tor-treated mice lived significantly longer than nontreated ones^32.
Then, in the mid-1960s, Dr. Bruno Bizzi, the vice-director of an Italian hospital,
introduced orgone accumulators for the treatment of diverse human illnesses, including a
few cases diagnosed as cancerous^32. He also obtained positive confirmations in the reduc-
tion of tumors and succeeded in interesting Professor Chiurco, the director of the
International Research Center on PreCancer Conditions at Rome University. Professor
Chiurco in turn sponsored an international seminar on cancer prevention in Rome in
October 1968, at which Dr. Walter Hoppe, an old colleague of Reich’s, presented a paper on
a successful case with the orgone accumulator^33.
What can we say in 1982 about the use of the accumulator for the treatment and
prevention of cancer and other illnesses? Very little that could not have been said in the early
- There is an even greater paucity of medical replications than physical ones. An
important factor here is the force of the injunction decree obtained by the FDA in 1954
against the interstate shipment of the accumulator (to be described in Chapter 29). That
injunction, as we shall see, was legally binding only on Reich and the Wilhelm Reich
Foundation. But the fact remains that as late as 1963 at least—six years after Reich’s death—
FDA investigators were making inquiries to see if any physicians were prescribing the accu-
mulator. In 1981 the FDA still displayed the accumulator in the media as one of the more
ludicrous examples ofmedical quackery stopped by the agency’s assiduous efforts^34 ,and
the Administration continues to exert its “chilling effect” on the medical use of the accu-
mulator.The Journal of Orgonomy, edited by Elsworth F. Baker, M.D., has since 1967 published
numerous articles on psychiatric and scientific orgonomy but none on the use of the accu-
mulator with human beings. One reason for this omission is fear of disciplinary action by
state or professional organizations. Yet the fallout from the FDA injunction fails to explain
the paucity of studies in other countries.
The growing shift in medicine from an agent- to a host-oriented perspective is
beginning to facilitate a reevaluation of Reich’s contribution to the origins of cancer. Let us
hope that these changes in the intellectual climate will also encourage serious inquiry regard-
ing Reich’s prodigious efforts to develop and utilize the orgone accumulator in the treatment
and prevention of cancer and other illnesses. Let us hope that the accumulator will be lib-
erated from the shroud of stale clichés—such as Time’s obituary for Reich in 1957, describ-
ing a “box”that “could cure common colds,... cancer and impotence”—under which it
still lies buried.
22 : The Medical Effects of the Accumulator: 1940-1948 289