Alongside the cure, Kuhne sold a diagnostic method, the “science of facial expression” (Gesichtsausdruckskunde), translated as facial diagnosis. The 1897 English title page presents it as “essentially an ante-diagnosis, enabling us both to foresee and forestall any ailment,” and the contents page lays out a system of reading “encumbrances” (front, side, back, and universal) from the shape of the face and body, each held to mark “deposits of foreign matter” and so to reveal internal disease. The claim is mechanism-only; no endpoint was measured and no validation was attempted.

The claim is recorded as refuted. Its premise is the same foreign-matter doctrine refuted elsewhere in this case (Bested et al., Gut Pathogens 2013; the morbid-matter image is humoral pathology, Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Humour”): there are no “deposits of foreign matter” producing facial swellings that encode specific internal diseases. The book itself places the method alongside phrenology in a chapter on the “Relation of Facial Diagnosis to Phrenology,” and physiognomic disease-reading of this kind has no scientific standing. Visible facial features do not encode the seat or degree of internal disease in the manner claimed.