Albert Abrams - Heidelberg Doctorate Claim

Heidelberg Doctorate Claim

Abrams fraudulently claimed to have qualified in medicine from the University of Heidelberg; he variously claimed to have accomplished this at the age of 18 to 20. In Abrams' view, American medicine was dominated by physicians with excessive admiration for German doctors and researchers. In earlier writings, he aroused the anger of physicians by dubbing them Dr. Hades or Dr. Inferior, by comparing their looks to typhoid and other germs, and by making fun of various abstruse therapies that at the time were considered "scientific" by the medical establishment. In a poem that he wrote on balloon therapy, for instance, the doctors take their patients up in the air but do not know how to bring the balloon down again. The poem ends with the lines: But they never came back. That's why we confess / Aëronautic therapy is not a success.