De La Warr, George (1905-1969)

British expert in radionics, a subject related to radiesthesia and dowsing, and which uses an apparatus to identify claimed subtle radiation in humans and objects. The primary use of the tool was to diagnose illnesses. Born on August 19, 1904, in Southwick, Sussex, England, and educated at Brighton Technical College, De La Warr served as a captain with the British army in the Royal Engineers. De La Warr was best known for his device that was developed from the black box of Albert Abrams but used the method of stroking a rubber pad with the fingers instead of tapping the abdomen of a patient. The rubber detector pad was set in a frame with a wire circuit connection to a box containing various knobs and dials. A blood sample from the patient was placed in this circuit, and the rubber pad was stroked by the operator's finger until it indicated a "sticking" sensation at various dial readings. It was claimed that the dial markings denoted various pathological conditions of the patient whose blood sample was being tested.

In addition to diagnosis of disease, the apparatus was used for absent treatment of the patient by "correcting wave forms," sometimes in conjunction with exposure of a photographic plate inserted in the box, resulting in a kind of "psychic photo-graph." There was no conventional electric or magnetic circuit in black boxes, so their inventors (including De La Warr) were often charged with fraud.

De La Warr founded a research laboratory at Oxford, England, Delawarr Laboratories, and developed various black boxes for medical purposes, including the thought energy detector, an art appreciation apparatus, the Psychoplot, and the vibrograph, which detects molecular changes. He also experimented with photographs related to radiation from blood samples. His theories about subtle radiation are presented in detail in the book New Worlds Beyond the Atom (1956).

He received considerable support from a variety of eminent individuals, including Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, Methodist minister Leslie Weatherhead, and Kenneth Walker (a student of Georgei I. Gurdjieff ). None had medical credentials nor could their enthusiasm stop the medical community from condemning De La Warr's work (as it had earlier denounced Abrams's).