Mystery sign on this SF home is last remnant of a dangerous charlatan

It’s impossible to count the number of lies Dr. Albert Abrams told while defrauding patients, seducing celebrities and brainwashing a cult of medical professionals. But there is one misleading message that remains today, in front of the lovely San Francisco home he built, that hints at a true story of tragedy and greed.

Abrams, the man the American Medical Association called “the dean of 20th century charlatans,” found international fame and fortune with two machines with a bizarre operating manual: the first he claimed could diagnose disease using a drop of blood, almost a century before Elizabeth Holmes was heard of.

His second box, called the oscilloclast, claimed it could not only cure diseases, but also detect a person’s parentage and ethnicity before any such tests existed. He even convinced journalists it could detect when a woman was in love. At the height of Abrams’ fame in 1921, a San Francisco judge accepted the machine as evidence in two paternity cases, and Abrams was making up to $1 million in a year off his practice.

Abrams’ certainty in his machines may have stemmed from the fact that for decades, he was a credible and highly regarded physician. When he earned his M.D. from the University of Heidelberg in Germany at 19 years old, he was the youngest to do so in 100 years. He went on to become professor of pathology at San Francisco’s Cooper Medical College, which became part of Stanford Medical School, as well as vice president of the California State Medical Society.

Abrams became a standard bearer in the use of X-rays to detect cardiac disease in the late 1800s, and he was ahead of the curve on contesting some since-discredited health practices. This included his 1896 speech encouraging women to ride bicycles for exercise when many doctors claimed it was dangerous for them.

His 1901 book calling out alcohol and tobacco use as disease risk factors included criticism of the “enormous mischief done by the quacks who advertise cures for many complaints, and who, like most charlatans, trade on the fears of their patients.”

For all the ink that was spilled by and about Abrams, it isn’t clear why he made his heel turn in middle age. But he crossed that threshold in 1910 with his book on spondylotherapy. That completely unproven practice “emphasized the peculiar hypothesis that the reflex centers in the spine could be stimulated by constant, rapid percussion or hammering,” wrote Dr. Morris Fishbein in “The Quackery of Albert Abrams.”

When many of Abrams’ medical peers took issue with his use of spondylotherapy to treat appendicitis, his response was similar to Holmes’ “first they think you’re crazy” defense: “To offer anything new in the medical profession is to be hounded to death by one’s colleagues.”

Abrams gave spondylotherapy courses around the country for $50 (about $1,500 today), and by 1922 it was $200 per course. Around 1918, he expanded to an updated scam with his dynamizer, using an acronym that has thankfully been usurped by baseball: the ERA, or Electromagnetic Reactions of Abrams.

Much like Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and other disgraced modern-day frauds, Abrams exploited people’s excitement for new technology and their ignorance of how it worked. What makes the dynamizer sound so laughable now may be what made it sound so revolutionary to some at the time. Abrams claimed that each disease gave off a specific electrical vibration, and his machine could detect it by inputting drops of a patient’s blood, neutralized by a magnet.

“A wire issuing from the machine was connected to the forehead of a second, healthy person (the ‘subject or reagent,’ who stood on grounded metal plates,” wrote David Armstrong and Elizabeth Metzger Armstrong in “The Great American Medicine Show.” “Then, the reagent was stripped to the waist and faced west in dim light.

“As the machine passed the vibrational frequency of the patient’s blood to the healthy reagent, Abrams or his surrogate tapped the reagent’s abdomen. Dull areas pinpointed the locations of disease.”

Then came the oscilloclast, which involved smearing ointments over a patient’s belly and administering ERA to cure them of cancer and other diseases. This is where Abrams’ multi-level duplicity took off. He leased hundreds of his machines to so-called “electronic practitioners,” many of whom were physicians. Lessees paid $200 upfront, plus $5 a month, and they had to sign a contract vowing never to open the machine.

