Exigencies beyond the keyboard

account for the slowing in my additions to these pages. More will come as they diminish.

The Lüscher Code: The Professor who Investigated the Connections between Color, Psyche, and Health

The trite state of the medical arts and sciences and the seeming indifference of many if not most of its practitioners to this sad state of affairs has been one of the steady laments of these pages. These are not complaints that are plucked out of thin air, nor are there no laudable examples of doctors and scientists who have made huge breakthroughs in medicine in recent years.

One of those very interesting scientists to make some extremely interesting discoveries, and, as is customary in a field dominated by mountebanks, all but completely be ignored, is Professor Max Lüscher (b 1923). In his day he taught at institutes of higher learning such as Yale University's School of Medicine and the Sorbonne's Psychology Department among many others. Lüscher had been fascinated by philosophy and psychology from an early age, and was given special - and rarely given - permission to audit university courses in psychology and philosophy at the age of 16. At 18, he began to ponder what influence the perception of color has on understanding the Rorschach test. The more he busied himself with the question, the more interesting the results were that he found. Colors have clear physiological effects on humans; some shades of red, for example, cause the heart rate to pick up and other involuntary symptoms of arousal to manifest themselves, similarly some shades of blue have an opposite effect. In more medical terms, this would be equivalent to the stimulation of the sympathetic or parasympathetic nerves.

Lüscher came to understand that while everyone sees the exact same colors when presented with the same color samples, how they perceive the colors is completely subjective, and often very informative about their state of mind and their health. His research was made easier by a lucky break; a befriended doctor arranged for him to enjoy unlimited access to the patients at the hospital he directed, and to their medical records, which Lüscher used to assiduously investigate how patients perceived certain colors he had identified as particularly useful for such diagnostic purposes, and what correlations existed with their physical and psychological states. Another obvious result is that once enough patients with clear medical records had been examined to allow clear conclusions to be drawn about how health states affect the perception of colors, testing the perception of colors would allow clear conclusions to be drawn about health problems that exist, and about health problems which were likely to appear in the future, simply by measuring how people perceive colors. The obvious caveat is that these conclusions will only be as reliable as the data and common sense that is used to draw them. All the same, this is extremely interesting. Such a color test can be done in 5 minutes; rather than requiring that blood be drawn and sent to laboratories and the like, the only equipment required is a sheet of paper, a pen, and eight pages with Lüscher's copyrighted colors on them.

His discoveries were sufficiently interesting enough for him to be invited to be a speaker at the first International Congress of Psychology to meet after the Second World War, this while he was still a student. His talks there made such an impression that he was invited to lecture about his work at the Sorbonne and to the Quai d'Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, right after receiving his doctorate. To this day, Dr. Lüscher's lectures are well attended.

Lüscher's (copyrighted) color test consists of batteries of seven tests; first of all, the testee is acted to rate eight colors according to how pleasant and unpleasant he or she finds them to be, then to rate a few shapes by the same criteria, and then to identify which of four colors and then which of four shades of four colors seem most appealing, and then to rerate the eight colors. What the results can tell you is amazing.

• Personality traits are clearly reflected in the results of his test.
  

• One of the conclusions that can be drawn from some results of the Lüscher Color test is that some patients either do or don't have a predisposition to get cancer. Admittedly, in the material I've read, the likelihood of the testee getting or not getting cancer are only given for less common color preferences not indicative of overall good health, but they are strong (p<0.001.)

• A Norwegian researcher found that in a study of 4275 13 year olds who grow up to be delinquents as adults already show significant differences in their subjective perceptions of the colors compared to those who don't; they find Lüscher's strains of black to be much more pleasant and yellow much less pleasant than their peers who go on to lead troubled lives. (Lie N, Boys who became offenders. A follow-up study of 2203 boys tested with projective methods, Acta Psychiatr Scand Suppl. 1988;342:1-122.)

• Elena Schikowa wrote her 2001 dissertation at Moscow State University in which she documented that male and female asthmatics have statistically significant deviations (i.e. p<0.05)

• A predisposition to heart attacks is also reflected in the choice of colors.

