In energy medicine, it is believed that there is a field that encompasses the body as a whole. The Chinese call this qi. It is this field—also sometimes referred to as the etheric field—that a skilled energy worker can influence in order to improve a patient’s health. Though there isn’t conclusive evidence of this energy field, the same is true of the now scientifically accepted notion of a gravitational field; scientists infer that the gravitational field exists because it offers a systematic, and reasonable, explanation for the way in which objects exist in space.
And yet the energy field of the body does have scientific relevance. In 1935, Harold S. Burr, a professor of anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine, conducted a series of experiments on animals—such as salamanders and chicks13—using a specially adapted voltmeter, designed to read very small voltages in order to detect the electric potential of the body. He concluded that all living systems had bioelectric fields. His own name for this was the L-field, which stood for “field of life.”14 Burr believed not only that life exhibited electromagnetic properties but that these comprised the “organizing principle”15 that kept our bodies from falling into chaos. Our individual electromagnetic fields maintain a pattern that provides the “wholeness, organization and continuity” of all our bodily systems.
In 1939, at around the same time that Burr was conducting his research, Semyon Kirlian, an electrician in the Soviet city of Krasnodar, stumbled across what he came to believe was photographic evidence of the human energy field.17 While making an electrical repair at a medical research institute, he observed patients being treated with electrotherapy; he noticed that tiny flashes of light were visible between the electrodes and skin of the patients during their treatment. Intrigued as to what this could mean, Kirlian decided to try to capture it on his own at home. He placed photographic paper between electrodes and the skin of his hand and took an image. When he developed the photograph, he discovered that a luminescent glow surrounded his hand and fingers.
Kirlian learned that there was a scientific phrase for what he thought he had picked up on film: corona discharge. “Corona,” from the ancient Greek, means a garland or wreath; it is the aura of plasma that rings the sun and other stars. But “corona discharge” is a term used in physics to describe the electrical glow on or around a charged conductor. Kirlian believed he had captured the corona discharge coming off of his hand. As he adapted this method, placing an object between a metal plate and a piece of photographic paper while applying a high-voltage current to the metal plate—a process that has since come to be known as Kirlian photography—he discovered that inanimate objects, such as a coin, gave off a different coronal discharge; it was more of a uniform glow. But living things—such as himself or a plant—created vivid, multicolored discharges, sending off flares of turquoise and maroon and purple. These were, Kirlian concluded, photographic stills of the vibrating energy field that surrounds all living things.
In an experiment that became one of the more famous of Kirlian’s investigations, he took a picture of a fresh leaf—displaying its brightly colored “aura”—and then cut it in half and took a second photograph. In this photograph, again there was an aura, but instead of it lighting up around the remaining half of the leaf only, it continued to glow around the entire shape of it, in spite of the fact that half of it was now missing. This became known as the phantom leaf effect—and has since been replicated and referred to reliably by practitioners of alternative medicine as proof of an energy field that surrounds the body.
This theory has also since been denounced by the scientific world. The counterexplanation is that the high-voltage frequency applied to the metal plate rips the electrons off of atoms, causing the air around the photographed object to become ionized. If that air contains any water, this will cause a glowing silhouette around the object. The more water, the stronger the silhouette. The cause of the phantom leaf effect, then, was residual moisture left where half of the leaf had been torn away. Soon after, however, a researcher at California State University expanded on Kirlian’s leaf experiment by photographing the missing part of the leaf through a clear Lucite block, which moisture could not pass through. And the vibrant silhouette of the entire leaf still appeared in the image. As with much of science, there isn’t a conclusive answer here, only evidence that can offer us different perspectives for understanding what we can’t yet know for certain.
