Dinshah P. Ghadiali
Dinshah Pestanji Ghadiali was born November 28, 1873 in Bombay, India, to a Zoroastrian family. Self-taught in chemistry and mathematics, he became an assistant in math and science at Wilson College at age eleven, per the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology; his medical training was informal, and the encyclopedia states plainly that “His medical degree was not recognized in the United States”. He moved to the United States in 1911, was naturalized in 1917, and in 1919 became vice president of the National Association of Drugless Practitioners. In April 1920 he delivered his first lecture on Spectro-Chrome therapy and established the Spectro-Chrome Institute in New York City; in 1924 he acquired a 23-acre property in Malaga, New Jersey that became the Institute’s permanent headquarters, and in 1933 he completed his three-volume Spectro-Chrome Metry Encyclopaedia.
Ghadiali faced repeated legal challenges over four decades: an acquitted 1931 Buffalo grand-larceny charge, a defeated 1934 attempt to strip his citizenship, a 1941 U.S. Post Office fraud-order against his Institute’s mail that, per the Dinshah Health Society’s own 2012 training manual, “stands to this day,” and, decisively, a six-week 1947 federal criminal trial in Camden, New Jersey that ended in a misbranding conviction, a $20,000 combined fine, five years’ probation, and an order to dissolve his Institute and surrender his Spectro-Chrome-related books for destruction. The conviction was affirmed on appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review. After his probation ended in 1953 he resumed selling renamed devices through a new nonprofit, which the FDA permanently enjoined from interstate shipment in 1958 — an injunction his own organization’s 2012 training manual says “still stands.” He died April 30, 1966.