The Pendulum that Diagnoses and Cures

Abstract

The example of medical radiesthesia illustrates how a new discipline may be elaborated and taken up by amateurs on the fringes of official academic science. Driven by scholarly discoveries about waves, it broke with the long tradition of dowsing while expanding its initial ambition, that of discovering hidden things by using an object to prolong the individual’s sensitivity. This break was materialised by the shift from rods to pendulums in the 1930s. Medical radiesthesia consists in using a pendulum—a simple object made of a solid or hollow ball of varying material oscillating on a cord—for diagnosis and therapy. It may be characterized as an amateur practice because radiesthesia was devised in the 1930s as a new discipline on the margins of professional scientific circles; and because it was theorised by non-doctors and practised mainly by people not involved in the world of professional healthcare.