Originally published 27 November 1995
Meet Patch Adams, M.D.
Laughter is the best medicine, says Dr. Adams, who has a degree in medicine from the Medical College of Virginia. In 1971, he founded the Gesundheit Institute (“Ah choo”) to dispense health care on the following principles: All patients will be treated as friends; there will be no charge for services; no third party reimbursement will be accepted; no malpractice insurance will be carried by the institute; the health care experience will be infused with fun.
Adams and his fun-loving associates are building a 40-bed hospital that will include among its therapies music, theater, and ceramics. The hospital will have secret passageways, slides, and interconnected tree houses. The staff will wear silly clothes.
“If everyone’s life was bathed in friendship, humor, love, creativity, hope, curiosity, and wonder—wheeee!—we would need a lot less medicine,” says Adams.
I made the acquaintance of Dr. Adams in a new book, Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, by David Weeks and Jamie James. Weeks is a clinical neuropsychologist and therapist who has practiced at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for the past 20 years. He undertook a psychological study of eccentrics when he realized there was nothing on the subject in the scientific literature.
He discovered that eccentrics are non-conforming, intelligent, creative, strongly motivated by curiosity, idealistic, gleefully obsessed, noncompetitive, possessed of a mischievous sense of humor — and, of course, completely loony.
But not, according to Weeks, mentally ill or in need of a cure. In fact, the hundreds of eccentrics Weeks interviewed and tested in Britain and the United States were generally much happier than the rest of us. “Eccentrics know they are different and glory in it,” he observes.
His survey suggests that eccentricity and creativity are closely related. Many artists and scientists are eccentric. The typical scientific eccentric is blissfully convinced that he is on the road to discovering perpetual motion, an inexhaustible energy source, or some other will-‘o‑the-wisp dismissed by establishment science as impossible.
“Eccentric science is that branch of learning, taught in no university curriculum, which rejects the imperative for reproducible results, favoring instead the impressionistic approach: It propounds what ought to be right,” writes Weeks. Eccentrics love data that coincide unexpectedly, he adds, and take coincidence as proof of their thesis.
Among the eccentrics Weeks studied is a fellow who is trying to invent a boat that can be made to hover by rotating cams. The inventor looked for inspiration from a creature that hovers, the blowfly. He recorded the sound of a blowfly’s wings and found it to have a pitch of 64 cycles per second.
When he played back the tape, tiny metal pellets he had placed on the cone of a horizontal speaker flew into the air. He concluded that at 64 cycles per second mass detaches itself from gravity, and he took further confirmation from the fact that this is “the same sound the Buddhist monk makes when he chants his om mane padme hum.” We are not told the fate of the cam-powered hovercraft, but we can guess.
Eccentrics and scientific geniuses have much in common, says Weeks, and he mentions Einstein as a case in point. Einstein expressed revolutionary opinions about the way the world ought to be. His theory of general relativity was in part inspired by the coincidence between gravitational and inertial mass. At the time he proposed his theory there was not one shred of reproducible experimental data supporting it. In all of this he is like the scientific eccentric.
However, Weeks pushes the parallel too far. Einstein was working within the establishment tradition. He was very much concerned about how his ideas would be received, and whether they would find timely experimental support. He had his eye firmly fixed on the pole star of reproducible results.
It is easy, as Weeks does, to list scientists who in their own time were thought to be beyond the pale of scientific respectability, whose ideas later became part of orthodox science. This is not a good argument that science should embrace eccentrics to its bosom. Einstein possessed certain eccentricities, but he was no scientific eccentric. I doubt if much good science has been lost because the science establishment holds eccentrics at arm’s length.
It is probably useful to distinguish between scientific eccentrics and scientific cranks. Eccentrics, like Dr. Patch Adams, are a happy lot, who don’t give a hoot about prevailing views. Cranks, on the other hand, are gloomy sorts who feel put upon by the world, and who are convinced that the only thing standing between themselves and Einsteinian status is the close-mindedness of the establishment.
Cranks we can do without. Eccentrics are an invaluable part of any healthy society, and Dr. Adams is a case in point. We may not personally choose to be treated by doctors and nurses in silly clothes at a hospital with tree houses and secret passages, but health care could use an infusion of unselfishness and joy. The good doctor from the Gesundheit Institute should be invited to participate in the health care debates in Washington.
Scientific eccentrics may not do much to advance scientific learning, but they have fun doing science and they are motivated by the selfless humanitarianism of their kind — qualities that uneccentric science can hardly do without.