• Finding Lüscher's yellow to be, in relative terms, very unattractive correlates with having a high T-lymphocyte count.
  

• A. Vegliach reports that in a sample of 25 depressives, depression could be diagnosed with p=0.00522, in other words probably with more precision than with the diagnostic checklists used today.

• I'm in the process of confirming that pregnant women and hyperthyroids also reveal themselves through their perception of colors.
  

Being a psychologist and philosopher, Dr. Lüscher not surpisingly also has some fairly interesting explanations to offer for why the different colors have different meanings, how, for example, his strain of violet, the color that results when red and blue is mixed, unites some traits associated with red and some with blue and more.

Another interesting fact is that Albert Szent-Györgyi, whose contributions to science have already been touched on in these pages, was also convinced the many colors one finds in the human body also must have some significance in the greater scheme of bodily functions. Why, he had asked his professors as an aspiring medico, was the liver brown? Their answer was that the liver is brown because.. well the liver is brown. This wasn't good enough for Szent-Györgyi, who was still pondering this in his 70s and asking his readers what the significance of oxygenated blood being the vibrant crimson is. Oxgenated blood is rich in oxygen, which is the primary source of oxidation in the body. Is it a surprise that the color of blood that powers this most important process has such an visual impact on us humans?

As the gentle reader may recall, Szent-Györgyi was convinced that semiconduction plays an important role in human biology, particularly that of cancer, and that cancer ultimately is a problem of - among other things - electron shell configurations. Since photons can change electron shell configurations, the reports that a person's color preference allows statistically very meaningful conclusions to be drawn about an individuals predisposition to cancer at the very least confirms that there is a good likelihood that Szent-Györgyi was onto something interesting. I have no idea to what all uses Dr. Lüscher's work can be put. Nevertheless...

• Could it be that routine mammograms do more harm than good in patients whose likelihood of suffering cancer during their lifetime is 0.1%, if said minority can be identified with a 5 minute color perception test?

• Could it be that people at a high risk of suffering a heart attack could be identified, and perhaps helped to reduce their likelihood of suffering a heart attack with this 5 minute test?

• Would it make sense to seek to identify adolescents who are highly likely to commit violent crimes as adults, and perhaps monitor them more extensively than people who appear to be at no risk?

• Could it be that one could identify which medications are most likely to be helpful in some illnesses with this test? I suspect so. Lüscher, in fact, says so.

• If illnesses and psychology are linked, would the competent and beneficial practice of medicine also involve identifying and instilling values and helping to order patients and society? Is this compatible with medicine by committee?
  

Unfortunately, medicine has all too often become neither an art nor a science, but rather a system of following flow charts that generally are created by committees in highly opaque circumstances. The only thing that is somewhat transparent is the flow of funding from the pharmaceutical industry to the politicians who chose those who are to regulate the industry. Thinking is deemed unbecoming; how else can one explain that it generally takes years until very serious, sometimes lethal, side-effects of "blockbuster" treatments are documented, if they ever are. For many doctors pretty much their only art is determining how to best code illness in order to maximize renumeration from the health insurances. This is an art particularly suited to mediocrities and the mediocrities among mediocrities; not surprisingly medicine today is full of such creatures. Whenever decisions are customarily made by committees, as is the wont in academia in our days, those who have better things to do than attend sempiternal committee meetings will neither thrive nor often get the acknowledgment that ought be their due.

The ancient Greeks had their priests who praised Zeus, Neptune and Hera; when they needed advice, they would consult among others the Oracle at Delphi. The Romans had priests who praised Jupiter, Saturn and the Lares. The ancient Germans had priests who praised Wotan, Thor, Freya, Odin, and others. contemporary Americans are plagued by clowns who praise the likes of Lipitor, Prozac, Vioxx, and Neurontin, and ascribe to them and all the other deities and semi-deities listed in the American pharmacopoeia magical powers that are not only not scientifically proven but sometimes even embarrassingly prove to be scientifically disproved. Every people must have its witchdoctors.

