Chapter 31
BIORHYTHMS
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.Ecclesiastes 3:1
As long as 3,000 years ago, the scientists of ancient Greece were recording the regular rhythms of basic bodily functions such as respiration, kidney activity, pulse rate, and, of course, the female menstrual cycle. Most of us barely give them a thought; yet these rhythmic cycles affect even the tiniest cells of our organism, from the day we are born to the day we die. Hippocrates, the celebrated Greek physician, noticed that good and bad days fluctuated cyclically in both sick and healthy people. It was only relatively recently, however, that the theory of three internal cycles, with a definite effect on behavior patterns, gained credibility in our society, and its practical use came to be appreciated by many people in all walks of life.
In modern times, we think of the “fathers” of biorhythm theory as Dr. Wilhelm Fliess and Hermann Swoboda. A German physician in Berlin, Wilhelm Fliess, provided the first tentative explanation for this phenomenon, on the basis of physiological and emotional cycles. Later, an Austrian professor, Alfred Teltscher, further developed the theory, identifying a third component: the intellectual cycle. Hermann Swoboda was a professor of psychology at the University of Vienna; Dr. Wilhelm Fliess was a nose and throat specialist in Berlin. Like so many important scientific discoveries, both men were working along very similar lines with almost no knowledge of each other’s work — and it is quite extraordinary that these two scientists, despite doing independent research, came to virtually identical conclusions.
Both Swoboda and Fliess found psychology intriguing, and — with books and information beginning to surface at the time — took an interest in human cycles. Swoboda published a paper at the University of Vienna in 1900: “Life is subject to consistent changes. This understanding does not refer to changes in our destiny, or to changes that take place in the course of life. Even if someone lived a life entirely free of outside forces — of anything that could alter his mental and physical state — still his life would not be identical from day to day. The best of physical health does not prevent us from feeling ill sometimes, or less happy than usual.” Analyzing the dreams, ideas, and creative impulses of his patients, Swoboda noticed very regular patterns, or rhythms; some artists may be familiar with these dry spells and then frenzies of creation, with predictable variations. He also observed that new mothers began to show anxiety about their infants whenever a critical day occurred, or was about to.
Swoboda’s discovery of these two basic biorhythms led him to write a succession of distinguished and widely popular books explaining and developing the ideas of human cycles. The first, published in 1904, is titled The Periods of Human Life (in their psychological and biological significance). His second, Studies on the Basis of Psychology, further elaborated his work on creativity and the recurrence of dreams. In 1909 he published an instruction booklet, which included a slide rule to calculate critical days, called The Critical Days of Man. Swoboda’s best book, and one of his last, was a volume of almost 600 pages titled The Year of Seven; much of that work was devoted to proving biorhythm theory by giving a mathematical analysis of how the timing of births tends to be rhythmic and predictable from generation to generation within the same family.
Wilhelm Fliess, on the other hand, did not get nearly as much gratification from his discovery as Swoboda. He did introduce his friend Sigmund Freud to biorhythms around the turn of the century; Freud, well known as the father of modern psychology, was very interested in human behavior and was fascinated by Fliess’s work. Over the course of five years, they wrote over a hundred letters to each other, discussing their respective discoveries and research. Both Fliess and Freud were interested in human bisexuality. Fliess began to prove cellular bisexuality through his research on biorhythms, realizing that both men and women had the same emotional cycle. He stated that women are more influenced by the emotional cycle, and men more affected by the physical cycle, and concluded that, due to cellular bisexuality, both males and females have both rhythms (saying that men have a pseudo-menstrual cycle, if you will). In 1909, Fliess published a book titled The Course of Life, which spurred another doctor, Hans Schlieper, to write a book on biorhythms called The Year in Space.