Today, when there is widespread public as well as professional interest in Reich’s
psychiatric treatment but not the accumulator, many people believe that the attacks in the
1950s completely centered on the “box.” This was not the case. Reich’s entire later work was
under a cloud of obloquy. To give one example: in the spring of 1953, Dr. D. Ewen
Cameron, then president of the American Psychiatric Association, told a patient who was
considering psychiatric orgone therapy that such therapy was “pure fake and that the
American Psychiatric Association was going to bring charges of fraud against Dr. Reich.”^12
Reich always wished to be informed about such incidents, much as they hurt and
enraged him. Yet the most serious threat to orgonomy came not from visible manifestations,
but from actions Reich was unaware of: the accumulator tests the FDA was conducting dur-
ing 1952 and 1953. Since the FDA had not been able to find any dissatisfied users, medical
tests conducted under its auspices were to be crucial for evidence.
The FDA never took its task lightly, even though some of the tests were grossly
inadequate. It did not have the resources to run its own tests on the validity of the accumu-
lator. Tests were therefore carried out by a variety of hospitals and clinics, including such
prestigious institutions as the Mayo and Lahey clinics. Here we will concentrate on the heart
of the FDA’s evidence—the biomedical tests. (The FDA’s replications of the temperature
difference and the electroscopic measure—its physical tests—were described in Chapter 21.)
Reich was quite correct in fearing that he would be at a serious disadvantage in any
courtroom procedure where scientists with all the right credentials presented inadequately
conducted control studies of his findings. Carried out by reputable people, the FDA’s tests
were just good enough not to be transparently unscientific, but still palpably inadequate as
any genuine assessment. Most of the outside replicators of orgonomy were as convinced of
its falsity as the FDA was even before embarking on the testing.
Dr. Frank H. Krusen of the Mayo Clinic wrote on August 24, 1953, to the FDA:
“It was very difficult for me to bring myself to take the time to prepare this report because
of the fact that this quackery is of such a fantastic nature that it hardly seems worthwhile to
refute the ridiculous claims ofits proponents.”^13 Other investigators also indicated their
contempt priorto any investigation.
Most ofthe FDA tests bore out Reich’s long-standing criticism of controlled repli-
cations of orgonomic findings: they violated essential conditions of the original experi-
ments. For this reason, Reich had urged that he or another
medical orgonomist participate in the FDA tests. The FDA never acceded to this
condition, insisting on the necessity for entirely independent verification. They too had a
point;still,for a completely fair assessment, their researchers would have to follow meticu-
lously all conditions of the original experiments. Not only did they not meet these condi-
tions, they often failed to mention their existence.
One striking way the tests failed is that they generally consisted of having patients
sit in the accumulator only a few times. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, for example, a sixty-
four-year-old woman with cancer of the large intestine and of the pelvis was treated four
times with the accumulator for twenty minutes each on June 9, 10, 11, and 12, 1952. She died
28 : The FDA Injunction and Reich’s Responses: 1951-1955 385