To round the buffooneries off, Americans even suffer the attentions of professional "drug czars," men rarely thought to understand much of pharmacology or medicine, but who have nevertheless taken in upon themselves to craft and enforce an American pharmacological demonology that few but the most abject of morons take even halfway serious. Curiously, the deities in this bizarre belief system all too often are under patent; the demons that must be vigorously exorcised, even publicly burned, generally have been treasured for their medicinal uses for thousands of years, and could generally be easily cultivated in your backyard were it not for these purported public servants. We are now at the point of a system of mountebanks, for mountebanks, and by mountebanks.

As long as people are accept as an article of faith that medicine by committee and insurance claim is superior to medicine practiced as an art and science between doctor and patient, and to tolerate legislation which prohibits the latter by force of law, they will get exactly what they deserve, nothing more and nothing less.


Links:

There are several pages dedicated to the Lüscher test that are online. But as they are at best rather shoddy attempts to emulate a copyrighted test, I won't link to them. Dr. Lüscher spent two years going through no less than 4,500 colors before he settled on the 43 colors and shades of gray that feature in his test. The results of his test are calibrated to his colors; any attempt to create a test that doesn't use his colors is a fool's errand.

Here is the website licensed to sell Dr. Lüscher's tests:

General Leopoldo Galtieri and the Invasion of the Falklands

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the end of the Falklands War.

When the war was declared, Argentina was one of those countries that had long suffered leaders who assiduously snatched poverty out of the jaws of prosperity. In 1933 Argentina had been the ninth most prosperous country in the world, to which immigrants from Europe, and in particular Italy, flocked in great number. After the Second World War, Argentina fell in the thrall of Juan Perón, whose catastrophic mixture of cronyism and corporatism left Argentina an economic and political basket case. Nor did his hospitality towards people one could euphemistically describe as "political refugees" from postwar Europe endear him to the wider world.

Perón's last wife, whose life was not made into a famous London musical, succeeded him to the presidency of an Argentina plagued by left-wingers given to the notion that it was justified, even ethical, to summarily kill purported "enemies of the revolution," and a military that had no compunctions about "disappearing" thousands of revolutionaries known to entertain such beliefs, or suspected of doing so, without worrying about legal niceties. Such circumstances rarely make for too happy a country; as General Leopoldo Galtieri, the head of the junta that held the reigns of power in Argentina, realized that time was running out for his increasingly unpopular regime, he decided to invade the Falkland Islands.

The Falklands had belonged to Spain, and been part of the Spanish province to which Argentina belonged when Argentina declared its independence from Spain in 1816. In 1833, the British occupied the Falklands, deported the remaining Argentines, and settled some of Her Majesty's Subjects on the islands. Argentina had never - and does not - recognize the British claim to these islands; to this day it remains a matter of national pride that the "Malvinas" as they are known in Spanish, are Argentinian.

General Galtieri believed - or wanted to believe - that the British under Maggie Thatcher's leadership, would quietly acquiesce to his conquest, and that the United States, with whom he enjoyed a good working relationship based on their mutual enmity of Communism, would put its friendship with Argentina above its venerable, almost fraternal, ties with Great Britain. In both of these he was sorely mistaken; Argentina's forces on the Falklands were no match for the British forces. The Falklands were lost, and his government fell. The talks between the United Kingdom and Argentina about the future of the islands - however soporific they may have been - are also a thing of the past.

But for the few days or weeks in which it seemed that Argentina may have regained the Malvinas, General Leopoldo Galtieri was the talk of the town.

Justice

In medieval Europe, towns were the seat of government, site of markets, and seat of the courts. Not coincidentally, many towns would have drinking fountains adorned with allegories of justice, presumably near where the courthouses were. Note how this particular allegory of justice is not only blind-folded, but, by modern standards for models, remarkably portly. Times change, and so do fashions. In which age, do you think, were models healthier?

Sir Wilfred Thesiger: Explorer, Friend of Ethiopia, and Refugee from Modernity

After I posted this article, I learned that the Pitt River Museum at Oxford owns the rights to Thesiger's photographs. Rather than purchase a license for £350 (about $500,) Ie decided to remove the pictures, and offer my readers hyperlinks to the pictures. They are worth the time.

One of the men who has long fascinated me, because he was a very interesting person with an even more interesting life was Sir Wilfred Thesiger. Click here for the first picture.

