The
electronic reactions of Abrams
Abrams was a excellent physician. He examined every patient thoroughly. The percussion (gently tapping) of the bowl is difficult to learn. Therefore Dr. Starr White perfected a device for translating the tonicity of the viscera in audible tones: the organo-tonometer.
Organo-tonometer according to Starr White
For some reason Abrams happened to be percussing the area immediately above some patient's navel. The note elicited by his percussion was, at it normally is, hollow sounding, resonant. While Abrams was still tapping, someone without warning switched on a X-Ray apparatus which stood a yard or two away. At that very instant the hitherto resonant percussion note dulled, and now sounded as dead as the note you would expect to hear if you tapped a lump of putty, instead of a gas filled abdomen! What in the world had happened? Abrams, who always thrilled to anything strange and unexpected, insisted on repeating the experiment over and over again, even making the man being percussed, stand facing North, East, South and West, while the X-Ray set was switched on and off. Most puzzling and mysterious to relate, this strange dulling of the percussion note when the X-Ray bulb was glowing, only occurred while the individual being percussed faced East, or West. If he faced North or South, the note elicited by percussion remained continuously resonant.
This reminded Abrams of an observation he made when he was overhauling a new patient, a man, suffering from a cancerous ulcer of the lip (epithelioma). Merely in the course of his routine examination, Abrams percussed that same area of the patient's abdominal wall, immediately above the navel. The patient was standing, facing as it happened West, but no X-Ray bulb had been switched on, nevertheless the note elicited by percussion was strangely flat, dull, dead. Abrams asked the patient to change his stand and face North: the percussion was repeated, but now the dull, dead sounding note had become hollow sounding, resonant: normal. Abrams continued these maneuvers until he was satisfied beyond all doubt that there could be no possibility of error in regard to the validity of the phenomenon he had just observed.
Abrams followed up the observation he had made in connection with the man with a cancerous lip, by collecting other patients suffering from cancer in any part of the body and percussing their epigastric regions while they stood facing North, South, East or West. Always he found in these cancer patients, that the percussion note sounded dull while they faced West, but resonant, the exact opposite of dull, if they turned to face either North or South. The same phenomenon was also apparent over an area immediately to the inner border of the left shoulder blade in patients suffering from cancer. This phenomenon was not detectable at all in the case of healthy people, nor is it easily detectable by a physician who is not skilled in the difficult art of percussion.