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Thursday, April 16, 2009

The more things change...

I have a collection of old Reader's Digest magazines that I found in my grandmother's basement years ago. Though it's not a complete collection by any means, the issues, which range from 1937 to 1967, provide some fascinating insights into the things that preoccupied America and the rest of the world in decades past. Magazines can do this in a way that books can't. That's why I am hopelessly hooked on old magazines, even the musty ones that make me sneeze and wonder if I am in danger of getting some gawd-awful ailment from ancient mold spores. It's a risk that we diligent researchers have to take sometimes.

Today while I was in the...um...reading room, I was flipping through a copy of the October 1967 Digest, and came across an article condensed from Today's Health, a general-readership magazine from bygone days (it was published by the American Medical Association). The article was titled, "The Menace of Mail-Order Medicine," penned by one Ralph Lee Smith. I would imagine that this is the same Ralph Lee Smith who wrote the 1960 book, The Health Hucksters: The Shocking Story of How Food and Drug Advertising Exploits Your Health. He also authored a 1969 book called At Your Own Risk: The Case Against Chiropractic, which several Amazon reader-reviewers said was biased and outdated. (Wrote one indignant reviewer: "The author was paid by the AMA to right [sic] this Third Reich dribble. Enough said
.")

But this post isn't about chiropractic (and by the way, if you want one contemporary MD's view on chiropractic (among other "alternative" practices), click here). Nor is this about whether or not Ralph Lee Smith was paid off by those Nazis at the AMA. This is about an enterprising fellow who went by the name of Sri Dr. (or Dr. Sri) Abn Donahnji. You won't find much about him by Googling, but a few decades ago he was doing quite a brisk business helping people find health and happiness.

The good Sri Doctor placed a lot of ads, such as the one you see above, in the back pages of magazines. One of these ads caught the attention of a deaf-mute Georgia couple. For those who are offended, I'm sorry, but that's the way they were described in the article. Back in 1967 it wasn't politically incorrect to refer to people as "deaf" or "mute" or even "dumb." The copy that attracted the hearing-and-speech-impaired couple read, in part:
Dr. Abn Donahji, Yogi Healer and Clairvoyant Reader, will solve your problems.
Full of hope, the two wrote to Donahji, explaining that the wife was suffering from cancer and asking if Donahji could help. Well, of course he could! Donahji told the couple that he had cured many people of cancer through his psychic powers; for a $5 weekly "donation" he would cure the ailing wife.

And so the couple promptly began sending him their weekly payments of five bucks, the equivalent of thirtysomething bucks a week in today's dollars. In return, they would periodically receive letters from Donahji assuring them that "the vibrations are building up favorably."

Alas, within a year the woman died of cancer anyway.

Though the Digest article isn't clear about whether the subsequent investigation into Donahji's affairs was in direct response to a complaint by the grieving widower, the fact remains that postal inspectors did at some point begin investigating the mysterious "healer." They discovered that "Sri Dr. Abn Donahji, Ph.D., D.D.N.S."* had actually been born Donald Van Dyke Wilson in Des Moines, Iowa. At one time he had been an assembly-line worker in Detroit, but then he moved to El Lay, where he hit upon the idea of becoming a healer. Changing his name and donning a turban, he studied a bit of esoterica and picked up enough of an "occult vocabulary" to fool Californians. Now, we know that Californians are harder to fool than just about anyone anywhere, so this guy must have been really, really, really good.

The new Sri-Doc set up shop in a house that he renamed "Brmhayati Temple," and hung out his shingle as a spiritual healer, prophet, and marriage counselor. Before long he had acquired a local following, and ads placed in various occult and astrological publications brought him a nationwide clientele. As author Smith put it, "The swami from Des Moines was soon living in a fine house and cruising around in a gold Cadillac."