Abrams was paid to lecture about his machines around the country and Europe, and patients paid $10 to mail Abrams a drop of their blood on blotting paper, until he raised the price to $25.

Two of Abrams’ phony machines, with all their wires and knobs, can still be found in a warehouse in San Carlos. They belong to the Museum of American Heritage, which estimates it has about 50 dubious medical devices and has displayed them as exhibits.

Abrams’ two contributions to the museum are the oscilloclast and a diagnostic set that may have replaced the dynamizer. Jim Wall, the museum’s president of the board of directors, said a collector donated them around 15 years ago.

What set Abrams apart from other quacks of his time, Wall said, was Abrams’ total commitment, putting his name on his machines and promoting them to anyone who would listen.

“It was as close to magic as you could get,” Wall said of electricity and radio in the early 1900s. “Most doctors were scooting along as fast as they could and got out of town. Abrams seemed to at least initially completely believe in what he was doing.”

Enhancing Abrams’ credibility was the endorsement of a highly suggestible press that repeated his claims in print without question. The most notable was muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair, who despite his reputation for exposing yellow journalism and corporate excess, was in thrall to Abrams. His book lauding the doctor was published in the U.S., France and Brazil.

Abrams became so famous that he was brought in to treat two soon-to-be Mexican presidents: Alvaro Obregon and Plutarco Calles. What likely raised his profile high enough to make this happen was becoming a courtroom star.

When Paul Vittori refused to pay child support for infant Virginia because he said he wasn’t her father, a San Francisco Superior Court judge admitted into evidence Abrams’ oscilloclast to test the girl’s blood — something unheard of in a paternity dispute up to this point. The test found Vittori was the father, and he was ordered to pay his ex-wife $25 a month.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle spread lionizing Abrams, the judge called the oscilloclast “one of the biggest things established by medical science in years.”

Weeks later in 1921, the judge allowed Abrams’ blood test as evidence again in another paternity case — as well as the testimony of famous local sculptor Haig Patigian, whose trained eye supposedly could detect a likeness between 9-year-old Eugene Sorine and Julius B. Sorine. Patigian couldn’t draw a sure conclusion, but the judge again played Maury Povich and agreed with the machine — Julius was the father.

“Long before daytime television’s love affair with paternity scandals, the Abrams episode vividly captured the public nature of modern paternity and how science, law, and the media produced it,” wrote Nara Milanich in her 2019 book, “Paternity.”

Abrams kept adding uses for the oscilloclast, the most troubling being its claim of detecting a person’s exact breakdown of ethnicity. But with Prohibition taking effect, he also fooled locals into thinking it could reproduce the feeling of being drunk, and people lined up around his San Francisco office to experience it. He also used it as a “love detector” with an 18-year-old woman as reporters watched (the result: She was “very much” in love).

Flush with cash from his empire, and inheritances from two wives, Abrams built his final home and lab on Sacramento Street in Pacific Heights for an estimated $45,000. Sinclair called it “The House of Wonder.” And that’s where the author of “Sherlock Holmes” comes in.

A brass plaque on the front of the building today, noted as a historical landmark on Google Maps across the street from Lafayette Park, claims, “This house, built in 1881, was once occupied by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.”

There are a couple of problems with this: The Beaux Arts house, with two lion statues guarding it, was built after 1921, and the legendary author of “Sherlock Holmes” was merely occupying the home for a few hours.

Conan Doyle had put writing about his beloved fictional detective on hiatus as he visited San Francisco in June 1923 to give lectures on spiritualism. This included his hopeless belief in the infamous hoax of spirits appearing in people’s photos, supposedly proving their existence.

The two seemed fated to meet in person even from an ocean away. They did so in early June, when Conan Doyle left his room at the Clift Hotel to visit Abrams’ home office. Both made a strong impression on the other.

Abrams told reporters that Conan Doyle had left him thinking he might be mistaken that life ends at death. He said he used one of his machines to test one of Conan Doyle’s photos of a living man surrounded by spirits, and that one of the spirits gave a “life reaction.”