Probably the last of the great explorers that the British Empire produced, Thesiger's life is interesting not only for the places he explored and the events he witnessed, but also because of the lessons Thesiger drew. Thesiger understood that there was no stopping the course of history and technological progress. But he never made his peace with modernity; for him motorcar and aeroplane, and even more so poison gas and nuclear weapons, were epithets. He spent most of his life living with "backward" tribes in remote parts of the world; it was not until Parkinson's got the better of him that he left his dwellings in a remote part of Kenya to return to England.


Thesiger was born in one of the thatched-roof huts (click here for a picture) that then constituted the British legation in Addis Ababa, the capital of what was then Abyssinia, where his father, a seasoned diplomat, was the British Consul General. His family was part of the British aristocracy; his uncle was the Viceroy of India and a Viscount, his grandfather had been a general and the second Baron Chelmsford. When Thesiger was born, Ethiopia, then known as Abyssinia, was the only African country to never have been colonized, and far and away the country south of the Sahara with the richest and most interesting history.

Ethiopia's is mentioned in Greek and perhaps Egyptian chronicles; Flavius Josephus, a Jewish historian and near contemporary of Christ, mentions that the Queen of Sheba with whom King Solomon enjoyed a friendship, and in the Ethiopian tradition a relationship, was from Ethiopia. Until the 1980s, Ethiopia had a fair sized Jewish community that traced its roots back to King Solomon. The Acts of the Apostles in New Testament tells of a visit by by the an official of the Queen Candace of Ethiopia to the Holy Land, who met Philip the Evangelist. 100 years before Saint Patrick sailed for Ireland, Ethiopia adopted the Coptic form of Christianity. When Islam arose, the Ethiopians sacked Jeddah, and then, when the Muslims counterattacked, lost their cities on the Red Sea. The neighboring countries were overran by Islam, Ethiopia, like Tibet, another country on a plateau, was able to resist the new religion; Somalia, the Sudan, Egypt and to some degree Kenya didn't. Gibbon's memorable summary was: "Encompassed on all sides by the enemies of their religion, the Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom they were forgotten."

Click here for the next picture.

In the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese became a naval power and established their colonies from Goa to Macao and points in between, they came into contact with the Ethiopians. The Ethiopians had just suffered a major defeat to the Turks, in a battle in which the Turks introduced the flintlock to Ethiopia. The Ethiopians looked to the Portuguese, their fellow Christians, for help, which came in the form of an expedition under Christopher da Gama, son of Vasco da Gama. Much as in the story of Matteo Ricci, for a while things went quite well. The Jesuits who came to Ethiopia with the Portuguese quickly gained influence at the Ethiopian court, but personality and theological (Copts are monophysites loyal to the Patriarch of Alexandria, Catholics were neither) conflicts led to their being expelled. They left traces; when Thesiger began to explore those parts of Ethiopia that had never before been explored by Europeans, there were instances where he had to confess in his memoirs, much to his chagrin, that in the sixteenth century, a Jesuit father by the name of so and so had indeed been there, but never since had a European returned.

Click here for the next picture.

For the purposes of discussing Thesiger's life, and his love of Ethiopia, we can move forward to the reign of Emperor Menelik II, during whose reign Thesiger and his family moved to Ethiopia. Menelik was the first modern African head of states to defeat a European army in the field; the Italians, late in the scramble for Africa, had sought to make a "protectorate" of Ethiopia. Menelik declined the questionable honor, and at the Battle of Adowa in 1896, his men resoundingly defeated the invading Italian army, in what was a truly humiliating defeat for the Italians. Mussolini, who was expelled from school for knifing a fellow student - a priest who taught him told him that he had a heart "black as sin" - would never forgive the Ethiopians for doing so, and order his thugs in uniform to use poison gas to ensure that they would prevail on the field of battle.

