SAPA injections. So, in 1940, he gave up the arduous and time-consuming injections and
instead kept cancer mice in the accumulator for one half hour each day. The results, in
Reich’s words, were startling:
The very first tests revealed an astoundingly rapid effect; the mice recuper-
ated rapidly, the fur became smooth and shiny, the eyes lost their dullness, the
whole organism became vigorous instead of contracted and bent, and the tumors
ceased to grow or they even receded. At first, it seemed [unlikely] that a simple cab-
inet, consisting of nothing but organic material outside and metal inside, should
have such a pronounced biological effect^20.It is hard to imagine exactly how Reich felt when he first put cancer mice in a sim-
ple wood and metal box. Certainly he must have doubted himself. The rationale for the
SAPA-bion treatment at least had a history of several years; the accumulator had only been
studied for six months when Reich started using it as a treatment agent. That he dared to
use this laughably simple device to treat a terrible illness took rare courage and self-confi-
dence. In retrospect, the most remarkable aspect of all was his resoluteness in the face of
ridicule and attacks in pursuing so steadily his concepts, observations, and experiments.
His daring paid off. The average life span of untreated cancer mice was four weeks,
of SAPA-injected mice nine weeks, and of mice treated in the accumulator eleven weeks.
Also, Reich, his colleagues, and his students began using the accumulator themselves and
noted a marked increase in their vitality.
By early 1941, Reich felt prepared to start investigations of the accumulator with
sick human beings. By this time his thinking about its therapeutic mechanism had also
evolved. Initially, he thought that orgone energy in the accumulator simply penetrated the
organism like X-rays. However, this hypothesis did not explain why some persons who used
the accumulator reacted to orgone energy immediately whereas others needed a number of
irradiations before they showed any reactions. Reich had also noted that the accumulator
functioned much better if its walls were about four inches from the organism treated.
Ignorance of this fact initially caused a series of failures. The effect of accumulators on mice
was poor when they were treated in large accumulators built for humans. A third key obser-
vation was that there was a slight rise in body temperature when persons used the accumu-
lator^21.
These findings led Reich to change his hypothesis about the mechanism behind the
accumulator’s beneficial effect. He shifted from the more mechanical idea of orgone parti-
cles hitting the organism within the accumulator to the notion of a mutual excitation
between two energy fields—that of the organism and that of the accumulator. Here his
thinking returned to earlier concepts: the attraction between two people with a “field of
excitation” and the lumination he had observed between bions. This explanation fit the find-
ing that energetically sluggish persons usually did not react to orgone energy in the accumu-
lator until after a number of sessions.
22 : The Medical Effects of the Accumulator: 1940-1948 283