THOMAS POWELL

Los Angeles County

Biographies

THOMAS POWELL, MD.

POWELL, THOMAS, Doctor of Medicine, Los Angeles, California, was born in Montgomery County, Tennessee, Sept. 21, 1837. He is the son of William Solomon Powell and Sallie (Holloway) Powell. He has been twice married, his first wife, Margaret Ianthe Rife, whom he married at her mother’s country home in Logan County, Kentucky, on December 18, 1859, having borne him eight children. They are Charles Thomas, Ianthe Florence, William Rife, Arthur Leon, Effie May, Nellie Caroline, George Fideles and Verne Q. Powell. His second wife, Clarissa Jeannette Pond, whom he married June 25, 1893, has borne him one child, Ruth Jeannette Powell.

Dr. Powell, who is distinguished for his original investigations and writings in explanation of the activities of life, normal and abnormal, attended the public and private schools of Montgomery County, Tenn., graduating later (1858) from the New York Medical College of New York City—the first institution in the United States to establish a higher standard of medical education, and hence the forerunner of the present system of medical education.

He entered upon his chosen career in the latter part of 1859, locating thirty miles northwest of his birthplace in a thickly populated country district, in Trigg County of Kentucky, where he still lived when the Civil War began. Nearly all of relatives were slave-holders, and yet he actively opposed the secession movement, and with the result of carrying his district in behalf of the Stars and Stripes in each of the three elections that were held with the view of taking his adopted State out of the Union. He was a member of the “Union League” of that perilous period, and took part in the enlistment of the men composing the regiment of Unionists organized at Hopkinsville, Ky., by Colonel Buckner of that city.

A short time after the Bowling Green convention took action, professing to add the south half of the State to the Confederacy and providing for a draft in the interest thereof, Dr. Powell and family, together with fifty-four of his fellow loyalists, seeing no other way of escaping service in a cause for which they had no sympathy, embarked on a United States gunboat for Paducah, Kentucky, arriving at that point soon after General Grant took command thereof. A few months later he yielded to the importunities of relatives residing in Indiana, locating in a thickly populated country district in Rush County, where he remained for many years. In 1878 he moved to Danville, Indiana, where he established what he believed to be the most up-to-date office of the period, embracing, as it did, not only the latest measures and apparatus then in vogue, but several steam-propelled therapeutic appliances of his own invention.

In 1884, when modern medicine was rapidly approaching the zenith of its world-wide regnancy, Dr. Powell determined to take a post-graduate course, and with the hope of meeting a long-felt want—a better understanding of medical problems than he had been able to obtain from the medical literature of the period—making choice of the then existing Medical Department of the University of Nebraska—an institution that appealed to him, by reason of the fact that all three of the then prevailing systems—Regular, Eclectic and Homeopathic—were embraced therein.

This institution was to all appearances well-manned and up-to-date in its equipment and teachings and yet it did not meet the expectations of Dr. Powell, as a medical student. Its teachings served, not to gratify, but to intensify Dr. Powell’s professional craving because even they did not supply the missing links of the current teaching. Wherefore, he set out with the determination to solve, if possible, both the confessedly and the obviously unsolved problems of Modern Medicine. The most important of the former class were those pertaining to the susceptibility of the body to morbific agencies, climatic, sporadic and bacteriologic. Authorities had gone no further than to realize and admit that both congestion and infection depend upon a pre-existing condition of which a lowered vitality is the most conspicuous feature.

To the newly fledged investigator, if to no other person, it appeared that the solution of this problem called for a knowledge of the agency to which a lowered vitality naturally refers—the power that lies at the bottom of the vital activities, evidencing its right to the distinction of being the law-giving principle by bearing the same relation to the activities of the vital realm that gravitation does to those of the physical universe.

In short, Dr. Powell has spent more than a quarter of a century in the attempt to detect and remedy the deficiencies of the current teaching, and with the result of the production of an entirely new and original medical philosophy, the details of which he published in 1909 in the shape of a medical work of 600 pages, entitled “Fundamentals and Requirements of Health and Disease.”

