von Pohl:
The Man Who Linked Cancer To Location

Gustav Freiherr von Pohl has an important place in modern earth energy research.

In the picture to the right, he can be seen using a type of dowsing rod rarely seen nowadays. It is his dowsing which has given him importance.

Specifically, it is his dowsing of a small German town called Vilsbiburg in Southern Germany in 1929 that is the key.

Vilsbiburg had a very high incidence of deaths from cancer. Naturally, people wanted to know why. The concept of 'Cancer Houses' was well known but there had been no satisfactory explanation as to why these places were so deadly.

Baron von Pohl had a theory that there were influences in the Earth itself which were the cause of the problem. He therefore asked the Mayor if he could test his theory.

There had been 54 deaths from cancer in the previous ten years in the small town, so there was a pressing need to explore the problem.

The town had 3,300 people living in 565 houses and 900 apartments. 42 of the houses had a history of seven deaths from cancer.

Because nothing like this had been done before, it was necessary to arrange for official supervision.

In January of 1929, from the 13th to the 19th, he operated under this supervision, marking his findings on a map of the town. He did not talk to inhabitants, nor did he tell anyone else about what he found.

At the same time, the local Medical Officer of Health, Herr Bernhuber, marked on a similar map the houses where the deaths had occurred.

When the two maps were studied, each of the 54 deaths were found to have occurred in beds over the lines which von Pohl had dowsed.

Despite the importance of these results, it is doubtful if anything would have happened if the Berlin Center for Cancer Research had not published them in their July 1930 journal.

This official approval of his findings and together with their suggestion that earth radiation could be a causative factor in cancer helped alert others to the importance of Earth energies.

Also, von Pohl himself published a book, 'Earth Currents as Pathogenic Agents for Illness and the Development of Cancer'. In this he explained his theory and applied it more generally to the country as a whole through examining the statistics of deaths published annually in Germany.

The major importance of 1929 to the linking of cancer with earth energies is that it sparked off a search to disprove the theory.

Despite several doctors trying to do just that, their efforts merely gave extra weight to the theory. (You can see some of the following research here.)

There has been independent correlation of von Pohl's findings in 1972 by Jacob Stangler. Stagler had spent much time developing a very sensitive instrument which could detect radiation. Specifically, the machine counts the tiny flashes of light generated when gamma rays or charged particles strike a crystal sensor.

He used his instrument and found sharp increases in radiation in the places which von Pohl had marked nearly 50 years earlier.

This later confirmation, using a known scientific technique, has acted to give even greater credence to the idea that there are definite and measurable radiations from the earth which have a negative effect upon people who spend periods of time above them.

Therefore, the investigations of a dowser using a simple rod in a Bavarian town has had huge consequences in how serious diseases are viewed. The idea that disease might be due more to location than to anything else now adds scientific backing to the ancient idea of 'Cancer Houses'.

Back To About Geomancy

Back to Home Page from von Pohl Page