One of Thesiger's memories from his time in Ethiopia was of Ethiopian civil war of 1916. Of the three Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire was Muslim, in fact the Ottoman Sultan would intermittently claim to be the Caliph, or highest authority, of Sunni Islam. The Germans adopted the shameful ruse of war of suggesting to the Muslim peoples under British rule that the Kaiser had secretly converted to Islam, and that they ought make common cause with the Germans for this reason. At the time, the British were fighting the Germans and Ottomans in several countries near Ethiopia, among them Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, Palestine, and Syria. Probably under Turkish and German influence, and convinced after the British defeats at Kut and Gallipoli that the Central Powers would probably win, Liy Yasu, the Emperor of Ethiopia all but converted to Islam, and was quickly deposed by the Ethiopian church and nobility, Ras (Prince) Tafari, later known as Haile Selassie, was installed as the new regent, Empress Zaitu remained as the empress.

A civil war erupted, and was quickly put down. At the end of this war, Haile Selassie and his soldiers were accorded a triumph through Addis Abeba which Thesiger described:

Huge tents, open-fronted, had been put up and the Empress came in state with all her ladies, veiled to the eyes, add took her place on the throne. We were presented and Billy and Brian shook hands. All the local army was ranged up on either side and in front, the chiefs a mass of colour, with their gold-embroidered robes and jewelled crowns and shields, the lesser chiefs in lion- or leopard- skins or sheep-skins dyed in brilliant colors. About 10:30 am, the army began to march past. First came the ministrels, yelling war songs, and when they had finished they tore off their mantles and threw them down before the Empress, saying now that they had fought for her such clothes were no longer worthy of them and would she give them new ones? On these occasions every freedom of speech is allowed. The advance guard of men on mules and horses came up in regular lines but as soon as they got near they dashed up at full gallop, shouting and brandishing their weapons, each men shrieking out how many men he had killed; and then they wheeled round to make room for others....

The whole description takes up two pages of his autobiography, which is currently out of print. But that is what used book stores are for. Thesiger concludes his reminiscencing:

"I believe that day implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovation in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world."

After the First World War ended, and travel once again became safe, Thesiger left for boarding school in England, then for Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he excelled more as a boxer than a scholar. After he graduated from Oxford, he spent a year leading an expedition that explored parts of Ethiopia that no European had yet traversed or mapped. Parts of his expedition took him into the lands inhabited by a tribe then known as a Danakil, amongst whose menfolk, the number of men a man had killed and then emasculated for trophies was the primary indicator of status. Although Emperor Haile Selassie, his life-long friend, (the two are in the picture at this link) had given him permission to embark on his trek, the local governor insisted that Thesiger indemnify him before setting off for the the wilderness. After the trek, he joined the Sudanese colonial service in Darfur.

Thesiger was greatly disappointed when the British politicians of the 1930s assented to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, in the vain and foolish hope that to not condemn the invasion, and the routine use of poison gas, would help keep Mussolini from making common cause with Hitler, and avoid war in Europe. Mussolini's attitude to the war was such that he ordered his soldiers to not only use poison gas and flame-throwers liberally but also to employ "bacteriological warfare," only to be told that the last was impractical. When Addis Abeba fell, the Blackshirts went through the city "liquidating" educated Ethiopians. Thesiger later wrote of his satisfaction when he learned that Mussolini had been put to death by his own people, and "appropriately" hung on a meat hook.

Another reason for the British reticence may have been that the British themselves were using poison gas to quell the rebellious Iraqi tribes at the time. Pots and kettles have their own etiquette. The British ignored their obligations under a treaty to sell Ethiopia weaponry, and even denied, contrary to all evidence, that Italy was using poison gas, and turned a blind eye to a war that was more annihilation than a good war. When all was lost, Haile Selassie went on a pilgrimage to Ethiopia's national shrine, prayed there for two days, and then traveled on to Geneva to give a haunting speech, in Amharic, at the League of Nations, in which he informed the other nations that if they abandoned the Covenant of League of Nations, which required that all disputes be settled by diplomacy rather than war, they, too, would reap the whirlwind. And indeed they did. His eloquence, once the galleries had been cleared of Italian agitators paid to disrupt his speech, was such that he was made Time magazine's Man of the Year. Here's a pathos-filled picture of His Imperial Highness during the speech. And here's the beginning of the speech:

"I, Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, am here today to claim that justice which is due to my people, and the assistance promised to it eight months ago, when fifty nations asserted that aggression had been committed in violation of international treaties.