In Howard Lachtman’s book about the U.S. tour, “Sherlock Slept Here,” he wrote Conan Doyle left Abrams’ home — without spending the night there — calling him a “wizard.”

With his array of medical gadgets, Abrams “impressed Sir Arthur as much with his ‘electronic’ methods of diagnosis as with his extraordinary personality, ‘volcanic and tempestuous when angered, but self-contained and contemplative by nature,’” Lachtman wrote.

For all his friends in high places, Abrams was also fomenting a strong backlash from the medical community. Chief among them was the American Medical Association, which Abrams quit in 1922.

The group lambasted Abrams in its journal and may or may not have assisted in pranks meant to discredit Abrams and his practitioners, including sending them samples of chicken blood that were erroneously diagnosed with human diseases.

With Scientific American already conducting what would be a yearlong investigation into his medical misdeeds, Abrams, then 61, died in January 1924 of a disease he claimed his oscilloclast could cure: pneumonia. His acolytes blamed his opponents’ criticism for his illness, and they doubled down by saying Abrams had predicted his death down to the week. 

When it released the exhaustive “Our Abrams Verdict” in September 1924, the Scientific American report called the ERA “an illusion at best and a colossal fraud at worst.” Still, the oscilloclast wasn’t banned in the U.S. until 1954, in a San Francisco court, after a federal probe determined it to produce the magnetic field of a vacuum cleaner.  

In his 1932 book “California’s Medical Story,” a University of California professor named Dr. Henry Harris unleashed his full vitriol on Abrams: “Even at this period of large wealth, he remained mercenary, and it was not uncommon in the free clinics of San Francisco to see patients with incurable diseases, the remnants of his colored ointment (Abrams’ paint) on their abdomens, left moneyless and hopeless after their electronic treatments.”

As for Abrams’ home on Sacramento Street, it transitioned to a normal, unfamous life after his death. It was sold at auction — his assets, like everything else, were greatly exaggerated — and passed through different owners. For all our efforts, we couldn’t figure out who put up that fanciful plaque.

Woody LaBounty, president of San Francisco Heritage and a lifelong city resident, says he remembers walking by the plaque as a teenager around 1979 and being startled by it because he was an avid “Sherlock Holmes” reader. After doing his own research, he guessed a previous owner posted it.

“There’s lies and there’s damn lies and there’s Google Maps,” LaBounty said.

“Plaques are always very suspect,” he added. “You should never think of them as primary sources.”

Mona Skager, the building’s owner since 1988, when she subdivided the home into four condos, says she doesn’t know who put up the plaque before her. The retired movie producer said she routinely has a cleaner polish the brass.

Why does she maintain the plaque? “Because no one else did,” Skager said.

We do know the plaque existed in October 1975. That’s because there’s a historical survey document from that date on the San Francisco Planning listing for the address. The surveyor made note of the words on the plaque, adding their commentary of “Really pleasant little French palace.”

Either that surveyor or someone else followed with, “I doubt that the facade in this photo dates from 1881.”

Public records available through the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder’s Office show one owner for the property between 1961 and 1980: Frances Youngblood. We could find nothing in library or newspaper archives tying the wife of an Army corporal or a previous owner to the plaque, however. The only hint of a clue in Youngblood’s interests might be a 1938 blurb in the San Francisco Examiner listing her as the historian of the San Franciscans Club.

As for Elisabeth Holmgren, she says she has enjoyed the legend. While living at Unit 1 of the address with her husband, David, before putting it up for sale this year, she recalled seeing lantern-lit tours walking by the residence during her 10 years there.

“I know there’s controversy about the plaque,” Holmgren said over the phone. “I feel it stimulates discussion, education. Everyone who walks by and sees the sign gets a glimpse of history and wonders what’s going on.”

The beginning of a Sherlock Holmes story if ever there was one.