Quack: A Tragedy

Deconstruction is most likely a comedy, but the story of Royal Rife is a tragedy. Everyone can agree on that.

On one level he represented everything that ought to have been noble and great about America in the early Twentieth Century.

He was certainly a genius of the highest caliber. Born among the corn fields of the Midwest, he went out to California during the blossoming of that state in its modern incarnation. He served the U.S. in World War I (in a way that has remained mysterious and open to speculation).  He went on to achieve scientific merit for discoveries and theories in optics and microbiology that remain valid today.

Yet something went very wrong. Seduced, perhaps, by pride, and aided by a group of rogue biologists with their own heterodox theory of micro-organisms, he bent his optical and engineering talents toward promoting his own bizarre ideas and "impossible" contraptions in support of the biologists' theories. This intellectual hubris led him to link up with a group of medical doctors  of varying character and intellectual capacity, and to found a clinic and to begin to "cure cancer" with a series of machines that Rife built himself based on his theories.

He was eventually defeated by the medical and scientific establishment. His optical devices and machines were dismantled, and today they are illegal as cancer treatment devices. He and his collaborators were disgraced and largely forgotten. That is the official version, at least.

Of course Rife has his believers and defenders even today. That is to be expected for anyone making such bold claims. But they remain a small sub-community mostly unknown and ignored, not to be mentioned in polite company of medical authority, where it is considered dangerous even to mention these kinds of things, lest people be led astray.

How did things go so wrong? 

That will be a central question that gets addressed by Quack.

An important subtext will be the question of how scientific and medical truth is determined.  Rife's career spans an important era in history. When he was born, there were virtually no standards as to what constituted the practice of medicine. Almost anyone could claim to be a medical doctor (the shadow of the patent medicine salesman can be said to hang over this story). By the time Rife retired as an active scientific investigator, the standards of determination of medical truth through scientific principles that we know today had been firmly put into place, under the authority of governmental institutions and with the force of law.

The issue of the determination of medical and scientific truth is one that obviously remains important today and has been current in the headlines from the news of the last several months, especially in regard to viruses, the theory of which plays a key role in Quack.