After an exhaustive investigation, which revealed the extent of his mail-order "medical" practice,
Donahji/Wilson was indicted for mail fraud. His files were impounded by postal inspectors and US marshals, who uncovered correspondence with 4,000 people from coast to coast. These folks had been paying Wilson for services such as treatment of cancer, heart disease and multiple sclerosis – treatments that consisted essentially of "setting up vibrations." In addition, he sold his "patients" copper bracelets with "health-giving properties" for prices ranging from $18 to $76 each. (The wholesale cost of the bracelets was a mere 37 and a half cents.) In all, he had brought in about $400,000, which, in 1967 dollars, was equivalent to more than $2,500,000.00.

He was convicted and sent to jail, and, as far as I can Google, never heard from again.

All I can say is, thank goodness we're all far more sophisticated today, and a phony "healer" like Sri-Doc Donahji/Wilson would never be able to fool so many people for such a long time. And if by some odd chance he did manage to get away with it for a while (and he was working in the US), the Federal Trade Commission or some other government agency would come down hard on him and throw him in the slammer, especially since we have much more stringent consumer protection laws now than we did back in the prehistoric 1960s. And once he'd been to prison, the scammer's reputation would be forever ruined, and he would never be able to scam people again.

I'm truly grateful to be living in more enlightened times.

* Presumably Sri Doc's "degrees" were phony. Thank Goddess people can't get away with THAT these days either.

13 comments:

  1. Wonder if he prophisized that he'd end up in prison.

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  2. Maybe he was so busy monitoring the vibrations of his paying customers that he neglected to notice that the vibrations were "building up favorably" for him to find a new home in the slammer.

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  3. Wow! I'm sure glad we no longer have to worry about fake "doctors" who claim to fix problems like illness, poverty, homelessness, forest fires, and vehicle shortages by sending out the right "vibrations!"

    "Kookoo Iscrewya" is, as you say, a thing of our naive and unenlightened past... isn't it? :-)

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  4. Wow! I'm sure glad we no longer have to worry about fake "doctors" who claim to fix problems like illness, poverty, homelessness, forest fires, and vehicle shortages by sending out the right "vibrations!"


    Are you serious, you only have to look at the people you snark about and they all qualify for the same fate. None of them consider the consequences of their ridiculous claims or actions nor do they care what anything they say or do does to anyone else because their disclaimer is "they weren't in the right headspace". Believe me I have heard it from some of them personally for years and they truly do believe their own crap. They believe if they believe hard enough all their problems will disappear. The irony of it all is that they become so deluded in their own delusion that they have noone left to believe or trust other than themselves.

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  5. Ron wrote:
    "'Kookoo Iscrewya' is, as you say, a thing of our naive and unenlightened past... isn't it? :-)"

    Actually, Kookoo Iscrewya sounds as if it could be yet another ancient forbidden Hawai'ian healing secret. Thanks for the idea, Ronnie! (BTW, there's talk that Joe V and Dr. Ihavacama Fer Yew...er...I mean Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len...may be coming out with a Zero Limits 2 book. Oh, boy! (I bet the publisher's publicist won't be asking me to review it, LOL.))

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  6. Geraldine A, thank you for your comments. You are of course right about modern-day scammers. Both Ron (in his comment) and I (in my post) were being sarcastic. Sometimes without warning I do throw in gratuitous sarcasm into my blog posts; this was one of those times. :-)

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  7. Connie,

    Lots of laughing out loud and rolling on the floor, etc... Perhaps you need to start putting a disclaimer on all of your posts that announces folks are entering a sarcasm zone. And you do it very well too.

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  8. Thanks, Dave. I guess I just assume that people will know when I'm being over-the-top sarcastic...but you know what they say about what happens when we "assume" something. :-)

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  9. That Xanadu Xero bird's a mental writer isn't she?!

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  10. HHH, just between you and me, I think we're all a little bit mental here. I know I am!

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  11. In that case, I'll shout it from the rooftops:

    I'M MENTAL TOO!

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  12. HHH, this Mental Case's kid, who I raised alone, is about to graduate something cum laude from Yale and devote her next 2 years to Teach For America. Kraaay-ZEE.

    Don't Tread On Me.

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