There is no precedent for a Head of State himself speaking in this assembly. But there is also no precedent for a people being victim of such injustice and being at present threatened by abandonment to its aggressor. Also, there has never before been an example of any Government proceeding to the systematic extermination of a nation by barbarous means, in violation of the most solemn promises made by the nations of the earth that there should not be used against innocent human beings the terrible poison of harmful gases. It is to defend a people struggling for its age-old independence that the head of the Ethiopian Empire has come to Geneva to fulfil this supreme duty, after having himself fought at the head of his armies.

I pray to Almighty God that He may spare nations the terrible sufferings that have just been inflicted on my people, and of which the chiefs who accompany me here have been the horrified witnesses.

It is my duty to inform the Governments assembled in Geneva, responsible as they are for the lives of millions of men, women and children, of the deadly peril which threatens them, by describing to them the fate which has been suffered by Ethiopia. It is not only upon warriors that the Italian Government has made war. It has above all attacked populations far removed from hostilities, in order to terrorize and exterminate them.

At the beginning, towards the end of 1935, Italian aircraft hurled upon my armies bombs of tear-gas. Their effects were but slight. The soldiers learned to scatter, waiting until the wind had rapidly dispersed the poisonous gases. The Italian aircraft then resorted to mustard gas. Barrels of liquid were hurled upon armed groups. But this means also was not effective; the liquid affected only a few soldiers, and barrels upon the ground were themselves a warning to troops and to the population of the danger.

It was at the time when the operations for the encircling of Makalle were taking place that the Italian command, fearing a rout, followed the procedure which it is now my duty to denounce to the world. Special sprayers were installed on board aircraft so that they could vaporize, over vast areas of territory, a fine, death-dealing rain. Groups of nine, fifteen, eighteen aircraft followed one another so that the fog issuing from them formed a continuous sheet. It was thus that, as from the end of January, 1936, soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes and pastures were drenched continually with this deadly rain. In order to kill off systematically all living creatures, in order to more surely to poison waters and pastures, the Italian command made its aircraft pass over and over again. That was its chief method of warfare.

Ravage and Terror

The very refinement of barbarism consisted in carrying ravage and terror into the most densely populated parts of the territory, the points farthest removed from the scene of hostilities. The object was to scatter fear and death over a great part of the Ethiopian territory. These fearful tactics succeeded. Men and animals succumbed. The deadly rain that fell from the aircraft made all those whom it touched fly shrieking with pain. All those who drank the poisoned water or ate the infected food also succumbed in dreadful suffering. In tens of thousands, the victims of the Italian mustard gas fell. It is in order to denounce to the civilized world the tortures inflicted upon the Ethiopian people that I resolved to come to Geneva. None other than myself and my brave companions in arms could bring the League of Nations the undeniable proof. The appeals of my delegates addressed to the League of Nations had remained without any answer; my delegates had not been witnesses. That is why I decided to come myself to bear witness against the crime perpetrated against my people and give Europe a warning of the doom that awaits it, if it should bow before the accomplished fact."

When the Second World War was declared, Thesiger fought with the SAS, i.e. as a commando, in North Africa; once when he was on a mission behind enemies lines, he covered himself with sand when he heard German soldiers approach, looking for saboteurs. They came within 50 feet, but didn't see him; when Thesiger read Rommel's diary, it became clear to him that, given the time and location at which he barely escaped the German patrol, it had been Rommel himself who had been looking for saboteurs.

When the time came for the British to liberate Ethiopia from Mussolini's footmen, Thesiger served with valor and distinction, winning a DSO, and helping his life long friend Emperor Haile Selassie, Emperor to the Ethiopians, and god to the Rastafarians (Haile Selassie's pre-emperor name was Ras (prince) Tafari,) regain his throne. He then fought with the Druze in Lebanon. After the war, Thesiger went on to become one of the most noted explorers of our day, traveling to wilds of Afghanistan, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Kenya. But that is for another post.


Links:

Wilfred Thesiger's picture collection at Pitt Rivers Museum

Haile Selassie's speech to the League of Nations, asking them why they abandoned his country to Mussolini.