His first achievement was effected in 1885 and consisted in a most complete and logical solution to the problems of Nutrition and Muscular Contraction, negative the current teaching by showing: (1) that nutrition consists, not in the rebuilding of worn-out tissues, as authorities had asserted, but in the filling and refilling of the cells of which the motor mechanisms, nervous and muscular, are composed; (2) that the living machine owes its energies, mental, nervous thermal and propulsive, to the oxidation, not of its tissues, as authorities have declared, but at the carbon of the food stored in the cells thereof; (3) that it owes its every motion to the Vitomotive Power—the power of expanding carbon dioxide gas—the form of energy which is revolutionizing the world’s travel, and as Dr. Powell puts it “by sending the ‘Horseless Carriage’ in triumphal elegance along the highways of civilization.”

In the January, 1886, number of the Kansas City Medical Index, Dr. Powell published an illustrated article on this subject. In the winter of 1888, the light afforded by the foregoing discoveries enabled him to detect what he holds to be the great underlying cause of disease—the thing that renders the body “susceptible” to “colds” and infections; that gives rise to such troublous conditions as congestion, inflammation, and tissue starvation, and that caps the climax of its essential virulence by taking the shape of catarrhal matter, Milliary Tubercles and Cancer Cells. Because of its wondrous virulence and versatility this substance has been given the new and fairly distinctive name of Pathogen—a term that the discoverer thereof constructed from the Greek roots path—which means to suffer—and gen—which means to generate or produce.

In the winter of 1894-95, Dr. Powell published in the Medical Brief, of St. Louis, a series of six articles on the subject of his discoveries, entitled “Exact Science in Medicine—Its Necessity, Its Hindrances, and Its Basis,” the immediate effect being a flood of complimentary letters.

In the latter part of 1896 he demonstrated on three separate occasions, and by experiments made upon his own body, that he had discovered how to render the human body immune to infective organisms.

A little later (December, 1896) he was induced by parties who had heard of his discoveries to adopt Los Angeles, California, as the basis of his future operations. Soon after his arrival in Los Angeles he repeated the tests above referred to, demonstrating under the supervision of many physicians, and by experiments made, as before, upon his own body, that when a man has been freed from what he has found to be the basis and predisposing cause of disease—Pathogen—he is perfectly immune, the vilest germs then known to science—malignant pustule, tuberculosis, glanders, diphtheria and typhoid fever—having been introduced into his body by every available route, from ingestion to hypodermic inoculation, without producing the slightest discernible injury.

In 1900, Dr. Powell originated the Electro-Dynamic method of eradicating deep-seated disorders—comprehending a combination of agencies, mechanical and electrical, whereby the requisite remedies are forced from the surface of the body, where they must of necessity be applied, through the skin and into the deep-seated areas where the basic cause of the trouble—Pathogen—is embedded, as it is in a multitude of maladies, the result of a timely and duly faithful effort of the kind being the cure of a great variety of problematic disorders, including several of the so-called incurables—diabetes, Bright’s disease, dropsy, heart disease, apoplexy, paralysie (sic), nervous debility and locomotor ataxia.

There is much in Dr. Powell’s theses to justify the conclusion the he has made an epoch-making discovery—that he has obtained a definite knowledge both of the power that rules on vital plane, as gravitation does on the physical, and of the rules by which it is governed, the principia, it would seem, of the domain of Animated Nature.

The May, 1910, issue of “The Medical World” states:

“The first part of the book, or “The New Vital Philosophy,’ explains the movements of the living organism by showing that they are produced by the vito-motive power; that this agent has a dynamic equivalent of forty atmospheres; what this might power is; from what element of food it is developed; and how it sets the vital machinery in motion. Part two is entitled, ’The New Etiology and Pathology,’ and explains the various morbid processes, from congestion and inflammation to necrosis, carcinosis, and tuberculosis, by disclosing the remote and hitherto unsuspected cause thereof. Part three is entitled, ”The New Prophylaxis and Therapeusis.’ It discloses the measures, medicinal, electrical, mechanical, thermal, manual and regimenal, required for the elimination of pathogen.

. . . .The theory is novel, and opposed to anything heretofore accepted, and the book is very readable. We cannot venture any opinion as to how successful it may be in proselyting the profession, but we unhesitatingly accord the attribute of honesty and enthusiasm to the author. .”

Dr. Powell is a member of several social and scientific organizations, among which are the Masonic fraternity, the Celtic Club, American Pub. Health Association, American Health League, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality, and the Southern California Academy of Sciences.

Transcribed 2-10-11 Marilyn R. Pankey.

Source: Press Reference Library, Western Edition Notables of the West, Vol. I, Pages 590-591, International News Service, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta. 1913.

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