farmers.

Its sufferers were often weather sensitive.

It sometimes resembled the common cold or influenza.

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It was the German physician Rudolf Arndt who finally made the connection between neurasthenia and electricity. His patients who could not tolerate electricity intrigued him. "even the weakest galvanic current," he wrote, "so weak that is scarcely deflected the needle of the galvanometer, and was not perceived in the slightest by other people, bothered them in the extreme." He proposed in 1885 that "electrosensitivity is characteristic of high-grade neurasthenia." And he prophesied that electrosensitivity "may contribute not insubstantially to the elucidation of phenomena that now seem puzzling and inexplicable."

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(((Freud))) ended the search for a physical cause of neurasthenia by reclassifying it as a mental disease. And then, by designating almost all cases of it as "anxiety neurosis," he signed its death warrant. Although he pretended to leave neurasthenia as a separate neurosis, he didn't leave it many symptoms, and in Western countries it has been all but forgotten. In some circles it persists as "chronic fatigue syndrome," a disease without a cause that many doctors believe is also psychological and that omst don't take seriously. Neurasthenia survives in the United States only in the common expression, "nervous breakdown," whose origin few people remember.

In the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), there is a unique code for neurasthenia, F48.0, but in the version used in the United States (ICD-10-CM), F48.0 has been removed. In the American version, neurasthenia is only one among a list of “other nonpsychotic mental disorders” and is almost never diagnosed. Even in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), the official system for assigning codes to mental diseases in American hospitals, there is no code for neurasthenia.

It was a death warrant only in North America and Western Europe, however. Half the world still uses neurasthenia as a diagnosis in the sense intended by Beard. In all of Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Republics, neurasthenia is today the most common of all psychiatric diagnoses as well as one of the most frequently diagnosed diseases in general medical practice.'” It is often considered a sign of chronic toxicity.

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In Russia, which began to industrialize along with the rest of Europe, neurasthenia became epidemic in the 1880s.? But nineteenth century Russian medicine and psychology were heavily influenced by neurophysiologist Ivan Sechenov, who emphasized external stimuli and environmental factors in the workings of the mind and body. Because of

Sechenov's influence, and that of his pupil Ivan Pavlov after him, the Russians rejected Freud's redefinition of neurasthenia as anxiety neurosis, and in the twentieth century Russian doctors found a number of environmental causes for neurasthenia, prominent among which are electricity and electromagnetic radiation in their various forms.

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As living beings, not only do we possess a mind and a body, but we also have nerves that join the two. Our nerves are not just conduits for the ebb and flow of electric fluid from the universe, as was once believed, nor are they just an elaborate messenger service to deliver chemicals to muscles, as is currently thought. Rather, as we will see, they are both. As a messenger service, the nervous system can be poisoned by toxic chemicals. As a network of fine transmission wires, it can easily be damaged or unbalanced by a great or unfamiliar electric load. This has effects on both mind and body that we know today as anxiety disorder.


Will pick up more later. Those of you who have read this far should get a copy of this book for yourself, it is one of the best informative written works out there on this subject.